Stand There!

Dear Colleagues,

Don’t Just Do Something…
 
The only thing you really need,
I tell these people, is the talent
of the room  Unless you have that
your other talents are worthless.
                           Michael Ventura
 
Joyce Carol Oats writes of Ernest
Hemingway in a fictional piece: he’d
had a bad day:  brutal when  “the work”
doesn’t come.
 
And Flannery O’Connor sasid in a
letter—I’m at my desk every morning,
from 8  till  12 because even if I’ve got
nothing to write, I want  to be on hand
if and when the good news arrives.
 
Something like that.
Not exactly.  LIKE, I said. .
 
Like waiting for Godot.  Supplicant.
Begging bowl up raised. Please, sir:
may I have some more? Cargo Cultist:
expecting goods to fly in on the wings
of a dove if I’m patient. A patient.   
 
Art is 90 % perspiration : 3 % inspiration
 
90%--necessary & insufficient. It’s the
3 % that counts.  
 
I  remember seeing something like this
posted on the wall next to my 5^th  grade
desk. Might not have been   “art.”   Might
have been  “accomplishment.”
 
7 %  = obedience  (“listening”—supplicant,
just begging for it.)
 
Some just sat for weeks . Some lasted months.
Some kept saying that next summer, or next
winter, or after they graduated or when they
moved to Europe  (which they never did), or
when they got a grant, or when they weren’t
so busy or when they got a place that gave
them the space  (because they needed  the
actual room; it couldn’t be the bedroom or
the kitchen) . . .sometime in the foreseeable
but not immediate future, they’d write that
novel or complete that sequence of poems…’
(Michael Ventura: “The Talent of the Room” )
 
http://www.michaelventura.org/writings/LA4.pdf
 
Or text book, or scholarly article,  bibliography,
biography…. grant proposal, funding application,
course syllabi, dean’s report, rubric creations,
reserve book lists… I add these  seemingly
like-activities, but I’m  not sure they fit.

What do you think?
 
Who sits in a room waiting for “the work” to come
when the work’s a text book for crying out loud?
Or a history? A comparison  of texts?  Scholarly
edition. Analysis of somebody’s long poem or life?
What’s to wait for? It's at hand.  Just do it.
 
You don’t have to have “the talent of the room”
to be a pro. It would be a  handicap.
 
Amateur standing, standing still on the one hand,
Professionalism on the other. Do not collapse,
conflate,or confuse. Turn it up. The difference
We can put it in play. Argue. Sitting on the dock
of the bay as it were. So to speak.

xxxooo, Sam