I'd like to take a moment  to look back on the last couple of years of Musing on the Muse. I began writing and sending these online newsletters about creativity in its various forms because people kept telling me that publishing an online newsletter would be a good way to "market" my classes and workshops. I was also just beginning to work with individuals as a creative guide / coach in various disciplines.

The conventional wisdom said that to be successful, online newsletters needed to offer something of value beyond  announcements of events or solicitations to sign up for something.

I was happy to discover that whether it brought me more people or not, I had a great time doing it. I found that having to consider what might really be of value to people was a wonderful way to go deeper into my own understanding of creativity.  Fortunately, people seemed to enjoy what I was sending out. 

The most important aspect of this undertaking was the way it seemed to support a sense of community.  My wife, China Galland, has recently been quoting Bill McKibben, a powerful advocate for the environment through his many books and articles, beginning in 1989 with The End of Nature. McKibben has been insisting of late that we need to use what he calls an "ancient technology," the creation and growth of community.

I soon realized that what I was moved to write was way longer than anything I'd want to find in my own mailbox, so I started  using my blog to contain the expanded essays I was writing on each Musing theme, linking to it from the newsletter to give people a choice of reading on or not.

For this look-back, I've compiled an index to he past issues of Musing on the Muse with links to the corresponding blog entries.

I've also compiled a list of the exercises and experiments in creativity I've been including and which are all posted on my website along with the various audio-visual elements and recommendations of books, music, film and performance that I feel passionately about.

Another [great] Depression?

It seems to me we're in a depression. My parents, aunts and uncles lived through the last one and told me stories about it. That event had a lot to do with the choices they made for the rest of their lives. Along with all the stories about the   tremendous hardships  they experienced, I  also heard, from some, stories about  new and stronger connections with their communities. Stories about neighbors who banded together to prevent authorities from carrying out evictions. As the sheriffs were taking the furniture out to the street, neighbors would carry it back into the house.

Paradoxically, creativity can flourish and  become even more essential in hard times.  I'll continue this musing on my blog. Visit me there whenever you feel like it. If you do, you can also join the conversation by clicking the "comments" link.

Now, for the first time

since the first issue from January, 2008, I'm asking for donations, in any amount, from those of you who appreciate what I've been doing and can also spare a few simoleons. If you would like to contribute something, you can click the button which will take you to PayPal's secure site.

If you prefer, you can send a check to TJT. (499 Alabama St. SF, CA 94110) Just be sure to make it out to TJT and put my name on the memo line.  I'm not calling any donations "subscriptions" and everyone will continue receiving each issue. ATJT is my fiscal sponsor, so any donation will be tax-deductible within the full extent of the law.

corey's latest  recommendations

I've been writing a play based on a non-fiction story by Dr. Irv Yalom, about his oldest friend from medical school who, as a 15 year old orphan, joined the Jewish Resistance in Budapest, passing as a gentile and evading capture. He came to Boston as a 17 year old refugee, worked his way through Harvard and went on to Boston University Medical School and became one of the most accomplished heart surgeons in the country. I've had the great good fortune to get to know him through a series of telephone interview-conversations which have illuminated the play I'm shaping in ways I never would have imagined.  He told me about a book, Fateless by Imre Kertesz (Fatelessness in a more recent translation).  For various reasons I actually saw the Hungarian film based on it, with a screenplay by the author, directed by Lajos Koltai.  I'll go out on a limb and call it a masterpiece.   It is one of the most fiercely beautiful films I've seen and one of the most deeply felt works about the Shoah that I've experienced. Imre Kertesz us the sane age as Robert Berger but unlike him was arrested and imprisoned in a series of labor and death camps including Birkenau.  The novel and the film follow a slightly fictionalized version of the author through that hell-realm. To those who protest that they can't take anything more about the Holocaust, I can only say, yes, I have felt that way many times and probably wouldn't have seen or read it on my own steam. But having done  so, I've come to a new understanding. Perhaps, having been born a Jew in America in 1945, I'm part of a generation that has the task of ensuring that the stories that contain  the people, the acts of selfless heroism and the acts of unimaginable cruelty,  won't be lost along with the  survivors:. the last direct witnesses to what must never be forgotten.
 

Links to Amazon:
Fatelessness (the book) by Imre Kertesz, translated by Tim Wilkinson

Fateless

By now many of you know about Leonard Cohen's current world tour that has been leaving ecstatic fans dancing in its wake wherever it goes. My dear friend and co-founder of TJT, Naomi Newman went to his Oakland concert and said it was one of the all-time greatest performances/spiritual peaks of her life. I couldn't get to the concert but I've been listening to parts of his NYC and London concerts and I share Naomi's delight. He's always been one of my four or five favorite songwriter-poets and since Ten  New Songs I've marveled at how  amazingly deep and comforting his voice has become.  What glorious inspiration for anyone past sixty or so. At 74, for heaven's sake, his voice has gone down through the earth's crust and returned to us new, molten and hot.  On top of that, he has gathered a "band" that is so impeccably hot they defy description. Just listen to the guitar solo on Bird on a Wire, or any track really to hear a level of artistry, a musical collaboration full of love, respect and high listening that, for me, is a spiritual experience to which I bow in gratitude.

You used to be able to hear, for free, part of his New York concert on NPR's music website, but, alas, they took it down now that an album of  the London concert is out. You can buy individual songs on iTunes or the DVD at Amazon.
Live In London You can also hear a typically haimish (Yiddish: down home, personal, real) Terry Gross interview with il Maestro here.

Juana Molina is an Argentinean composer of what's called "electronica" but feels to me deeply rooted in the southern hemisphere. She creates cascades of sound with her acoustic guitar sequenced and looped through some device that mixes it with a wild range of keyboard controlled samples. Then she sings, sometimes without words, sometimes in Spanish, multiple vocal lines that weave and transform.  She records, of course, but more surprising, she performs her composition live. Watching video clips of her performing in her guileless manner, fully absorbed in the music, you wouldn't guess that she was also a TV star in Buenos Aries, achieving a huge following as a comic, playing a Tomlinesque variety of characters.  She says she got into that as a way to support her music. When she realized it had taken over her life, she quit and never looked back, You can watch a lovely video profile of her and her music on Youtube.