One of the beauties of last night's run was getting to a point where I understand now what the story is truly about and where it is headed. It was a kind of cards-on-the-table moment, where all the things that mattered most were finally spread out in front of me, and I could see how they were relating to each other.

Something I've had to accept with this book is that it is not the book I started out to write, but that is not a bad thing. The book I set out to write was nothing more than an idea; the book you write is the book you end up with, and it has the benefit of being something you can actually shape and work with. An idea is nothing more than that.

Curiously enough, Janet Fitch (of White Oleander) chimed in earlier this week in the NaNo Pep Talk email with some notes to that effect:

Working on White Oleander, I kept hitting this wall, about chapter 8. It was all going great, all the wheels in motion, and then WHAM. I just couldn't decide what to do next.  ... Luckily I was seeing an amazing therapist at the time. ... And she gave me the piece of advice which has saved my writing life over and over again, and I will give it to you, absolutely free of charge. She said, "I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all." [Emphasis mine]

When I was barely twenty, I was in what amounted to a doomed collaborative project with another writer. Doomed because neither of us really understood how to pull off or sustain something of the size or scope that we wanted to attempt, and because we were both fairly immature and hotheaded in our own respective ways. We had at least some idea of what we were going to write; my take was, let's just start writing the damn thing and, you know, revise it after. His take was that we had to get everything locked down exactly right beforehand, and so that meant endless rounds of actually writing very little. In the end, we went our separate ways for other reasons, and as far as I know that project hasn't moved forward an iota since. (And, from what I can tell, nothing of value was lost.)

I have to wonder how much of the hesitancy on his part was fear of failure -- or, to be more writerly about it, fear of having to endure the drudgery of rewriting. Not all of us are Yukio Mishima, capable of producing a clean first draft that would almost inevitably be sent to the publisher's in exactly that condition. For him, rewriting seemed like an admission of failure in some respect. Well, sure it is -- and if you can't admit to a failure of any scope, even a creative project (to say nothing of learning from the mistake), then that doesn't say much about you as a person, or a creator.

Aside from being a groundbreaking piece of electronic music—probably the single most important piece of its kind, second only to Stockhausen’s earlier Song of the Youths (which isn’t nearly as impressive or ambitious to me)—Kontakte has something of the flavor of an epic film that would be unrealizable on any budget in today’s world. The whole of Kontakte had been made by taking electronic pulses and manipulating them on tape, processing them with a limited battery of studio effects, and then splicing together and re-recording the results—a process which took two years of work in the WDR Köln studio to pull off. Given that the piece runs 35 minutes total, that meant the average day’s work for Stockhausen yielded up maybe two and a half seconds of sound. It was the sonic version of stop-motion animation—or maybe Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking, which he accomplished by painting and etching directly onto the film itself.

“Stockhausen?” said my brother, the other classical-music maven in the household, as I prepared to install the album on the turntable. “More like Nuthausen.” He knew of him but didn’t know the music in detail, and from what little he’d heard he wasn’t inclined to hear any more. He had trouble enough mastering Debussy’s “Syrinx”. Never mind dealing with some composer who wrote music you could play from the beginning, middle or end indiscriminately, or indulged in any number of artsy-fartsy end-runs around the audience. Well, whatever, I thought, and dropped the needle into the run-in groove.

I didn’t have a single coherent thought about what I was listening to until the end of Side One, where Kontakte had been split at the 11’25” mark for the sake of sequencing. It wasn’t until I’d listened to the whole thing, both sides, several times, before the words came together: This is a music that I have always wanted to hear but never know what it would sound like. Stupefied, I ran off a copy onto a cassette for my friend David Hirmes and brought it to him at school the next day.

“This is really something. When was it recorded?” he asked me after having listened to it.

“1968,” I said.

“Wow. I didn’t know they had MIDI back then.”

I was fairly sure they didn’t. In fact, I was fairly sure they didn’t have much of anything else. I went back that afternoon and re-read the liner notes, along with Paul Griffiths’s detailed explanation of the composition in his book A Guide to Electronic Music (“…perhaps the electronic work par excellence, since in technical and musical respects it is entirely a work of the new medium”) and the chapter devoted to it in Robin Maconie’s survey of Stockhausen. I read and read, and my jaw hit the floor. And then I crawled into bed and put Kontakte on my Walkman and listened with the covers pulled up over my face, still gob-smacked. The next day I apologized to my friend and explained the real deal. No, it hadn’t been made in 1968, but from 1958 to 1960, and not only was there no MIDI at the time but no synthesizers, no sampling—no electronic instruments as we know them, period. He, too, let his jaw just hang open for a bit.

Stockhausen’s aim in creating Kontakte was to demonstrate what was possible with electronic music—not just technologically, but aesthetically; to show how a new kind of music (and, by corollary, a new kind of listening) was not only possible but desirable. This included using sound to show what sound is—how one kind of sound can be created from another; how sounds can be wholly abstracted from their sources to create things that didn’t exist before; and so on. The most dramatic example of this starts at around the 17 minute mark, when a nasal-sounding buzz slows down, becomes a series of individual pulses, and turns from that to a massive reverberated drone.

