In a recent New Yorker article, Jonah Lehrer, argues that brainstorming is a myth, and quotes Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, who summarizes the science:

“Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

Is it true, then, that we really work better on our own as compared to those who gather to brainstorm? Not exactly. It’s just that not all brainstorms are created equal.

It’s not that group work is all bad and the new turn should be to send everyone back to their rooms until further notice. It’s that there is a fundamental fallacy behind the notion that even the merest hint of criticism kills the “delicate flower” (as Osborn once called it) of the creative impulse. In fact, recent research demonstrates that while it is good for a group to feel free to be wide open to all ideas, the best work comes from those who also debate and even criticize others’ ideas. Dissent stimulates ideas.

You know what this makes me think of? Writing and reading book reviews. After graduate school and years of workshops I had a deep aversion, a kind of pendulum swing over-reaction to anything that smacked of the “critical” or the chin-thrusting fastidiousness of an elitist snob or judge. Then, Gerry LaFemina asked me to write an in-depth review for Review Revue, a newspaper-styled format which evaluated and discussed contemporary poetry. For some reason, the timing was right I guess, by virtue of reading analysis of other poetry I felt an intellectual hunger and an emotional creative drive. In other words, I was creatively stimulated doing what is considered a non-creative task, the reading and evaluation of others’ work. I realized the act of reviewing is a kind of collective communal act in which one puts one’s own (hopefully informed) opinions in the public sphere for the mutual benefit of driving the art.

It’s not like all creative brainstorming doesn’t come back and evaluate the effectiveness of what the open-ended creative sessions yielded, but studies indicate by a wide margin that when the creativity is developed within the context of specific, controlled measures of creativity and debate, that the time is used more effectively. Criticism can wake us up to new ideas because it forces us to move below the surface of predictability and consider alternative perspectives. Essentially, it wakes up our minds.

This winter we’ve had an hour’s worth of a flurry one morning and that’s it. Today, a high of 71. So what’s the deal?

Not that I miss the snow so much. It’s just that you know you may be in trouble when you walk out on your back deck in mid-February and a healthy-size housefly resting beside your door actually speaks. “Just wait till my friends join me and see if you can keep us outside!” this one says. “And when the mosquitoes join the cause, your summer will be officially miserable!”

Ordinarily, this might be upsetting. This week, though, you’ve been thrown into outbursts of violent sneezes in rapid succession. “Achoo” doesn’t really do justice to whatever allergen (ragweed? pine pollen?) is tripping your sinuses.  AH-BLEWEY! AYE-CARUMBA! might be a little closer. You rub your itchy eyes, tearing up, and head back inside for a tissue as if you hadn’t heard the fly with your own ears.

If snow hadn’t buried your town several times over last year, you might call it “Global Warming,” even though that’s no longer politically correct. Much more appropriate to call it “Climate Change.” Or, when all else fails, blame it on El Nino or La Nina. I’ve been hearing La Nina this year. I don’t know. I never was too good at science.

What are the advantages? Well, it’s not cold. You can start your garden two months early, which means heirloom tomatoes in May? What else? The blooms start earlier? You start mowing your lawn in March?

I know how to count my blessings. When the summer hits, however, I may want to heed this little bluebottle fly’s warning and head somewhere north to avoid the coming plague.

May you live in interesting times

Still, it’s not clear how the democratization of either the print or music industries can best be used to benefit the vast majority for whom the gates have been thrown wide open. For the past two or three years, however, as I began to put my toe back in the music pond and actually started considering how to promote One Shoe Untied’s music, I’ve been working on this very issue. (It’s beside the point the band didn’t work out.)

Here’s my question:

Why is it considered cool/innovative/grassroots for a band to “start their own label,” but for a writer, it’s still considered “minor leagues”?

