Oh, you know, the usual…
It still looks as if the labyrinth open house I had planned for tonight might be rained out, so I’m going to err on the side of caution and postpone it until next Friday, May 20, 6:30-9:30.
Apologies to all those who had rented Druid costumes for the night.
The good news is that the moon will be just past full next Friday. See you then!
Yesterday I planted new ferns around the labyrinth. I’m running out of places to put them, unless I rip out the ivy altogether. If I could rip out all the big ivy and leave the English ivy, I might consider it.
Anyway, I’ve loaded in so many varieties that, dilettante that I am, I can not remember which one is which. I have a great book, Ferns for American gardens, by John T. Mickel, in which I have annotated which species I’ve planted and where, but sometimes when one is meandering about the space, one just wants to know, you know?
The obvious solution is a marker of some kind. After a little thought, I imagined that a pretty solution would be to make some in the ceramics lab this summer, small clay tablets with the names stamped in, then lash them to sticks with something funky. In the meantime, I thought, I could just run get some of those cheapo metal ones that you write on.
Then my lovely first wife reminded me of the neat idea we saw in a shop in Colquitt, GA.
Kind of hard to see, but the idea should be plain: take a stick, whittle off a flat white space, and write the name on it. I felt all folksy doing it. At least until I used a Sharpie™ to write the names. But now they’re all labeled. An added nice thing is that the sticks are all from the fallen Dead Tree.
I may still make some in clay this summer. Heaven knows I shall probably need the therapy.
Habitués of the labyrinth will know of the Dead Tree in the northwest corner. I’m not sure what kind of tree it is/was. The arch of its branches suggest a flowering tree of some kind, like cherry or apple. It’s been dead since we’ve lived here as far as I know. (Prior to the labyrinth, we didn’t use the back yard much at all.)
I’ve valued its presence in the labyrinth, a work of art, beautiful and stark amidst all the green. My backyard neighbor once asked if I wanted him to cut it down for me, and I declined. I fumbled an explanation of how it just sort of was a kind of symbol or something. How does one explain one’s closeted mysticism to someone who just sees a dead tree?
As you suspect by now, the recent high winds have taken their toll on the Dead Tree: the top half of it broke off.
No damage to anything else—what is it with this space that seems to be protected?—and the rest of it still stands. I carried the large branch to the middle of the labyrinth to lie in state for the week.
After that, we will consign it to our fires.
In other news, there are still bare spots in the path. I will scratch more seed in. I also have about six new ferns to install on Saturday.
This morning, as I lay semi-wakeful at the Highlands Inn—we had gone to the wedding of Michael and Catherine Giel in Decatur last night and decided not to drive home— I had an interesting dream. I was either working on a website or standing at a smartboard, and I was defining what essentially were nonsense words. One of them stuck in my mind, and I wrote it down upon arising.
The word is vuking, and what I remember most vividly was belaboring the pronunciation. It is, I am informed, pronounced VOO-king (not view-KING as some would have it), and after a couple of repetitions it dawned on my what a tremendously useful word it may become.
Feel free to add it to your vocabulary.
We traveled down Hwy 27 on Friday to Colquitt, GA, where we stayed at the lovely Tarrer Inn, did Colquitt, and saw the famed Swamp Gravy.
It is worth the trip. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and are too lazy to click on the link, here’s the short version: the city of Colquitt decided to rescue itself from its doldrums back in the 90s by applying for some grants and creating a ‘folk life’ play from collected oral history. It was an immediate smash hit, and has been ongoing since then.
The town itself is almost nothing, and their grip on the tourism thing seems to extend mostly to having this fabulous theatre piece for a month of weekends twice a year. The building is an old cotton warehouse, and they’ve renovated it brilliantly, with a museum of local artifacts (without however any contextual explanations of any of the items on display).
The performance space is U-shaped stadium seating around a pit, with permanent multilevel platforms interspersed throughout. There is a large stage-ish area at the end of the U.
Community members from 4 to 70 rehearse the season’s play and then perform it for a month. The arts council collates a new script for October (or goes back to a previous script), and then it repeats in March. They also have a local show called May-Haw, which as the website says, is more for the townsfolk than the tourists.
