What I Love About Our NYC Subways, a Baker's Dozen

1. When the number 2 train brakes into the station, it somehow plays out the first few notes of Bernstein's There's a Place for Us. Last week, my wife was surprised when I showed her where Bernstein got it from, a little corner of Beethoven's first piano concerto. I love Clifford Curzon playing it, elegance, pure elegance.

2. At Columbus Circle, go into the station, in there, two of the stairs will show lead you further down to the A, C, B and D trains. You have to get the right stairs (south side as you come off the 1, 2, 3). The signs will say AD and BC with two arrows pointing to the two different tracks. I call it our time machine. One train to the future, one to the dinosaurs.

3. There used to be these lit up design pictures to see as you took the tunnel under the water to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

4. The breathtaking, leave-my-seat view when the trains go over the bridges.

5. There is one stop on the F line where I will always loose my sense of North, South, East, West when I emerge and am certain of the wrong direction.

6. The 1 train Stop mosaics of Alice in Wonderland at 5oth street; and the subdued, abstract mosaics when entering one part of Grand Central's subway station.

7. Meeting a friend by chance on a train, especially when I haven't seen the person in years.

8. Those red and white lamp globes on some entrances contain Pokemon, don't they?

9. The elegant Union Square kiosk.

10. In the snowstorm years ago, riding the F train above ground in Brooklyn. The tracks froze or were covered with snow or something. Everyone was asked to get out
of the train and walk a near-forsaken patch of city in the storm, two stops over to make a connection.

11. On an advertising poster, they showed us how all these new trains were shinny and clean but someone wrote tiny graffiti on the little trains as if he had a tiny, tiny spray can.

12. That this huge world of workers actually exists below us while we sleep.

13. All those books I read while riding.

(This list format is a bit overused on the internet, but it was fun to give a try.)

*photo - tainted dream on flickr. Subway Drummer www.johnsloan.net/

Right Brain / Left Brain

















In utero, our male and female brains distinguish. There is a wall of cells which die in the male brain, dividing the hemispheres. Not so in the female brain. Because of this, we process thoughts differently.

Also, in a hypothetical, tragic instance of an accident where a man and woman both loose their speech abilities, it is likely the woman's other hemisphere would take over and she would regain speech, while the man would probably remain dumb.

I remember meeting a brain research doctor in Central Park a dozen years ago when our children were very young. She was getting a Spanish nanny. I was told that if one learned a second language during the first 18 months of life, the two languages would map on different hemispheres. Introduction to multiple languages afterward would cause them to stack on one side of the brain only, no matter how many there were.

I was shocked a few years ago, when I saw that da Vinci, in one of his drawings displayed at the Met Museum, divided the brain and labeled the hemispheres into something like - the rational and the creative. Was he not brilliant? But then, even much earlier, at the inception of the modern Hebrew written alphabet (reflecting an even older tradition, I am sure), there was awareness that the brain divides into emotional and rational sides.





Isn't it curious that the backward R and the L in the main photo article look like Ralph Lauren's Double R ranch logo?

In the title of this article, why did I color the right, "Feminine," brain baby blue and the left, "Masculine," brain pink. Why? Earlier in America, blue was first used for girls and pink for boys, just the opposite of today.

It is most interesting to me that the left side includes both the emotional and the intuitive aspects of our thinking. A teacher of meditation, Stuart Wilde, used to emphasize that we first must quiet our emotions to be intuitive, to be connected to our feelings. Emotions being things like anger, fear, jealousy, aggression; feelings being what we notice non-analytically when we quiet our selves. Mr. Wilde suggested we go about our interactions with others, but just leave off the emotions.

And for those musicians among my readers - when a non-musician listens to music, the person processes it with her/his right, emotional hemisphere; if you then train that person in music, there will be a shift. Her/his left, intellectual half will then be the side used in listening to music.

The nice photo at the top of this article was found at project741.com/blog.

Three Trees







Nothing earth shattering. I just tried a new way of drawing online. Here are my trees, from my first attempt. It's easy. You can try too. Go to zefrank.com/scribbler/scribbletoo/

Gould Beethoven 32 Variations in C minor(1/2)

One Comparison of Horowitz and Gould



Horowitz is a poet and owns the first 30 seconds; after that his virtuosity gets in the way a bit. Gould's opening is crude by comparison; but throughout his performance he plays phrase to phrase and emphasises the aspect of counterpoint, which is gorgeous.