In some ways the path to publication as a novelist sounds simple enough. You break through with a literary agent, get published by a New York publisher (one of the Big 6), and PRESTO, you’ve made it. By some estimates, the Big 6 still own distribution spots in about 80% of the brick-and-mortar booksellers stalls. Does it matter that it doesn’t sell well? Yes and no. Mostly yes of course. But there are ways around a substandard first showing, especially if one continues to simply write well. With the hardest part out of the way, breaking through in the first place, it’s not like you’re blackballed because you didn’t hit the bestseller list. On the other hand, for someone like me, a “debut novelist of literary fiction” (yikes!), whose narrative takes place more or less in the course of an hour, few literary agents are going to swing the gates open if for no other reason than it doesn’t exactly smack of bestseller status to a Big 6 publisher (an understatement to be sure). So, Atticus Books and I are trying something new, something we’d like to see as innovative. Lately, however, especially with a national writers’ conference coming up rapidly (AWP), I’ve been worried about how my approach will be viewed in the eyes of the literary community.

The breakdown of the major recording companies had to deal with the breakdown first, and it’s been well-documented that they made massive mistakes. While iTunes has certainly figured out a lot about how to maximize their opportunity to profit from recording artists, the truth is people still widely torrent whatever it is they can’t or don’t want to pay for. While the development of ebook readers has helped the publishing industry avoid gaffes such as hunting down purported offenders instead of seeing the very clear writing on the wall and realizing new ways to monetize opportunities, why are attitudes so slow to change about the means and methods of publishing?

What can publishers and the creators of publishing content (writers!) learn from what’s happened (and continues to) in the music industry? Wilco’s latest release, The Whole Love, was produced through their very own label and they even decided to sing about it in one song (see video). I wonder if it’s not just publishers and distributors who need to “get with the times,” but authors and writers themselves. If I believe in my work, if I can be the best promoter of my material, if I stand to make far higher royalties on my own, and if I can distribute my material by ebook to the world in (more or less) an instant, why is this not being utterly embraced?

Stagolee, a seasoned, indie-rock, blues-based band started off the night. They began as a duo in Starkville, Mississippi, but are currently based out of Nashville. They balance an eclectic mix of genres, at times sounding like an indie pop rock band, at others folk rock–and everything in between these apparent distances. As the opening act, they really laid down it down. We all knew this was not going to be amateur night.

Ashley and the Xs are a Chattanoooga-based band who’ve recently added my very own brother, John Prevost, as a bassist to their own distinctive mix. Actually, John brings a custom-made electric, eight-string guitar to the mix (three of the eight strings correlate to a standard bass, the A, D, and G strings). It brings all the bass you need, and more importantly also offers the possibilities of bass-like chordal structures, which give the music an extra dimension and natural sophistication. Besides the obvious strength of Ashley’s performance and vocal quality, in a lot of ways the band centers around the metronomic-precision of Dan Walker on the drums. In spite of this being the first time the band has played out in several months, and with the recent addition of a fifth member, they more than held their own between the two touring acts from Knoxville and Nashville between them.

It was my own loss that I was out back for most of Christabel and the Jons. When you have three bands, as JJ’s often does, and when the first act doesn’t begin until, what? 10:30? sometimes it can become an endurance race to hang in there. When I did come back in, I witnessed an especially distinctive, impressive act who look like they’re on a quest for greater things yet, and there’s not reason to think they won’t. If the upright bass and accordion aren’t enough to catch your attention, the semi-hollow Gibson guitar is sure to resonate. An original act, I hear they’ve already done a commercial for Apple.

What a night. If JJ’s can keep bringing in such seasoned talent, and perhaps shifting back the opening acts and pretending we’re on Central Time Zone, they’re sure to keep bringing the crowds.

Then, one by one, my best laid plans “gang aft aglee,” as Robert Burns once famously said. Erik and Reuben never get access at all. John and Randy break through once. Enough to get 4 tickets–for them and their life partners. Same deal with Carisch and company. Oh, and I received this litany of bad news as Lennyn wept for 45 minutes over coloring Minnie Mouse’s right shoe outside the lines. There was no fixing the mistake, and there was no assuaging or redirecting her grief.

Where does that leave me? With the blues.

Frankly, I deserve to be one of the 1,000 who get to go to this show, and I shouldn’t have to pay a scalper $183 (the current cheapest rate) to do so. For one, I am the one who wrote a poem about the person who parades around as Jack White, which was not only published at The Huffington Post, but also became the first poem for my chapbook collection, White-Feathered Bodies (and for inquiring minds, can be easily accessed here on Scribd).

