Ten Thousand Hours

I was just reading an artist blog that referenced Malcolm Gladwell's calculation that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. Such a large number feels unfathomable. But if I figure out how many hours there are in a year (8760--not counting any leap  nonsense), I can wrap my head around the figure. Still it feels unhelpful in the same way as thinking that one spends a third of one's life in bed (by which is meant asleep).

Ten thousand hours. Is this the same thing as infinity when you're at the beginning of artistic desire? But on another shore (not opposite because that would mean the end), I calculate again.

If I say it's been 30 years that I've been working on poems--returning, writing, scratching out, throwing away--that comes to 333.33 hours per year. 333.33 hours--underlining, using the dictionary, wishing I believed in the muse (not really), cutting and pasting--divided by 12 months, comes out to 27.77 hours per month--rethinking, sending out, making sound lists, rejecting, counting lines--which would be less than an hour a day.

So I may have put the time in already which comes as a suprise to me.

Of course achieving "mastery" is another long discussion entirely.

Lakehouse Diary IV (New Lake Again)

August 15, 2014

Where has Brenda Hillman been all my life? I have just started reading Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. I love it—playfulness, attention to sound, wordplay, interjections of Latin insect names, scattered vivid image, white spaciness later on. I felt more excited reading the Section I title page (4 epigraphs and a section called “Argument” which is a very, very long list: “microseasons, vowels, panticles, California grasses, existence, sex, the cosmos . . .) and the first three poems than I have felt all summer.

August 16, 2014

Things I have heard this morning: operatic-y voice singing a hymn, somebody practicing the piano, church bells tolling the hour, church bells playing a Woody Guthrie song, boat honk, parts of a sermon, motor boat buzz. I have practiced my reading which will be today at 3:30. I have studied on the parts of my first workshop tomorrow. I have worked on the lecture that will be on Tuesday at lunch. After lunch today, I took a short walk down to the lake shore and over past the Atheneum to the beach. Later: reading + reception + more Brenda Hillman+ listening to Thrity Umrigar’s NPR interview. (Swimming in words.)