You Don't Need What You Need











A wise friend of mine, a child therapist, Dr. Leah Levinger, had a method. Get rid of any book you haven't read in 5 years. I don't think that would work for me. I have a lot of books I reference and reread. But one of the teachers at the morning meditation group I go to donated 500 books a month ago to Symphony Space; and while my wife and son were out of the country for three weeks, I set a goal to match her number. And I did.

It helped organize the apartment but the paring wasn't that dramatic. The emptied bookshelves became sparse; the sparse became full, as I reorganized the overpopulation. There are a lot of paper citizens left, but they look and feel great, more ordered, in place.

This has been something I do from time to time; but this time took out a nice chunk. I am pleased.

I got rid of other things too. Magazines which would make a pile more than half as tall as me, do-hickies, thingamabobs, mementos, a lesser cello and bassoon we upgraded. And I remembered a warning, I think from a Feng Shui book, that when you get rid of a clutter of items, expect that right away you are going to need something you threw out.

Well, I did. I got rid of a dozen small picture frames. Then my wife returned with two sepia photos of her grandfather in his Buddhist robes which I wanted to frame.

I think there is part of one's old personality that wants to stay when we change. It likes to cling to possessions and habits and look for a way to say, "See, I did need that." And what the soul yearns for, it makes manifest.

We often have an ambivalence as we progress spiritually. We get rid of clutter, we let go of people we have outgrown, we eliminate poor food habits, we set new disciplines. But we need to not be afraid when afterward, these were not obviously the right decisions. They were.

It is quite the same with meditation. We think we have to think though something, try to remember something else, follow an interesting thought path that comes up, or even cut the meditation short to get some work done, write, make phone calls. But meditation begins as a letting go and focusing, noticing as your brain speed slows to alpha, delta, or Wow! theta; quieting the mind which says it needs its thoughts.

But if we persist, we find that we didn't need what we need. And we progress. We may find "the tunnel" and move up it to that other place. Or get clear messages, "Don't write that book now, move to Montana and raise goats," directions that go contrary to what seems right, but come from a place which connects to the universe, not our cluttered thoughts. And somehow we just know, that was the answer was right. Or we manifest the person or money or opportunity later in the day. But it will start with getting rid of the clutter. And it will often feel like a mistake as soon as we let go.

I am adding to this post afterward.

I started the original post the night before, finished it early that morning, then went off to my meditation group. After our meditation, people started talking about how they the liked the space we were in - the way the architect designed it in an oval, and it's comforting emptiness.

The leader then spoke about when people would visit her on Cape Cod years ago and loved her home. It had nothing in it. She had left New York and had sold her extensive collection of Chinese art, her books, furniture and much more.

Her friends thought she needed money and offered to buy her possessions and hold them for her until she could redeem them. But that wasn't the case. She just felt she wanted to let things go.

Her story was a nice, little coincidence to my writing this.

No Wonder I had So Many Cups Too Wash











I had been clearing out no longer wanted items from our apartment for weeks, and that turned things upside down.

Yesterday, in an all night marathon of my last minute, frantic cleanup before my wife and son arrived back from Japan, I found an old page of practice writing of my son's. It made all the frenetic work I had to put into cleaning up the apartment pay off. I think I may steal it for the first line of one of my stories.

"A few days ago the toothfaire came and drinked all our coffee"

Snowstormlessness













I read a woman's description of herself today. She is in her 30s and lives in Florida. She said she never saw snow.

I feel sad for her. I would not want to miss a year of snows.

On a more serious note, for the past month we have been worried over my friend's 15 year old son who had had cancer for years. He lost one eye and nearly another to it.

Other than that he is now fine and the cancer appears gone, it seems. But, for the past month, after an operation to remove a cataract, his vision got cloudy instead of better. He could just about not see at all. A second operation three days ago was to clear the eye of blood and debris. Now his vision is much better and expected to clear even more week by week.

I thought of the things I would miss seeing. People's faces most of all. Trees and stars. The ocean beach. Small things like birthday candles and the color of the shirt my son picked out for the day. My wife's earrings. A pianist's hands while he plays. It's been said that we first taste food with our eyes. Books, I love the intimacy of paper words in my hands.

