Author: Dale

Hm.

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I awoke at 4:10 this morning, my brain awhirl. It seems that the reality of the summer began to click with me. It’s all been rather Promised-Land-like, a hazy summer of sitting in the labyrinth, sipping Xtabentun and painting, or shambling up to the study to knock out another dozen measures or so on the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra piece. The countdown app on the iPhone still has another 10 days and 1 hour until my actual summer begins.

But yesterday it occurred to me that it would be necessary at some point today to pack for my eight-day stay in Valdosta starting tomorrow, and I guess that set off my reality alarms.

In my state of semi-sleep, I was surprised to find myself observing some events from this coming week with what was almost a frisson of sadness. You would think that would include the arrival of the students next Sunday, but mostly it was images of the staff meetings on Friday and Saturday that gave me pause. I think perhaps it’s the “drawing of the circle” nature of this week that affects me, both in actual execution and in the prospect of missing it.

It’s not that I’ve gone maudlin on myself. I have absolutely no regrets about taking the summer off, other than that I’ll not be able to stand in front of an audience of parents and say, “Forty years ago, my parents sat where you sit today.” That would have been cool. No, I needed a break, and I have work to do. But it will not do, either, to try to deny that I have given up something that is one of the most wonderful things on the planet, howsoever temporarily.

At any rate, I’m awake way earlier than I needed to be. Might as well blog.

A scathingly brilliant idea

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In a dream last night, I had a scathingly brilliant idea. For real. Let’s see if I can remember it.

It’s called STAMP, and that stands for Standard Time, Alarm, and Map Protocol. Here’s my thinking: every gizmo, every application that schedules events or alarms could encode a bit a packet of metadata, the STAMP, that could be recognized and used by every other gizmo or application for its own purposes.

Essentially, every scheduling application does this now, but the STAMP would be the bedrock that would allow the communication between different flavors.

For example, if I sent out an invitation to gather in the labyrinth at 8:00 tonight, and the STAMP included data about travel time, I’d set that to 0. But when Kevin got it and sent it to iCal, it would use whatever GPS was available to it to reset that to 15 minutes. (Heaven knows what Mike would get.)

I can see how if I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled and forgot about it and decided to drive up to Atlanta instead, my iPhone would keep upping that drive time until finally my distance away from PAPP Clinic intersected with the necessary time to drive back, and the alert that would have gone off at 3:45 goes off at 3:15 instead, giving me enough time to get back.

Other kinds of things that STAMP might include would be due dates/times, alerts (multiple, perhaps), etc.

I have no clue why I dreamed such a thing. Does it make any sense? I’ll try to remember other advantages of it if I can.

Sam Clemens

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I am also, via DailyLit.com, reading Who is Mark Twain?, by the same. It’s a collection of essays, etc., and this paragraph, from “Jane Austen,” made me laugh out loud:

Does Jane Austen do her work too remorselessly well? For me, I mean? Maybe that is it. She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

Middlemarch

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Through DailyLit.com, I have been reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I don’t know what I was expecting, because, honestly, the only thing I’ve ever heard about it was how wonderful it was. I’ve never read any of her other stuff, save Silas Marner of course, so I had nothing on which to base any preconceptions. (I didn’t even read the blurb on the sign-up page.)

It is highly amusing and highly entertaining. I did not expect at all a comedy of manners. Of course, I can see the seeds of high tragedy as well, so the suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

I highly recommend it.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

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I just had a transcendent experience listening, to all things, Prof. Peter Schickele.

My iTunes had selected 1712 Overture and other musical assaults to amuse itself with, and I was only half listening to Bach Portrait, which Schickele wrote for the tricentennial of J. S. Bach’s birth in 1985. It is a hysterical (of course) parody of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, with majestic music interspersed with quotations from writings from the great man, tagged with the phrase “And this is what he said.”

Only with Bach, it was from his letters to his employers, constantly carping about his pay in escalatingly specific terms. The portrait is overwhelmingly of an underpaid, embattled, and cantankerous artist. We surely know what he felt like and what that kind of situation can do to our creativity.

Finally, Schickele narrates, “Johann Sebastian Bach, umpteenth musician of the Bach family, is everlasting in the memory of music lovers. For, surrounded by adversaries, this is what he said. He said:” and then Schickele starts to sing the melody from “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in its entirety.

And all you can do is weep in gratitude and awe, knowing that what any artist “says” is largely unrelated to the travails of his quotidian existence.

Rant

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Today at school we received one of those forwarded emails that are ludicrous on their face but which a certain portion of the population treats as gospel. It was this one, about the U.S. Mint removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from the new dollar coin.

IT HAS BEGUN! the email shrieks, and the person who sent it to the whole faculty prefaced it with “I know at least one of you will go to Snopes, and it has already checked out.”

Well, I can take stuff as personally as the next Teabagger, so with narrowed eyes and wrinkled lip I headed straight to Snopes, where of course the entire email is reproduced in its entirety and debunked as completely false. Quel surprise. I replied to all, which is what I always do. I never, but one day I’m going to, say, “I dare you to forward this!!!1!1!”

I also did not write nor send the following email:

Dear troops:

This is ridiculous. Every single one of these emails y’all forward so breathlessly is FALSE. Every. Single. One.

Has it not occurred to you that you are being lied to? That someone is lying to you? For reasons of their own? And those reasons include keeping you riled up, angry, outraged at what “they” are doing to “our” country?

I cannot be the only person on this campus with a BS detector. For Moloch’s sake, people, we are educators, and it behooves us to be more skeptical than it seems many of us are. You should immediately question any email that comes to you that contains anything that is “outrageous.” Because, as I’ve already stated: Not. One. Of. Them. Is. True…. Ever.