I’ve been a part of the glorifying-bandwagon. I’ve watched It Might Get Loud, the movie with the Edge and Jimmy Page and Jack White. I’ve seen him on that DVD playing under the Black Pool lights in the UK, which was the inspiration for my poem. Come on, man! I should get in free! No, Jack White should pay me to go to his show, and he should have me read my poem to open the set.

So why did it feel so good when two of my friends asked what the big deal was? One said only in Chattanooga would a guy who’s best days were in circa 2002 have a run on tickets in 2012. Another wrote,

All you just did was save money.  Now you can come over to my house and I will play the same five blues licks over and over really loud while [my daughter] bangs a trash can lid. I will also turn up the heat, blow pot smoke in your face, and sell you my Fat Tires for $5 a pop . . . and then it will be the exact same thing as seeing Jack White at Track 29. I feel like the Black Keys fully occupied the space that was created by the White Stripes.  It sounds silly, but it’s true.

It was only a short-lived satisfaction. I don’t really believe either one of them. First, Jack White has re-invented himself and grown into the thin air of rock god stardom over the past ten years. He’s miles away from his origins as The White Stripes guy. He’s also just a hell of a performer, and there is no way this will be anything other than an amazing show.

And I will be at home watching the first season of Lost or something. Why? Because I am that far behind, and because there will be no assuaging or re-directing my grief.

But, yesterday, as I was reading about Jennifer Egan’s candid discussion from last week about her apprehension of social media, something that had been rattling around in my subconscious surfaced. Here’s one sound-byte:

“Who cares that we can connect?” she said. “What’s the big deal? I think Facebook is colossally dull. I think it’s like everyone coming to live in a huge Soviet apartment block, [in] which everyone’s cell looks exactly the same.”

The power of this little computer-thing that I now type from is its own downfall, at least for one like me who needs to lose himself in his own narrative. Of course it’s beyond amazing that anytime there’s anything you need to know while writing the novel, simply click your browser button, Google the term you need–BOOM!–47 articles plus images of everything you want to know about your given subject. Isn’t that actually a great advantage for a novelist? In a sense, you could almost say that the flow of one’s narrative shouldn’t suffer “old-fashioned” interruptions because you can just incorporate what you need to know seamlessly into your day’s writing. But we all know that somehow it just doesn’t work out that way. There’s a reason why they call it “hyper” links.

You can get lost in the maze of links just from Wikipedia. You can hit the radio. You may feel compelled to check your two email accounts just to make sure everything is okay out there. And here you are reading my blog, wondering what you might do with it. Should you “Like” it (yes!)? Should you bother to comment, link it to Facebook or Twitter? What’s in it for you? Will I now read your blog? Are we all just running in circles clinging to the illusion of connection? See how I get carried away? Maybe all I’m really doing is maximizing my capacity for ADD. So, here’s the question: What about inventing “the new typewriter”?

I’m serious. What about creating an instrument that typed as smoothly as my MacBook, but felt like an instrument at its purest, its singularity? No distractions. Just you and your disconnected, simple machine. It could be huge.

Now, all you have to do is launch it with a massive social media campaign.

When I taught at Dalton State College, a colleague, Leslie Harrelson, said she tells her students that brain research shows the difference in brain activity between what’s going on when one is writing by hand as compared to someone who’s writing on a keyboard is like the difference between “flying over Dalton at night and flying over Los Angeles.” Of course, she’s trying to get them to freewrite and generate ideas (in and out of class). Up until now, I’ve felt like I understood this research from my own anecdotal experience. Lately, though, the more I write on the keypad, the more I feel the flow of my thoughts very directly from thought to expression.

So, if you’re wondering why this topic keeps coming up lately, it’s because there is emerging data that clearly suggests the brain functions differently when physically forming letters by writing than it does through the swifter medium of punching the digits. Virtually all of it, however, focuses on brain development, education, memory and ideas, and the implications for the digitized world children are growing up in. Oh, and don’t worry, if you want your child to learn how to develop their handwriting skilz, there’s an app for that, as discussed in this video.