Another major element in Kontakte, and in Stockhausen’s music generally, was how things like spatialization can be compositional tools. The latter was especially significant, given that the first public performances of Kontakte were for four-channel sound—arguably the first real use of quadraphonic recording for something other than multitracking. The LP was bounced down to two-track stereo, but with some careful work done to insure that the spatialization was preserved; I’m still waiting for a DVD-Audio issue that features the original four-channel mix.

Given the amount of work he’d need to go through to accomplish even the smallest piece of the whole, Stockhausen did not “improvise”—he wrote a score and stuck with it quite rigidly during the two years he spent creating the piece on tape. Later, he created another version for both tape and live instrumentalists, and it is this version which has turned up in multiple LP and CD editions. I bought one such edition, but didn’t see the point: the original music was strong enough that it didn’t need to be tricked up with additional call-and-response or counterpoint. The original tape version wasn’t released on CD until the creation of Stockhausen-Verlag, and even now it’s still difficult to find unless you order it directly from them (it's catalog #3). Amazon, for instance, does not carry it, and independent retailers are apparently not allowed to resell it either.

For years the only recording I had of Kontakte was my slightly scratchy tape of the library LP. I put it on one side of a 80-minute cassette and set up the other side in such a way that I could immediately begin playing it again without having to rewind. (I was an early convert to rechargeable batteries, but let’s face it—it was more the inconvenience of waiting for the music to start again more than anything else that bothered me.) I listened to it endlessly: on the bus, while walking to and from school, in the library. It cast mystery and added new and unexpected dimensions to every environment where I brought it.

It still does. It probably always will. I sit here typing this while it plays in the background, and even the trees across the street now seem like different trees. They are always different, of course, but only as long as you can see that. Or hear it.

This is a simple index template I whipped up to allow people to crosspost their most recent Movable Type entries to a LiveJournal account.

Revision History

0.3:

• Results are posted to auto-revealing IFRAME.
• Now shows list of all posts on main page.
• Floating, collapsible post-navigation list.
• Navlist auto-collapses after nav action.
• Jump-to-top shortcut at each post.

0.2:

• Extended entry text is automatically placed behind an lj-cut tag.
• Text input areas resized.
• Link back to original post.
• Option to post summary + entry only.
• Some other formatting changes.

0.1: First version. Verrry primitive!

Licensing

This script is released under the terms of the MIT Public License.

Setup

1. Create a new index template with the template type as "Custom Index Template" and the publishing option as "Static". The exact naming and location is entirely up to you, so long as you can access it without too much hassle. Note that if your publishing options vary you can change either of these to suit, but these are the defaults that work for me.

2. Add the following text to the template, and save and publish it:

Crosspost to LJ version 0.3 code (ANSI text)

3. Edit the user and password hidden form fields so that they contain the user and password for your LJ account in the value= parameter. If you want to change the options to leave comments, set the prop_opt_nocomments value to 0. In my personal version of the script, I have it off by default and just append a link to the bottom of every post that links back to the original post:

<p>[<a href="<mt:EntryPermalink>">Comment here</a>]</p>

4. Save and publish the results.

Usage

Bookmark the index template. Whenever you publish a new entry, go to that page and you'll see text boxes that contain the subject, body of the post, and the tag list. I've left the fields open for editing, but for the most part you don't need to change anything. Click "Post to LJ" and you should see a confirmation message from the LJ servers, along with the URL of your new post.

You'll also see text boxes for each of the posts you've made that are now showing up on the front page. This is useful if you want to post older stuff to LJ (for instance, after an outage).

The "Post list" that floats at top right contains a quick list of all the posts available on this page. Click "Show" to browse the list and "Hide" to close it up. Note that when you click any entry on the list, the list automatically hides after one second.

To Do

Better security handling. Hard-coding the password in the template and sending it in plaintext is not secure, period. I plan to do something about this in the future, but right now there are a few things you can do on your own to ameliorate these issues. You can, for instance, hard-code only the username and poll the user for the password by unhiding the password field.

For super-duper quick and dirty security: One way you can secure the script is by saving it with a .php extension and bracketing the code like so:

<?php
if ($_GET["pwd"]=="[password]")
{
?>
[body of script goes here]
<?php
}
else
echo ""
?>

This way, you can only access the script by providing some kind of password as a pwd= parameter on the URL. Again, scarcely industrial-strength, but it'll keep out most casual discovery. (I'm looking into a way to make this play nice with MT's own native login system, actually, but that's a long way off.)

More options. The template only has the most minimal option set. It doesn't let you change the mood or anything else, which are things I want to see if I can pick up from the original post depending on how users have things set up.