2010 November

	2010, NOVEMBER

November 23

The saga begins. I have started the new guitar.

Guitar1

November 16

I was reading somewhere that PETA wants Ben & Jerry’s to use human breast milk to make their ice cream. I guess they think it’s better for cows if you don’t milk them. I doubt if anybody asked the cows, but I’m afraid the campaign to keep udders full and breasts drained is doomed anyway. In order to get an adequate supply of breast milk Ben & Jerry would have to hire the entire female population of Vermont, get them all pregnant (and presumably barefoot) and hook them up to milking machines twice a day. You think dairy farmers have problems with cattle?

Even at minimum wage, this would be prohibitively expensive and would eventually result in outsourcing. To India, no doubt, where the cows are sacred but the women are not.

What about all those babies whose mothers are supporting the ice cream business? What will they eat? I guess it will have to be cows’ milk. What will PETP have to say about this?

November 10

It is an indication of how profoundly my memory has deteriorated that I am about to begin building another guitar. I’m doing it essentially from scratch except for one small detail: I don’t trust myself to cut the slots for the frets as accurately as they need to be, so I have ordered a fingerboard blank with the slots pre-cut (that is to say, cut). You may think having them do it is a relatively simple procedure—tell them to do it and pay the money—but that’s because you’ve never tried it.

First you have to choose a scale length (the length of the strings) so they can figure out the fret spacing. Then you have to tell them whether you want the neck to meet the body at the 12th fret or the 14th. And how many frets you want. The usual for a steel string guitar is 20 or 21, for classical 19. But I want the last two inches or so unfretted, so I can put an inlay there.

“Well, what’s the distance from the 12th fret to the soundhole?” How should I know? At the moment there is no soundhole. I intend to study a plan of a 19th century master but I haven't seen it yet—it’s supposed to come with the rest of my order—and I’m going to modify it anyway by shortening the scale length.

I contacted the guy who drew the plan (no, not the original), but he couldn’t tell me either. He said it depends on where you put the soundhole in the body, how big the hole is, the phase of the moon, and who’s conducting the London Philharmonic this week. His response was basically “buy the damn plan and figure it out yourself.”

So I calculated the answer as follows: 17.

This is based on the assumption that a “standard” classical guitar has 19 frets and the last one is so far down it’s cut in half by the soundhole, so 17 will probably leave me an inch or so at the end (maybe less, since I’m shortening the scale length by 1 cm) which is less than I want but I can’t bring myself to build a guitar with fewer than 17 frets even though I’ve never played anything above the 14th.

And I haven’t even started yet.

Follow-up: they sent me a fingerboard with 22 fret slots, and the wrong scale length. And I haven't even started yet.

November 7

I have been a consumer of formal education for 30 years, so far, and that’s not counting the period when I took two or three classes a semester at the local community college for fun. I started doing that back when junior college was cheap entertainment and continued until it was no longer cheap and I had taken just about everything even remotely interesting in the catalog. Except Welding for Sculptors, which they didn’t offer until two years after I suggested it; maybe next year.

A characteristic of formal schooling is that it always has a clearly defined goal: the end of the semester, a certificate, a degree, a license. I thought about it briefly once before, when Cal Poly threatened me with a degree in Architecture and I realized that an M. Arch. wasn’t really my aim and that no amount of schooling could ever make me an architect. But for the most part, for 30 years I went along with the educational program, noting the appropriate milestones along the way.

So it should not be surprising that I tend to be goal-oriented, something I never realized about myself and something I find vaguely discomfiting. I had always thought of myself as concerned with process, more interested in smelling the manure than in getting the stalls mucked out. After all, I didn’t even show up for the finals in those classes at the J.C. until they said I couldn’t come back if I kept taking incompletes.

Then I discovered music. I’ve been taking guitar lessons almost two years, and I still can’t play the thing. It’s a lot harder than I expected. I can do things I couldn’t before, but I can’t just pick it up and play something, so at least by my definition I can’t play the guitar. I told Tom, my teacher, the other day that if I had known then what I know now, I’d have taken up the piano. “Oh,” he said, “they’re really heavy.”

The thing is, I have no idea when I will be able to play, or even how to recognize the moment when it comes. The trouble with learning the guitar, or any musical instrument, is you never know when you’re done. There is never a time when you can say “There! I have worked hard and done well; I have achieved my goal.” Chet Atkins is the only Certified Guitar Player I know, and he just made up the title.

No the trouble is not that you never know when you’re done; the trouble is that that bothers me. Do I really need a certificate to say I’m a guitar player? I suppose not, unless I have some specific target in mind. Tom has been playing for 50 years and he agrees that there is no end. He says that’s what he likes about it—it just keeps getting better. Clearly, I need to reorient my thinking.

OK, break time over. I have to go practice—I have to be good by my next lesson, on Wednesday.

November 3: A very modest proposal...

The election is finally over, and Wednesday brings at least one bit of good news: my phone has stopped ringing. I think we should hold elections a couple of days earlier. Halloween seems kind of bland and pointless when you know that the following Tuesday you’ll have a whole new crop of clowns, vampires, and prima donnas.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

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