Author: Dale

Labyrinth: a concept

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You may recall that I’ve been thinking of something to anchor the eastpoint of the labyrinth, there at the entrance, that could reflect the alchemical identification of east with the element of Air.

This past weekend we were out in Senoia, shopping about, and came across a wireframe arbor that struck my fancy. It was more than I can pay at the moment, so I left my card with my price point for the proprietor.

Back home, I envisioned, through the torrential rains, how the arbor would in fact look at the entrance to the labyrinth. I didn’t like it.

However, the idea of the two columns, open, painted white, appealed to me. What if I constructed two towers, welded pieces of wire, and placed them on either side of the steps leading down to the labyrinth?

The sketches are kind of hard to see here, but I think I’m going to keep this in mind. The towers might need to be at least fifteen feet tall, perhaps twenty. What say you?

A short rant

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A young friend of mine just announced his engagement, and we’re all thrilled for him.

Isn’t that nice, you’re thinking, but why is Dale blogging about this?

This young friend just announced his engagement. To his boyfriend. In Georgia.

This delights me. I have no idea if this is the new “thing” in the marriage equality movement, but if it’s not it needs to be.

Think about it: we have no laws governing engagements, there are barely any social rules any more, and being engaged certainly has no religious overtones in our society. A steady progression of gay engagements is perfectly designed to make the right wing froth at the mouth. I mean, what are they going to do to stop it? Constitutional amendments?

So to all my gay friends out there, if you have someone to whom you would be married if we were a sane society, not that we ever were or ever will be, then go ahead and announce your engagement. Send it in to the paper. Have an engagement party. Tell everyone you know. Introduce your partner as your fiancé.

And when someone says, “Have you set a date?”, just reply, “Not yet. But we will.”

Labyrinth: the Cloud Sculpture

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Just when Jeff thought it was safe to presume there would be no baroqueness, I unveil the Cloud Sculpture.

Several years ago we were in Decatur, doing their Christmas Thursdays thing, and in one of the shops they had these “cute” lawn ornaments constructed of screen mesh, painted and shaped. I thought at the time that one could do damage with such a concept, and I promptly bought a roll of screen mesh and a can of black paint.

And what did I intend to do with this material? I don’t know. Something like this, perhaps?

I did this earlier this afternoon, just oil pastels on a photo of the labyrinth.

Here are some more studies, done upstairs later with gouache:

I think it extremely unlikely that I will even attempt such a thing, materials to hand or not. But what a staggering concept, eh wot?

Will you spend more money for better terry cloth?

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Are you much taken by jewelry?

Why won’t the aliens step forth to help us?

Do you know the distinctions, empirical or theoretical, between moss and lichen?

Yes, they are, aren’t they? The questions, I mean, all taken from the first four pages from The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell. This book is now on my Required Reading for Sentient Beings.

Here’s a paragraph from page 4:

Can you ride a bicycle very well? Was learning to ride one for you as a child easy or not? Have you had the pleasure of teaching a child to ride a bicycle? Are your emotions rich and various and warm, or are they small and pinched and brittle and cheap and like spit? Do you trust even yourself? Isn’t it, forgive me this pop locution, hard being you? If you could trade out and be, say, Godzilla, wouldn’t you jump on it, dear? Couldn’t you then forgo your bad haircuts and dour wardrobe and moping ways and begin to have some fun, as Godzilla? What might we have to give you to induce you to become Godzilla and leave us alone? Shall we await your answer?

This small volume is comprised entirely of questions. I merely dipped into it this afternoon and am having to force myself to stop reading it.

Would you like to live a life that allows for frequent use of acronym, as in “Let’s proceed according to SOP?”

Can you stand Pat Boone?

Are you daft?

Labyrinth, 1/18/10

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I had intended to reseed the labyrinth today with a mix of winter rye and shade, and to plant the daffodils I dug up last spring when I planted the ferns, but plans change. The area where I’m putting the daffodils (the “dance floor patio” on the upper level) was very wet; tomorrow will be dryer. The bulbs seem to have survived for the most part, and some are beginning to put out leaves.

The reseeding I have no excuse for, except I began to think it might be better to wait till the end of the month. I first seeded it on February 1 last year, so I can wait until then this year as well.

I did get some busy work done, getting all the votives prepped, i.e., cleaned and restocked with fresh candles, and getting the Christmas greenery chopped up and stowed away. The air is redolent with fir behind me. We need to have many fires to get all this stuff burned by the end of February. Last year branches lay around until they turned black, and the ground beneath them. I don’t want to let that happen again.

And finally, I decided that since the weather was so beautiful and warmish, I would go ahead and get the bamboo fencing finalized around the men’s loo.

This is the area we’re talking about:

On the right is the area where the tree fell last October, and it’s even more bare now without the overgrown undergrowth behind it. The men’s loo area on the left is even more bereft and open.

So I got to work and in less than three hours I had this part of the yard all fixed up:

I think it’s going to be very nice. At the very least, it provides a modicum of privacy, and I think by the end of the summer it will probably be covered with ivy and/or honeysuckle, which will provide even more privacy. Then when the ferns recover in the spring, they’ll really look good against the backdrop.

It was not difficult getting the fence up. The back fence should be pretty easy. The rest of the fire area fence, not so easy, because of all the bamboo and having to move the firewood, and I discovered while on the other side of the fence in the Ellis’s back yard that the pecan tree directly behind the fire area is almost totally rotten. So I think I’ll probably wait until that’s down before installing that section of the fencing.

