Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Not a lot (Day 38/365)

Posted on by Dale

I didn’t really do a lot today. I planned out a period dance workshop for this Saturday and created the handout and CD for it.

My friend James Wagoner, GHP teacher, is directing Pride and Prejudice this fall and asked me to come up and teach his cast some English country dance to use in the ball scenes. So I am.

You may not know this about me, but historical social dance is one of my specialties. In college (UGA, 1972-76), I was president and chief researcher of the UGA Period Dance Group, a performing group based in the theatre department. We performed social dances from Shakespeare’s time to the 1940s, and we had a blast. We’d stage them in the round, with audience seated all the way around the space as if they too were attendees at our balls. We had dances, songs, gossip, flirting, just a riproaring time.

You can see it all at http://perioddance.org.

Every summer, at GHP, I teach a weekly seminar on period dance. I start with the waltz, then English country dance, then ragtime dances like the foxtrot and tango, and then we have a grand ball. It is loads of fun. One year I shall have to get pictures.

More 341 (Day 37/365)

Posted on by Dale

I guess Sunday’s editorial inspired me. There’s more:

So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest

this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter,
but even this cannot explain the sadder,
nagging feeling creeping up as we
zoom through the landscape. Inescapably,

we’re free in ways that go beyond the fact
that we are on vacation, overpacked
for condos, beaches, meals in brasseries,
regenerative sex. It’s more than these
that sets us on a road that’s so much more
than this deserted High Tech Corridor.

Others doing work (Day 36/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would think that I would have accomplished something on today, the 10% marker, but I didn’t really. I took a stab at adding another line or two to the poem:

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest

this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter.

But I think that hardly counts. (The next line will probably end with matter, of course.)

In the meantime, I explored some sites that have the same impulse as I, only a little more focused and a lot more successful:

Some are more successful than others, of course. Some are quite nice.

Fiddling around (Day 35/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today I just played with music files I already had, switching from Finale’s internal orchestral sounds to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. Takes up lots more memory, but in general provides better sound. However, parts of “Milky Way” sounded very clunky with strings. Further experimentation with articulation is called for.

Hwy 341 (Day 34/365)

Posted on by Dale

Those of you who read the Atlanta Journal Constitution might have been amused or intrigued by the big editorial in this morning’s paper on the plight of schools in south-eastern Georgia: “Georgia Strands Its Rural Schools,” by Maureen Downey.

Her hook? “The four-lane highway leading into Hawkinsville in rural Pulaski County boasts an ambitious epithet: ‘Georgia’s High-Tech Corridor.’ But nothing along that stretch of U.S. 341 hints at a budding bastion of technology, unless you count the motorboat on blocks in somebody’s yard.”

We laughed. Apparently Ms. Downey missed the “boiled peanuts” sign.

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.

As good as nothing (Day 30/365)

Posted on by Dale

I spent the day thinking about where to go from my newly polished climax of “Milky Way” to get to the last two stanzas of the poem.

Last year, when I was finally deciding how to tackle this piece (I had put it off for twenty years), I decided that it would be in a modified sonata allegro form. For one thing, the A theme (the setting of the first stanza) and the B theme (second stanza) would have to be reversed in the capitulation, since the last two stanzas are mirror images of the first two.

So the puzzle I have (it’s not a hard one) is now that I’ve given the listener a really traditional recap, with the triumphant restatement of the opening chords, I have to twist sideways and lead into the B theme, only in a minor key (because of the rat’s grotesque cynicism) and then back out into the A theme for the final statement.

And there will be another puzzle: Ms. Willard has ended the poem not on a transcendant note but a blunt “handful of dirt to the rat.”

Anyway, I was going to get a lot of this worked out tonight, but I got dragged out to dinner with friends. Oh well.