BANGS: “Have you ever had any formal music or theory training at all?”
ENO: “No.”
BANGS: “Have you ever felt the pressure that you should get some?”
ENO: “No, I haven't, really. I can't think of a time that I ever thought that, though I must have at one time. The only thing I wanted to find out, which I did find out, was what 'modal' meant; that was I thought, a very interesting concept.”
~
In 2003, I discover the tradition of the “journeyman”, where Old World artisans, after picking their craft and learning everything about it that they possibly could at home, would spend the subsequent years on the road plying their trade and honing their skills before going back to their respective towns and setting up shop, finally as complete legitimate craftsmen.
In the strength of this, after two years in the UP System, I decide to quit the MP program and go full-time in UP UGAT. It’s the beginning of a violently productive two and a half years.
~
The damage has been done,
I am not having fun anymore.
Do what you do when you try
what you get when you see the light,
come down I'll set my hope
in a wonderful hospital man.
.........
Well my (he)art is not a wide open thing, I know,
there is hardly not a lot to say,
- Stephen Malkmus, singing with Pavement in “Ann Don’t Cry” (Terror Twilight, Matador Records, 1999), who, in a 2002 interview to promote his solo career, reveals to fans why he left the band: he didn’t feel like writing sad songs anymore.
~
The straw that finally broke my camel’s back is in the fifth fragment of the first chapter of this book.
Also: the intrigue, the incessant gossiping, the powerplaying, the “literary careerists” within the student body and the faculty (more on them in their proper place).
~
Not to take away anything from UP Diliman’s MP graduates, of course: in 2006, my Current Girlfriend graduates cum laude from the MP program, her thesis as one of the “best” in the department.
And she’s not the only one: “suki ng MRR” poets SB and SS graduate from the program after more than half a decade in the UP System, as do budding novelists VBG and MFA and BS and anthologized and multi-awarded CW graduates AFS and CJJ, all of whom have books out in National Bookstore right now.
But when asked, none of them proclaim they’re “Writers”, or even “writers”. And they all have proper jobs! They’re just people who like to read and who also happen to like “writing”.
~
Again, from the Bangs-Eno Interview, where Bangs brings up Eno’s controversial “I’m not a musician” quote from a few years back: “It seems like a conceit turned inside out, inasmuch as I've got almost a dozen albums of his music sitting here. ‘Again,’ he (Eno) almost sighs, ‘it was a case of taking a position deliberately in opposition to another one. I don't say it much anymore, but I said it when I said it because there was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it. And that seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought that it was well worth saying, 'Whatever I'm doing, it's not that,' and I thought the best way to say that was to say, Look, I'm a nonmusician. If you like what I do, it stands in defiance to that.'
“’When I say 'musician,' I wouldn't apply it to myself as a synthesizer player, or 'player' of tape recorders, because I usually mean someone with a digital skill that they then apply to an instrument. I don't really have that, so strictly speaking I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're not to do with manipulation in that sense, they're more to do with ingenuity, I suppose.’”