And yes, I would miss seeing seeing snow. Snow changes the whole world around us in a beautiful way. But if friends could tell me it was snowing out, and if I could feel it and smell the air, that would be OK. In this week's pilot for the new TV show, Covert Operations, a blind CIA operative tells the protagonist that he doesn't need to see a woman to know she's beautiful, he just listens to the way other men talk to her.

I would rather give up chocolate than snow. To those who know me, that says a lot. Even the chocolate from the basement of this one, old department store in Japan.

We must be careful not to miss our opportunities. Each time I visit Japan, I bring a book to deepen my feeling of being there. One such book mentioned these weary travelers who, 20 years ago or so, stopped to sleep at a monks' place. The monks encouraged them to see their treasure, it was on view. But they were tired and decided to decline, just go to sleep and see it in the morning. They woke up and asked to see the treasure. A monk apologized and said it was only on view for that day. "Maybe next time," the travelers said. "When do you think it will shown again," they asked. "I don't know," the monk replied, the last time before this was in the year 1230.

If you open for a big rock band, you can get a ton of exposure. I worked selling real estate years ago with a woman who looked like Rhea Perlman, (Carla from the Cheers TV show). Eventually, her boyfriend David F. came and worked with us too. He told me he was once in a band when the Beatles came and toured America; and they were asked to tour and open for the fab four. But David said it was cool then to turn things down. They could have been rich and famous.

In Judaism, you are supposed to run when you have the opportunity to do a good deed, you don't know if it will pass quickly or if you will ever have the chance again.

I hope the young, snowstormless lady gets and takes an opportunity to see snow very soon. And that my friend's son will get to see many more years of snow.

The Best Book Ever?













That was what I was asked after reading. . .

"Have you ever read a book that is soooo good it blows all the others out of the water? Last month this happened to me. Seriously every book I reviewed on my blog the year prior went down a notch in my five-star rating system."

What about you, my reader, the BEST? I thought about a bit about this, myself.

As I had learned to type by retyping The Catcher in The Rye, no matter how great another book is, this will always retain its own special dimension.

Cummings' 95 poems comes close to perfection in its category.

Recently, Victory Finlay's non-fiction, Color, introduced me to our world as if for the first time; and also The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin. Read it even if you aren't a musician.

Perhaps I will write elsewhere of music books - of the only theory/composing book to consider; about a book that Julliard wishes wasn't; and on a book that is an advanced technical study on how to play the recorder, but which remains very human.

Not the book itself, but now listening to the text and fine explanations by Jean, a brilliant friend and teacher (in his 90s and dying of cancer), as he explains the stories in a book by Aragon; by it teaching us French at his dining room table. But the book itself too; for Aragon's way of expressing himself is, among any writer's I have encountered, the most similar in thought process behind some of my own poetry. It makes me feel less lonely. And more so too, with Jean reading to us.

My most intimate facts have been learned privately with teachers, but one or a few.

Surely, I exaggerated just now. And one exception was Tides and the Pull of the Moon, where I learned the moon does not circle the earth but the moon and earth, each other; and so, apples do not fall, they and the earth merely are trying to circle each other's center; the center of the earth being so down deep, the apple appears to be falling straight towards that middle.

For sheer depth and breath, the immense Torah commentary, MeAm Loez is unrivaled, building upon Rashi, the Talmud and other tomes.

In the other direction, there is this tiny, Beatrix Potter sized book, odd as small, in translation from Japanese, The Illustrated Book of Living Things by Momoko Sakura. Just get it. Intimate recountings of her meeting various species and wonderful, amateur illustrations. (James Thurber once told his "NYer" editor that he was going to take a drawing class. The editor told him it would ruin his terrible style. Likewise, Momoko San's paintbrush is warmly naive in its own way.)

Incidentally, Ms. Potter choose her small book size for small hands, she said. Of hers, I love Ginger and Pickles, whose title characters were a cat and dog. I love it for the following quote, Edward Gorey worthy. . .

"The shop was also patronized by mice - only the mice were rather afraid of Ginger. Ginger usually requested Pickles to serve them, because he said it made his mouth water. 'I cannot bear.' said he, 'to see them going out at the door carrying their little parcels .' 'I have the same feeling about rats,' replied Pickles, 'but it would never do to eat our own customers; they would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchit's.' 'On the contrary, they would go nowhere,' replied Ginger gloomily.