Anyway, the show was good. This one was stories from the murals which dot the city (another of its attractions), all of which depict specific local events and people. On the whole, I thought it was probably weaker than their usual collections of folktales, ghost stories, and reminiscences, but parts of it were just glorious.
We intend to return to see another show. Yes, it was that entertaining. Plus, it warms my heart to see this tiny community pull off something this good.
I’ve said enough nice things, right? I can be a little catty now, can’t I?
Good.
In the window of one of the stores was this poster, for a trio singing at a local church. If you are a Colquittian who has stumbled on my blog, my sincerest apologies because y’all are some of the nicest people we’ve ever met, but this sent us into hysterics:
The lady in blue: exactly what is her hand doing? I promise I have not cut anything off. In fact, I had to redact the name of the group just to make sure I got as much of the thing in.
I hope this doesn’t ruin my chances to be considered as director for some future Swamp Gravy, because I think it would be a lot of fun. (And Swamp Gravy, I have ideas. Ask me how the elephant story could have been a showstopper.)
At one of the shops, an antiques/decor place, we came across this:
It’s bamboo. There was another chair like this, plus a ‘sofa’ and a table. Totally wobbly, so it would have to completely restored. I was thinking skulls on the uprights would be awesome. I could indulge in all my Mr. Kurtz fantasies. I did buy something from the shop, about which later.
This morning we started our drive back to Newnan, and somehow it became a thing for us to swerve off of HWY 27 to go take a gander at any and all small towns off the path. It was actually fun. Blakely—I think—had just had its “Peanut Proud” festival. (Colquitt has the Mayhaw Festival next month.) Bluffton had this enormous and ornate building, a former school perhaps, all boarded up. I wish we had a photo.
We stopped at Providence Canyon State Park:
Better pictures on the intertubes, but it was awesome. To see most of it, you have to hike, and we were prepared neither with shoes nor time, so we had to settle for these glimpses from the outer rim. It’s only 150 years old: settlers in the 1820s planted cotton, stripping the land of all vegetation and plowing up and down the hills rather than across. In 30 years, it looked like this. Can you imagine?
We also plan to return here to hike through the thing. There’s supposed to be a wildflower hike, but the website doesn’t mention it.
When we drove down Friday, we noticed a row of three small white churches off the highway. They all looked well-kept, and we thought it was odd to have three churches in a row like that. We jokingly suggested it was three hardshell Baptist churches, founded by three feuding branches of the same family. As we drove back up, we pulled off to see the Louvale Historical District. There doesn’t seem be an actual Louvale as such, but then we saw the three churches. They’re surrounded by a chainlink fence, but the gate was open, so we pulled up into the gate and looked.
As we looked, a car pulled up behind us, and a woman offered to show us around. Her daughter had gotten married in the Antioch Primitive Baptist Church, pictured above, and she had the keys. She explained that this was the Louvale Church Row, unique in the nation. Three churches and an old school, moved to this site and still active (the school is a community center). The buildings are immaculate, and the Antioch church was elegantly simple. And the acoustics were quite live! I’d love to perform there. (I just discovered that there’s a Historical Marker Database! Woot!)
Finally we made it home and I was able get out to the labyrinth to install my purchase from Colquitt:
Yes, the Apollo Belvedere, a foot-high bronze. For those who don’t know already, here is the skinny on the whole Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic. I hadn’t really been searching for avatars of these two forces, but when I saw this—and the price was right—I had to have it.
Now I need a bronze Dionysus. This is the only even halfway well-known one I might look for, but it seems almost tame, kind of Apollonian. So I just might go for the Barberini Faun. That’s Dionysian.
I’m posting this a day late because I was out of town during the evening.
Spent the morning finishing up the herb garden. After the Revolution, I will always buy exactly the correct number of bags of mulch. I will not have to return to the store to buy more, and neither will I have two bags left over after I have done so.
Notice the two bags of leftover mulch.
Survivors from last year: rosemary, dill, parsley, chives, and two or three cilantros. New plants: oregano, sage, thyme; arugula, Romaine, Bibb, and red leaf lettuces. Still to come: basil, tarragon, maybe some mint, and lemon verbena.