More than that, you should be teaching our students to be just as skeptical as you are. Hell, you should be teaching them to be as skeptical as I am. That is our job as educators in a free nation.

The people who create these emails are counting on your being gullible idiots. I don’t know who they are (although I have suspicions) and I don’t know what they want you to buy or vote for (although I have suspicions), but I know they want you to buy or to vote for something. And they’re willing to lie to you to keep you outraged enough to do it. The only question now is, how gullible an idiot are you?

Cheers,

Dale

Thank you, dear reader, for listening.

Grayson update

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Grayson and Ginny got home yesterday from Greensboro, and I am relieved to report that his face is mending nicely. Still stitched up, and still clearly the result of a horrific accident, but the swelling is down and daily it gets more normal looking. Nothing to worry about.

We can go back to the natural order of things, harassing him about getting a job.

Honey, again, please

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This has been floating around for a couple of weeks, I think: Camille Paglia, always good for a chuckle, in an interview with the Globe and Mail:

This whole thing about global warming, I am absolutely incredulous at the gullibility of people. What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears? And finally I realized, people don’t know polar bears can swim! For me, the answer is always more facts, more basic information, presented without sentimentality and without drama. To inflict this kind of anxiety on young people is an outrage.

Mercy. Has Ms. Paglia gone all Emily Litella on us?

I think Ms. Paglia is entirely correct in thinking more information, presented without sentimentality and without drama, is our saving grace here. So here’s what I propose: assuming Ms. Paglia can swim, we drop her in the middle of Lake Michigan. That way, she gather more facts at her leisure and can tell us what her conclusions are when she gets back to Chicago.

Honey, please

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So Rand Paul, teabagger extraordinaire, wins the Republican senatorial primary in Kentucky and goes on Rachel Maddow’s show to do his victory lap. (I know, right?)

So Maddow asks him if he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He says no. While he is in fact not in favor of discriminatory practices, the government, he says, has no bidness telling restaurants whom they must serve.

Well. Hilarity ensues, of course, but my favorite rightwing burble is Senator John Cornyn (R, naturally-TX, of course) He said

Maddow’s inquiry was a “gotcha question.” “If I’m walking down the street minding my own business and somebody sticks a microphone under my nose about a law that was passed 40 years ago, without more detail — I think it probably caught him a little bit by surprise,” Cornyn said in Paul’s defense.

Honey, please. Paul had 15 minutes to explain himself, and this is after giving the same answer to a newspaper and to NPR, and he acquitted himself admirably. He said exactly what he believes. As for his being “caught by surprise,” if that is so, then I say good on Rachel Maddow for exposing this guy for an even bigger idiot than he already appeared to be.

My question for Cornyn at this point: Do you seriously want this specimen on your team in the Senate? Really and truly, do you??

Labyrinth, 5/20/10

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You might have noticed that I was on a roll, posting nearly every day, and then suddenly I dropped off again. Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

Last Saturday, I was basking in the labyrinth and painting sketches of bodies and really getting somewhere when I got the Phone Call, the one no parent wants to hear: there’s been an accident. Grayson’s been hurt.

My son, my child, riding his bicycle down the Creeper Trail with his girlfriend, has taken a two-foot drop off the final trestle and gone straight over his handlebars into the gravel and cinder-covered track, landing squarely on his forehead and nose. Miraculously, he sustains no other injuries but to his face: no neck injuries, no skull injuries, no eyes or teeth, not even a concussion.

But it is enough: he has scraped off his forehead and a great deal of his nose. The plastic surgeon in Johnson City, TN, has a challenge to reassemble what’s left into something that will work. My son’s nose is now about a half inch shorter than it used to be.

I drive immediately to Tennessee. His mother flies from Boston, where she’d gone for a five-day conference. We deal. He’s hurting, but he’s fine. In terms of dealing, it’s all cosmetic. He knows that, we know that. And we try to be grateful. It is hard.

Short version timeline: Saturday–he falls, surgery. We head to Johnson City. Sunday–he continues to recuperate, stays overnight. Monday–he’s discharged, we take him to the hotel. Tuesday–we meet with the surgeon, who [OH MY GOD HE’S WONDERFUL] is pleased with his work and with the healing. I drive back to Newnan. Ginny and Grayson go to her parents’ house in Abindgon, VA, an hour away. Kristin returns to Greensboro. Wednesday–we all breathe. Thursday–today–he has his stitches out in Johnson City. The surgeon is very pleased that Grayson has feeling in his nose.

Now it’s just a matter of healing. We’re pretty sure that there’s more cosmetic surgery in our future. We don’t know where he’s going next. His sketchy post-graduation plans [YES, HE GRADUATED FROM GUILFORD COLLEGE THE PREVIOUS WEEKEND WITH A DOUBLE DEGREE IN GERMAN STUDIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE AND I SHOULD HAVE BLOGGED ABOUT IT SO YOU COULD HAVE SHARED IN THE HALCYON PERFECTION OF THE WEEKEND] are now even sketchier.

And I am taking advantage of the beautiful weather to sit in my labyrinth, drink, paint, and meditate.

There’s too much going through my head to get it all down, and some of it I don’t want to share anyway.

A fresh bottle of Xtabentun, please. Isn’t it a good thing that I ordered a whole case of the stuff last month?

Here’s the thing. He’s an adult. He must decide what to do with his life, injured or otherwise. I cannot help him other than to provide some kind of health insurance. He has to figure out what it means that in one horrific moment he changed his life forever. I can’t. I can’t even face that decision. I can only be there to hand him a cup of water when he needs it or to be stolid for his sake. But inside, I’m a father who’s ready to lose it at any moment because my child’s life has been changed forever.

I have nothing else to say.