Not so much on the implications for writers. See if you can find some.

I’m a lifelong journaler. For the better part of a decade now, I’ve stuck with the uniformity of my black Moleskin notebooks, writing everything from poem drafts, to novel ideas, to song lyrics and other random jottings. I suppose we can see a pretty clear link to the value of handwriting from the current brain research for the kind of writer that seeks to “plumb the depths” of his or her memory, as well as for generating ideas. Virtually every writing textbook discusses different ways of composing and drafting, concluding with “Do whatever works.” Well, yeah.

Lately, though, I’ve increasingly found the keyboard so fluid, so immediate. My thoughts can transpose almost instantaneously onto the page. Am I missing out on ideas and imaginative connections I might otherwise have had? Have I just reached some comfort level, some “brain” milestone of development? Am I not using both sides of my brain when I use both hands to type?

What works for you?

In terms of classic, famous, Brit-rock invasion bands, I’ve never been all that excited about The Rolling Stones or The Who. I loved Led Zeppelin, and appreciated The Beatles. Okay, but Zeppelin didn’t produce their first album until early 1969. In ’66 there were essentially three different ways of using music as a vehicle: the profound bard, the street punk, the sound sculptor. The Beatles were definitely the sound sculptors, and the polar opposite of, say, a politically conscious Dylan, generally removed from the ideological and social struggles of the time.

As a casual listener, here’s what’s always stood out to me about The Beatles’ music (followed by a BUT).

(1) Great songwriters. But their famous pieces were inescapable and culturally ubiquitous. Sometimes they were even a little…cheesy? Light?

(2) Prolific. Yes, they catalog hundreds of songs but there are so many castoffs, and so many two-minute ditties, you begin to cherry-pick the albums looking for the two or three famous pieces. (And Zeppelin gets all the credit as the makers of “the concept album”).

(3) Distinctive sound. But you don’t expect things like hot improv guitar, or really innovation. And if you do think of innovation you probably think material from ‘Sgt. Peppers’, which followed Revolver and has more famous material (“Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds,” “Little Help from My Friends”).

What Lennon is doing with the guitar melodies and background jangling sound, reminds me of what Peter Buck maximized for 30 years with R.E.M. (“And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Dr. Robert”). Lennon also demonstrates what you do as a guitarist when you aren’t a great soloist. You play cool riffs and harmonize the melodies. The day of the guitar solo has burned out and faded away for probably about the past two decades. Bands like Cake have since perfected the precision riff.

And McCartney’s motown-inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life” reminds me of Neil Diamond (okay, not so innovative there).  But even this relatively unheralded song signaled a major prelude to the 70s with the band orchestration and fade-out. And check out those horns! Some wild, eccentric sound-sculpting here for sure! And all in two-and-a-half minutes.

But have you heard of “Tomorrow Never Knows”? This is the song that truly blows me away. Way ahead of its time. I would go so far as to say you wouldn’t know the difference between it and a given song produced today. What a way to conclude an album. The song begins, “Turn off your mind and look downstream…it is not dying” and concludes with the repeated phrase “…in the beginning.” It was a beginning. Pioneering more than subtle sounds, but an explosion of experimental and psychedelic music to follow for decades. It includes such groundbreaking techniques as reverse guitar, processed vocals and looped tape effects. Musically, it’s drone-like, with a strongly syncopated, repetitive drum-beat played over a single chord. Lennon’s processed lead vocal was another innovation. Always seeking ways to enhance or alter the sound of his voice, Lennon told EMI engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted to sound like he was the Dalai Lama singing from the top of a high mountain. The end result is an ethereal, filtered quality. Just amazing.

Of course there are the homages, and the specific, direct attempts to recreate a “Beatles-influenced” song, such as Wilco’s “Hummingbird” from A Ghost is Born CD (who themselves are now considered to be “boundary-pushing”). And there are bands like The Jayhawks who have a natural harmony that can at times, and at their best (say, the 1995 Tomorrow the Green Grass CD), sound reminiscent of that distinctive Beatles harmony. But I’m pretty excited by my de-familiarized listening to The Beatles and how they laid claim to so many distinctive sounds for, well, the rest of rock n’ roll history when it comes down to it.