That was enough for the day, I thought, so I’m just sitting out here blogging and listening to the usual iTunes labyrinth playlist and having a drink in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the fact that our country has more often than not decided to do the right thing.

I do have some thinking to do about the eastpoint of the labyrinth. The element connected to the east is Air, and I’ve been collecting items that I think might be an appropriate installation for the east:

Left to right, we have a windchime, a twirly sun thing, and a solar-powered mirror ball. The windchimes are not the ones I want, they’re just a conceptual placeholder. The ones I would like to install are lower in tone, the “tenor” range. I also have a handblown glass star with a gold center that will go into the final mix. Another option might be prayer flags.

Leaving aside what an idiotic idea a solar-powered mirror ball is, think about it, help me think this out. Here’s the eastpoint we’re talking about:

It’s the entrance to the labyrinth. I would like to do something like take one or two of the big pieces of rebar that I have left and create an arch or something over the entrance from which the Air items could be suspended. I don’t want it to be cluttered, like some daft old hippie’s front porch, but simple and understated like the other points of the compass are.

Any suggestions?

Wha?

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So, I’m reading Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, via dailylit.com, and it’s a rough read. When I described him as Western civ’s biggest moonbat, I was not kidding.

And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person’s soul in the significant marks of its own special virtue has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.

There you go. That was yesterday’s gem.

I may not make it.

Labyrinth, 1/12/10

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I was in a pissy mood this afternoon, and have been for several days. I was thinking about blogging and analyzing all that, or at least posting on Facebook MOV I.1 and see if anyone picked up on it, but then I got home.

All this made me happy. There’s the manila package from Summer, who returned a Neo-Futurist book. The little box is a piece of fence equipment that I couldn’t get from Home Depot or Lowe’s, so now I can reattach a pole across the top of the fence at the woodpile.

And the big bundles are my bamboo reed fencing.

Here are they unwrapped. Each 25′ length is bundled in a handy carrying case, stitched closed.

When unwrapped, we get this:

And here’s a closeup of the texture:

There’s actually quite a bit of space between the reeds.

It was too cold to do any real work, of course, plus I have to go pick up some wire with which to attach the fencing to the chain link, but I couldn’t resist standing it up over in the men’s loo to see how it might look.

Quite nice. We now have to consider whether to stain it, and how.

As soon as the weather starts to warm up, I can start installing it for sure. Huzzah for yard work! I’m ready to be outside again.

Moral thermometer

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Snowbound as I am, I have been surfing the Intertubes and came across the National Insitute of Health’s Images from the History of Medicine, and specifically this image:

It appeared in the Journal of Health, v. 4, p.5 (Philadelphia, 1833).

I don’t know quite what to do with it other than to be amused by it in some undefinable way. I’d love to see it in context, to read the article to understand exactly what the medical community thought it was clarifying. I thought about making some kind of Assignment for the Lichtenbergians, but I couldn’t define what it was I thought should be done with it.

So, commenters, what are your thoughts?

What does it *mean*?

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After I finished Treasure Island via email (from dailylit.com), it was my intention to subscribe to Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, but when I searched for the title one of the results was Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (aka these days as In Search of Lost Time).

What the hey, I thought, why not?

And then I also had on hand a nice Easton Press edition of The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. (You know the Easton Press: they’re the ones who have gone to great lengths to bind the Classics in Leather with Silk Endpapers, etc., etc. This volume is actually nice, so their advertising is truthful.)

What the hey, I thought, why not?

Why not tackle two of the most abstruse and impenetrable books at the same time? To make it the more gracious, peradventure, I calculated the number of days that dailylit.com will take to send me all the installments of Swann’s Way, and then calculated the number of pages per day it will take to finish Tristram Shandy in the same length of time. Fortunately, it was only nine pages a day.

So far it’s had a curious frisson: slogging through the fuzzy musings of Western Civilization’s biggest mooncalf while at the same time untangling the convoluted snark of the first postmodern novel.

If I have any actual insights, I’ll post them.

Listening experiment

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Not really an experiment so much as a controlled experience. I noticed, or thought I noticed, that iTunes was focusing on certain CDs to the exclusion of others. So I created a smart playlist for classical/orchestral music which excluded anything that had been played since June 1 of this past year.

I was right. There were a couple thousand tracks, some of which I had not heard since 2007 or even earlier.

That’s what I’ve been listening to for the past week, and I’ve got three and a half days of solid music still to go.

At the moment, I’m hearing Bach’s Keyboard Concerto #2 (Murray Perahia on the pianoforte) as if for the first time. It’s gorgeous, of course.

In a scan of the contents of this playlist, I notice that iTunes tends to shun the first CD of any 2-CD opera set. I’ve been hearing the ends of operas, but not their beginnings. Actually, I haven’t been hearing most opera, and some other thorny 20th-century stuff, at all, since at school I had been listening to a “culled” classical playlist that excluded stuff that I thought might drive other people crazy. But since my clerk’s been abolished, I listen to whatever I damned well please, and everyone else can just catch up.

As Charles Ives once said, as he beat a concertgoer over the head with his program, for protesting the “modern” music being played, “Stop being such a God-damned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?” (The music in question was that of Carl Ruggles, which is still tough going even today.)