I made the mistake last year of not mulching, which meant that I spent four hours tilling the place up and then laboriously pulling the grass out by the roots. Two huge piles of detritus to the curb.
Since it rained the night before, the soil in the labyrinth was soft enough to rake through and scatter seed.
I’m a terrible lawn maintainer. When I say “reseeding,” I mean, “scatter some seed onto the raked, slightly disturbed soil and hope for the best.” I do water it, but you’re supposed to till the soil to a depth of 1 to 2 inches, then scatter the seed and rake it under 1/4 inch. Hello?
At this point, I’m hoping the oxalis takes over. It grows like the weed it is, it’s pretty, and it’s soft underfoot.
I had formed the impression that it was going to rain all day on Friday, so I put off all serious work on the cello sonata until then. Oops.
I have at least formed some opinions. I talked about using the chromatic motive as a building block, but I am also considering a cello solo for the second movement; give the pianist a moment to rest the weary fingers before that third movement. And I think I’ve reached a major decision about the third movement, after doing the obsessive listening thing in the van while running errands this week. Currently, there’s this gorgeous rush of sound that kind of blooms forth, then finally calms down to a halt and a calmer midsection.
It has made sense structurally, in that the first 1:20 there’s no place for the audience to breathe. It seemed to be exhausting, and my instincts were to bring all that rush to a close and to provide a more static interlude before picking up the quintuplets in the piano again.
However, what if I didn’t do that? What if, at the 1:20 mark, I gave the spheres another spin and kept us going through yet another rushing passage, building and building until the whole thing just explodes in ecstasy? I can keep that interlude material for another piece. (Yes, I already have notes on a second cello sonata, including the AFO sketch Labyrinth in Snow.)
Comments?
I didn’t blog yesterday, because by the time I got inside, showered, cooked dinner, etc., the intertubes were clogged. They were still clogged this morning. This is the first chance I’ve gotten to catch up.
Yesterday, I rooted out the old grass in the herb garden. That took all morning and half the afternoon, but it’s now beautiful: stripped back and tilled, ready for new stuff. I was ruthless in pulling out old plants that were puny. Circle of life, etc., etc.
In the later afternoon, I moved back to the labyrinth, meaning to till the bare patches and reseed the whole thing. We found some grass seed that swears it’s for “deep shade.” I’m going to mix that with some fast-growing stuff, and hopefully by the Equinox we’ll have green lushness again.
However, the bare patches of soil were rock hard. This is part of the problem, that the topsoil I used had little organic matter in it, and had enough clay to turn to brick if left to its own devices. You would think that six different plantings of grass would have provided plenty of dead organic material, not to mention all the mulch-mowed leaves over the three years, but you would be mistaken.
I finally had to take a hoe and just chop little dents in the thing. I gave up about halfway, resolving to wait until it rains tonight and try again on Friday or Saturday when the rain has softened the earth a bit. If not, I’ll water the whole thing and proceed from there.
No work on the cello sonata, although I have decided to go download the slow movements to Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites and study them a bit. It wouldn’t be bad to have a solo slow movement.
Today, I ran a gazillion errands: mulch, hardy herbs and lettuces, a VGA adapter for the iPads at school (so students can project their work onto the smartboard), etc. While waiting for the Apple store to open, I ducked into Barnes & Noble and browsed the art books.
Andy Goldsworthy. (Also here.)
First, some images of his stuff, in case you’re too lazy to explore his website.
You get the idea. Gorgeous stuff, and he works only with the natural materials to hand: no nails, no glue, no high tech monkey business.
Anyway, I came across this book:
Ooh. Also Ah. Some gorgeous (and massive) stuff, newer than in the books of his works that I already own. (That was a hint.)
It triggered some thinking about the northpoint of the labyrinth. The element of north is earth, and I’ve done a small work there in the bank:
It’s vaguely yonic, with the bare earth opening in it. Not very defined, and the problem is that you can’t see it really from anywhere but standing right over it in the outer circuit.
You see the problem. The other points are clearly visible from anywhere in the labyrinth, and especially from the center.
So I’m thinking I need to pull an Andy Goldsworthy on the northpoint. I could construct something past the yonic pile against the fence, or put something there right at the border, something that stands. This requires some meditation.