Does this sound like 1966?

In fact, it’s the 10th year of the Poetry@Tech program. Whether I was living in Atlanta or, for most of that time, in Chattanooga, I’ve tried to come down and participate at least once a year to the 4-6 community readings they offer. I realized it had been a while when I decided this past week to come see three poets who I didn’t know much about.

I knew a little about Bruce McEver. Successful in both business and poetry–oh, and he recently got a doctorate in Divinity at Harvard! It’s also his endowment that has created the many opportunities it has. He’s an unusual person, in tune with “both sides of the brain,” as Tom Lux said in his introduction Thursday night (although McEver says in the video below that he doesn’t actually “see a dichotomy between being a businessperson and a poet”). C&R Press is proud to be producing his second full-length collection, slated for 2013, Scaring Up the Morning. He began the reading with his spiritual-infused, narrative based travels, exploration and poems dealing with the grief of having lost his wife. This performance was followed by Chris Forhan’s precise, lyrical, and haunting childhood struggles. As a perfect, and unexpected cap to the reading, Theresa Davis, an outstanding spoken word poet, delivered several passionate, theatrical performances. An entertaining reading filled with small wonders and delights in a great Atlanta setting: Kress Auditorium at The Robert C. Williams Paper Museum (Institute of Paper Science & Technology).

The reading was followed by a get-together at Tom Lux’s. As fate would have it, February 9th also happened to be the night of a full moon. I was well-accompanied by intrepid Poetry@Tech associate and long-time friend, Travis Wayne Denton and his wife and fellow poet, Katie Chaple. And as I sat on the top floor of Tom Lux’s midtown residence, sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon and conversing with the stars beneath the stars and the full moon, I felt once again like I was in exactly the right place.

Here’s a video with Bruce McEver and Tom Lux discussing the poetry of work, and the work of poetry.

Billy Collins letting them have it.

That’s just the smoke on his clothes, sweetheart,” McCann said.

“No, no. He’s burning from the inside out.”

McCann says he was stunned by the prescience of such moments of childhood insight and began wondering, “How do you write about this?”

He thought about how we’re all burning from the inside out, how America was and is. Eventually, the tightrope walk came to mind. The image of this lone figure, almost angel-like, above the city. What is the historic context of the novel? Vietnam was recently over. There were even computer hackers beginning for the first time, and he saw connections between that time and the present time. Iraq could substitute for Vietnam. So he went “to the depths” to see what he could find about where we happen to be now.

In the video below, Colum McCann discusses the dirty-beautiful world he has created in his fourth novel, Let the Great World Spin. He says that the tightrope walker’s stunt, around which the novel is written, has been called “the art crime of the century.” Beginning from high above, the novel then moves down to the depths of the city, and, as a result, penetrates it–and speaks to our own historic moment.

It’s also a novel about the human heart. Quoting Faulkner, McCann says that “the conflict of the human heart” is what he’s after. My attempt here is less to discuss this novel as a review than to shine a little more light on it. (The reviewing job seems to have been done well enough for the PR campaign that this book has already generated the past year and a half.)

The novel is framed with an inter-connected weaving of lives in New York during a moment in time when a man decided to tightrope between the the twin towers. Here’s a helpful article on Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who in 1974 did it. McCann does make “reaches” by undertaking many characters from the street. For instance, he has to channel the voice of a 38-year-old, black prostitute from New York City. He calls that “part of the beauty of fiction,” and indeed his careful, detailed and often idiomatic sense for each character’s voice and back story are convincing.

“You try to find redemption and joy, what is meaningful to the human heart,” McCann says.

It’s even called “psychological fiction” as one of the Library of Congress classifications on the title page. As with any narrative in which intricate and inner highly observational “moments in time” (such as I myself took on in The Director of Happiness in New York!), the reader is faced with more of a challenge than something that has more plot movement, or in which “the stakes” are a little more black and white. But that’s what literature does. It just only aim to entertain–it also aims to enlighten, challenge and/or illustrate a vision of life. The way one can appreciate Let the Great World Spin is through the characters and the struggle of their lives. The poetic images, thematic integration and historic connections follow.