Category: not

Creating something every day for 365 days: only not today

Nothing (Day 64/365)

Posted on by Dale

Once again, I was prepared to tackle “Sun & Moon Circus,” but a late supper and other business kept me away from the computer.

I do want to say, though, that the Republican leadership’s outrage over the politicization of Rep. Mark Foley’s boy-sex scandal is raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips. How many tax dollars did these same guys spend on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? “It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” Said Mark Foley at the time.

And someone, don’t have the reference, sorry, today made the claim that one reason the Republican leadership tippytoed around the problem of a sexual predator in their midst was that they knew he was gay and they were afraid of being politically incorrect. Ah, yes, the right wing of our Congress is readily recognized by their sensitivity towards our gay citizens.

Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge both blame the boys: “sexual beasts,” which sounds to me as if they’ve given a little too much thought about this kind of thing. Dennis Hastert wonders why no one’s investigating the 16-year-olds.

James Dobson blames the internet and our permissive society, which is quite Christian of him, for him. I’m sure he’d do the same for Rep. Barney Frank.

Rep. Tom Reynolds, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (to elect more people like this), rented a daycare facility, children and all, to hold a press conference today. When a reporter asked if they could get the little kids out of there so they could have an adult discussion of the Foley scandal, including what Reynolds knew and when he knew it, Reynolds declined. “I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.” Who were these children? “…some of our thirty-somethings, I’ve watched these children being born…” Only not, of course.

All in all, a queasily satisfying display of conservative meltdown. I do hope it lasts.

Decatur Book Festival (Day 33/365)

Posted on by Dale

I didn’t do anything creative myself, but I did go watch others be creative at the Decatur Book Festival, people like Roy Blount, Jr., and Mike Luckovich.

The Festival had a lot of booths set up around the square with lots of book stuff going on. The local libraries were there, university presses, the Ferst Foundation, small presses, and an amazing number of self-published authors.

These all seemed to be pushing either their murder mystery/thrillers or memoirs. All of them seemed to be about 230 pages long. (Is this the limit for self-publishing? Would Leo Tolstoy have been out of luck?) Having been exposed to several self-published works before (Vampires of Dixie, anyone?), I hesitated to stop at any of these booths.

There was one booth which was a federation of literary magazines. That was very tempting: dozens of titles, filled with poetry, short stories, literary gnoshes just waiting to be sampled. But how do you choose?

All in all a fun time and worth doing again. Word of advice: if you want to see a particular author, get to the venue at least 30 minutes early to get a seat.

Almost nothing (Day 27/365)

Posted on by Dale

I almost did nothing. I cleaned up my work area, clearing the drafting table to serve as my “away from the computer” composition area. I read more of my CSS book.
In other news, I have a couple of uses for my lottery winnings:

  • Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia will be opening in New York soon. That’s a three-play work covering the lives of the Russian intellectuals involved in the 1830s revolutionary work. It made no sense to me when I read it (as in, why did he write this?) and I’d like to see if it makes more sense when you see it. So that’s at least three nights in NYC I could spend money on.
  • Also in NYC, Mr. Nebojsa Kaludjerovic is the sole employee of the U.N. mission of Montenegro, which recently, and peacefully, gained its independence from Serbia. He’s the ambassador, the secretary, the bookkeeper, etc. He used to be the ambassador from the combined countries, working out of a mansion on 5th Ave. Now he works out of his apartment, using his son’s laptop to check his Gmail account. The country of Montenegro is multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious, and yet it has remained peaceful and democratic throughout the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. I’d like to buy the man some office supplies for his new office.
  • I’d go to Kiva.org and fund all the developing businesses there.

Nothing, Nada (Day 26/365)

Posted on by Dale

Sorry, it was one of those days. I did nothing. I can’t even claim to have cleaned up my study and cleaned off my drafting table in preparation for composing away from the computer. I just read.

I read my book on Leibniz and Spinoza. I think I’m siding with Spinoza at this point. I read Louis Sachar’s sequel to Holes, called Small Steps. Any goodwill invested in our main character Armpit from Holes is diluted by a made-for-Disney plot; it was a good book, but not very believable and certainly not as good as Holes. I read my new book on CSS and how to design websites with it, which is one of my goals for the fall.

But otherwise, nothing. Nada. Zip.

Dissatisfaction (Day 24/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’ve decided I’ve got to do more work away from the computer. I’m not so much composing, in the sense of hearing music and creating the notation for that on paper, a.k.a. “writing it down”, as I am playing with dots on a computer monitor and listening to the results. It’s almost dada-istic as an approach, and I don’t think I like it any more.

Assessment (Day 18/365)

Posted on by Dale

Not that anyone is going to call me out on it, but I haven’t lived up to my end of the bargain this week. I haven’t done a creative thing every day.

Well, of course not, people will say. You had to take Grayson up to Guilford. You had things to do, emotions to deal with, huge rainstorms to drive through with stinging tears rolling down your cheeks, etc., etc.

But it seems to me that part of a project like this is that you do something every day. It’s part of the discipline of the thing. And I haven’t found that discipline and that rhythm yet.

I completely understand that the creative process requires downtime. Even when I’m not sitting in front of my computer or music notebook, I can be mulling over what to do next with “Milky Way.” Often your best ideas come from after you’ve walked away from the problem. That’s happened to me all the time.

Still, that downtime can be spent on other projects, which is why I have tried to get several things going: William Blake, the symphony, the 341 poem. And this week I’ve just slacked off.

One of my biggest weaknesses, and you’ll hear me whine about this a lot in the coming year, is that my abilities as a composer are really hit or miss. I have no formal training in composition, so I’m usually floundering my way through whatever it is I’m working on. What this means for the daily discipline thing is that I am unable to sit down and work for a quick ten minutes, say, on the “Milky Way” problem because I don’t have a trained understanding of the mechanics of the solution. That is, knowing that I have to extend the climactic nature of the passage, delaying it for another eight measures (for example), is no help at all when I don’t have the knowledge set of how to do that harmonically.

Ah well, as dear Sammy Beckett always said, “Keep going. Going on. Call that going? Call that on?”

An even less creative day (Day 15/365)

Posted on by Dale

How uncreative am I today? I just drove back from Greensboro, NC, in the driving rain, gently weeping most of the way. Because of a scheduling screwup in the orientation proceedings, Grayson was not on campus for the parent lunch. We had to leave without saying goodbye. This really sucks, and if anyone thinks creativity is enhanced by unhappiness in the artist’s life, they are seriously Romantic and probably hopelessly blue.