As firstborns of man get birthrights and double blessings, the same holds true for novels. Don Quixote says it all and so well that all the authors in all the lands could have stopped there. We struggle within what we believe is happening, but with grave delusions of what is, though this does not decrease the import of our quests.

(OK, "first western novel," the appellation of first novel is more accurately awarded to Lady Murasaki's pen.) I love The Tale of Gengi's beginning. But when my wife was given a choice to study that or The Pillow Book, she choose the latter, a great little work by a horrible court lady and so much more interesting. My wife chose well.

And I see no need for me or any to attempt to write "The Great American Novel." It was already written and has Atticus Finch in it and a real guest appearance of Truman Capote as a child. It is so America.

The early Peanuts books, The Hobbit, 100 Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, the first Harry Potter for it's escorting us into another, here world, flawed though its world structure is. The Dark is Rising series, maybe partly because my wife introduced it to me. The greats have been well thumbed and acolladed with good reasons.

(Well, I guess "Moby Dick" was a previous "The Great American Novel," and it could be time for a third.)

I can't imagine another book that would notch down Bilbo's tale.

And my favorite quote in any of these or between some other covers? It comes from the book on how to play the recorder. You will have to write me if you want it. It's not earth shattering, but important.

(Ohh, I just had a thought. Imagine, as a child, being tucked into the covers of your bed; and the top cover is an imprint of the cover of your favorite book. Or even now, what book would you choose?)

Pleasant Speeds

Later this morning, I will be seeing my lovely wife and energetic son off. They will be taking a plane to Japan. The land of moon viewing.

And there are the trains there, between Tokyo and to Yokohama and beyond, which run local and express, and one that is faster still. It is called "Pleasantly Fast Express." I like that name.

I have been up working and typing here, in the late night; comparing the different speeds Feuermann and Casals take with Bach's Air in G; and I am distractedly watching the moon like a scientist between times, struggling to see if I can actually notice her moving.

But the moon is too slow for me to see move across the sky.

There! No, I think I just imagined it.

And, as if to taunt me further, a small mouse blurs across my floor too quick for my eyes, like a magician's trick.

But now, I am comforted to watch the pleasantly slow moving clouds which have appeared and are moving in front of the moon, like a curtain at the ballet.

I see the moon snuff out like a candle, a smokey glow left nearby.

I keep at my works and eventually look up again. My companion has returned, definitely further to the west in the sky.

We used to play red light, green light as kids, where you only moved when the watcher had his back turned. The moon has been playing this game with me, no?

Well, she has won. I need to retire before I forfeit all my night's sleep. And the yellow disk has finally hid behind the building wall as I finish.

There is a trick I could have used at the end - if I hadn't been engaged in writing this for you. If you imitate the coming of an eclipse by positioning yourself so the moon touches the edge of the window or another building's side, you can see it melt, eclipse. You can notice it move.

But she has won.

Barney Greengrass











I have just finished my writing work and went off for bagels. Walking down the street, I ended up thinking of two restaurants. one Japanese, one Jewish.

My son, Sage, was very disappointed that Sapporo was renovated. It was a typical Tokyo or Osaka feeling restaurant, a shabby and unfancy, beaten up place that served wonderful, basic food - chicken katsu and noodle soups. But it was special because it's in Manhattan. Now, the food is still the same, but my teenage son, like a retired geezer longing for "the good old days," complains that the katsu have gotten smaller.

Oh, and don't be mistaken that their katsu is like what you've had in other places, unless you've eaten katsu in Japan.

We get out bagels from Barney Greengrass, that still-the-same, dingy, unrenovated restaurant across the street from where Mr. Singer lived and where the author had many a bagel and bialy, eating there practically every day for many years.

I think Issac Baschevis Singer, an author my son likes, would have understood Sage's feelings.

One biographer supposed Mr. Singer choose his apartment building because it has a huge inner court to look in on. It would have reminded the Yiddish writer of the court his family lived on in Warsaw as a child. Mr. Singer wrote of how he loved to watch from his family's balcony, the dealings and dramas going on below in the Jewish ghetto, an old world he chronicled and which is now gone.

And while Barney Greengrass across the street wouldn't have been why he took an apartment in that building which takes up an entire city block like a medieval castle; I'm sure it was one of the reasons he stayed there so long. A comfortable, unfancy place with simple, familiar soups and food.

The English title we have for Issac Baschevis Singer's short story masterpiece, Gimple the Fool, is a mistranslation. Tamim is not a fool. It is a Hebrew word for perfect in a straightforward and untricky way. In our selfish, tricky, clever, violent world, the simple tamim is looked upon as foolish. But that is a mistaken view of fools.

I used that word, tamim, only once in my fiction writings. Just last night, actually, in the simple poem I wrote. I will share it with you below. I am still looking for a title. Maybe a good one will come to you as you read? Nothing fancy I hope.

find a way
to be amazed
and thankful
at sighting the next
small, brown bird
in a common, green tree.
it will have taken
every, every one of
this world's woven events
to bring the two of you
together just then.

be as the true and tamim cellist
or the quiet guitarist in his room,
who has chosen to love
the subtleties of each
of eighteen million,
slow, unadorned scales.

Something for Your Coffee Break














If you go to this site you can read some of my quite-short stories, myshorttales.blogspot.com Click on the sleeping cat on the upper-right of this page to be magically transported, she is a portkey.

I just added another small story. Enjoy with a donut.

(This picture isn't relevant at all, but it was so beautiful I couldn't resist. Isn't she like Botticelli's Venus rising, her slightly tilted head, her falling hair? But this maiden comes to us not from the sea, rather the deep wood. For comparison, I provide the image below. You may click on the images to enlarge. The photo above is by ha!photography on Flickr. )

Rubber Chicken Soup











This is the true story of an unfortunate pun.

It all started several months ago when I entered a contest for the world's worst poem. I lost. Imagine, my poem wasn't even good enough to be the world's worst! How sad.

The reason I had entered, in the first place, was the glorious prize they gave you if your poem was the worst. The prize was a rubber chicken.

My son, Sage, had mentioned he wanted one. I wanted to win it for him.

Well, a week or so after the contest results came out, I saw one in the window of a pet store and decided to go in and buy it myself. (I didn't need no stinkin' contest.)

Sage loved the chicken and named it Tasty. This somehow got us talking about rubber chicken soup; and then to making an account, tastyrubberchickensoup@gmail.com.

Sage's new hobby became playing The Blue Danube on the piano while substituting the chicken squeak sounds for some notes. (Is this how Victor Borge got started?)

The other afternoon, when he had gotten a bit bored with his bassoon practice, Sage got out Tasty the rubber chicken to find out which note it makes. He compared it to the bassoon and then the piano.

Sage found that if you squeeze our chicken, it produces the note la, or a natural.

I imagine other chickens from other manufacturers produce other notes. There must be f sharp rubber chickens, and e chickens, and d chickens out there somewhere.

We definitely have a chicken. But if you squeeze most of the air out, the note then sounds half a step lower, then it's a flat chicken.

(The next time someone asks what it's like to homeschool, I think I'll just send them this article.)

I Wish I Were an Architect!












David Ayache, an Italian luthier, took this wonderful interior photo of a violin. I love the shot and wish I were an architect. Then I would design a lobby for a symphony hall that looked exactly like this with the soundpost, curves, materials, basebar and f holes. (Imagine this 22' tall!)

Wouldn't it be fun to sip wine here during intermission?

I am adding a note 5 months later. . . My son just played bassoon at Lincoln Center, in a student orchestra. Afterward, while enjoying the celebratory party upstairs, I am told that the architects of this redesigned building for Julliard and Avery Fisher Hall wanted to make it feel like you were inside an instrument.

How to Succeed With an F Average








How I envy those who can captivate with a story. I mean in a conversation, like last night when we had dinner with a close friend. She obviously has different genetic material than I do regarding the ability to make interesting words come out of one's mouth.

This is very different from being able to write an interesting story.

As I sit here at the computer, remembering our cellist friend tell her stories last night, it's like remembering scenes from a movie, or like the stories happened to me, not her.

I, on the other hand, feel shy and clumsy in company. It's as though I'm playing the wrong instrument, say a cellist blowing into an oboe. I think of Gary Larson's cartoon of an elephant onstage at the piano realizing in panic that he's not a pianist, he's a flutist.

When I do say something, it's often a clumsy imitation of what I wanted to say. And I can't go back and edit, revise, like I can as I am typing to you here.

That is why I like typing out my stories and essays. It feels like I am playing the "write" instrument.

Writer Lorrie Moore answered well when she was asked "What in your childhood contributed to your becoming a writer?"

"... a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset in literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page, and a habit is born."

Ineptness in conversation can be a useful failing if you're interested in writing. Just as dead, decomposing plants in your garden become the humus, the soil, which allow other plants to thrive.

In her article on how to become a writer, Ms. Moore speaks of a different failure which is helpful to writers...

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

I just finished a book of poetry that took a few years. Yea! and Confetti! And I can truly say that my finesse at the small failures in life has greatly contributed. (Except for my failure at being a descent speller. That's been a bit of a drawback.)

Here is a small appetizer from the collection. . .

An Extra Closet

The corners of my home
have become
filled with filling.
I wish I could put
some of the piles
into my writings
and hide them away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Actually though, gathering any experience will give you some grist for the mill, having something to write about is what matters. Not just the failures, a writer's successes in life and those mixed results can be useful too. Getting out of bed and trying is the thing.

Playing Hookey











I was going to write something else today but I got distracted by the faint and constant snowing. In a few hours we'll go skating at Bryant Park. It's very beautiful to skate there as the snow falls. Then we'll go to a restaurant I love nearby there that reminds me of being in Japan. I'll order tanuki (a tanuki is an animal like a raccoon, but that's just the name, there's no tanuki meat in this). Tanuki has pieces of tankatsu batter, the batter used in making tempura, in a soba or udon, warm, noodle broth. I love it.

They also have kitsune (fox) of soba or udon broth and tofu skins, which is funny because this again stirs my memory, of the simple, traditional song my son and every Japanese child hears and sings about - kobuto, kitsune, tanuki, neko. However there is no (kobuto) piglet or neko (cat) soba or udon.

How to Walk onto the Stage of Carnegie Hall Without Stage Fright










Nine and and a half years ago, in July of 2002, I cut out a couple paragraphs from a New Yorker article and taped it up on our kitchen cupboard. In it is the simple secret of how to instill confidence in your child or in a pianist who will debut at Carnegie Hall.

Never praise abilities, praise efforts.

Never tell your child, self, wife or student that she is talented, smart, or naturally gifted. Tell her, she is such a hard worker.

Never say to a pianist that he is so good at sight reading, tell him that he worked hard at sight reading and it paid off. Don't these sound similar? But no, no and no - they are polar opposites, like northern polar bears and southern penguins, we feel they are from the same region, but they live on opposite ends of the earth.

Do not tell a violinist that she has real talent, tell her that her hard work on her vibrato really paid off. This is a dangerously important distinction.

And secondly, it is better to praise small achievements than broad accomplishments. You really worked hard on this trill in the second movement; you're getting good at filling the cat bowl; I noticed how quietly you have been closing doors lately, you've been trying hard not to slam them; you're relaxing your shoulders now when you play the piano, you've put a lot into it.

If you want to walk on the stage of Carnegie Hall without stage fright, you need to start encouraging yourself way before that night. You need to make it a habit to tell yourself that you are a hard worker. Not in a magic phrase way. But find little things you worked at, notice them and encourage yourself. Surround yourself with friends who will do the same for you. "I love the way you worked on phrasing in the beginning of the slow movement, it sounds beautiful."

Here is the article snippet from my cupboard. . .

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, has found that people generally hold one of two fairly firm beliefs about their intelligence: they consider it either a fixed trait or something that is malleable and be developed over time. Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-science students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills.

One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills.

Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believe that intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay at home. "Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb," Dweck writes, "for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success."

In a similar experiment, Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer.

Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable; forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward.

They weren't naturally deceptive people, and they weren't any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate "talent." They began to define themselves by their description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. . . They'd sooner die.
-
Yes, every musician in or out of music school knows you have to practice like a little, red-tailed demon, talent alone gets you nowhere. But it is the self-encouragement of noticing our little victories, and how we talk with each other that make a difference. Are we saying, "Oh, you're so talented! You're going to go far." or "Wow! you really worked on your dynamics in that piece."?

You made it to the end of this article, you really showed determination. Keep up your good work!