I do have this stone:
It’s in the upper lot, next to where the “dance patio” is planned. It’s actually the first bit of “mythic landscaping” I did in the yard, years and years ago. I’m now thinking it needs to move to a place of importance, and stand there at the northpoint like the standing stone it is.
Any comments?
In other news, I have played with the southpoint in recent days:
It’s more impressive than it looks.
I think I’m going to force myself to write every day this week.
Today was the first day of the school system’s winter break. Weather was pleasant, most pleasant in the afternoon, and I took advantage of that, as I will describe in a moment.
This break kind of sneaked up on me. We had the week off in January because of the ice, and there’s been all the excitement of getting the iPads in and getting them up and running, plus other distractions, and I mostly forgot that I was about to have a whole week off with no real responsibilities. At the eleventh hour last week, so to speak, I decided on a couple of tasks I might work on.
One of course is the cello sonata. I have avoided working on it, because I have no real ideas for the second movement. So this week will be dedicated to straining out stuff that’s awful. Like horrific. Like you will never hear it.
Of course there are things to do around the house, so I made a list. On Saturday I raked out the labyrinth and tidied it up for a Lichtenbergian gathering. I need to write about that over on the Lichtenbergian site.
Today I raked the front yard and did some maintenance on the landscaping across the front, clearing out the dead stems and stuff so that the green can burst forth, which it is already beginning to do. I put off truly revamping the herb garden, but I also cut back all the dead stuff and pulled up plants past their prime. And trimmed that rosemary bush! Why is it that the herbs you rarely use grow like weeds?
I finished reading Wolf Hall, which is an amazing, amazing book. It’s a novelization of the career of Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII, and it’s a dazzler. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It does not cover his entire life, stopping at a significant moment, so perhaps there will be a sequel. I’d be delighted.
I’m also determined this week to meditate more seriously. I went to the labyrinth and sat in the sun and meditated for ten minutes. I was not very successful, too much brainbuzz going on, but it’s a start.
I also decided I would use the labyrinth as a place to focus my thoughts on the cello sonata. I retrieved my music moleskine and walked the labyrinth for about an hour, forcing myself to imagine music and to transcribe it. This is not my usual working method of course. Normally I must have the keyboard and computer in front of me, or I get nothing done.
Today I forced myself to pull the music from inside. I was relatively successful, filling a page in the tiny notebook with sketches that might actually work.
The problem is that I have planned the second movement to be very, very static, without the cantabile of the singing cello, and how do you sing that to yourself as you pace the labyrinth? If your melodic line, such as it is, is merely half-steps or repeated notes, then you have to start thinking about texture, about pauses/silence, about other structural assets you might deploy.
So that was useful. Weather permitting, I shall attempt this strategy all week. I shall try not to input it into the computer until Friday. Let’s see how this works.
And now, off to Masterworks Chorale.
It has not escaped my notice that when conservatives put forth plans to fix our public schools, they do not involve actually fixing the public schools. More and more standardized testing, charter schools, or vouchers: which of these involves actually taking a failing school—and let’s just point to an honest-to-goodness failing school in some inner city somewhere—and solving the problems it faces in providing a free and appropriate education to the young minds trapped there?
I have a problem with that.
In other news, my media center has been undergoing a complete technological facelift.
I’ve always stayed ahead of the curve on the technology thing, all the way back to the Apple ][e’s that Alan Wood bought me for the media center in the old East Coweta High. I made the technology readily available to the students and trained them how to use it, even to program in AppleBasic. I myself, as I’m sure I’ve said around here somewhere, programmed a word processor, a card catalog printing program, and an overdue fines/notice program that everyone in the county used until the state automated us in the late 1980s.
For the last ten years, the school system has declined to purchase Apple Macintosh computers, for reasons which we will not go into here. As the years slipped by, all the elementary schools (including mine) began to divest themselves of their iMacs, the old candy-colored winners from the 90s. And they all came to me, because I refused to give them up.
For one thing, they still ran, and they were still more reliable than all the crappy Dells flooding the county. For another, I was still able to use HyperCard (‡‡‡) to create some really useful educational tools. And finally, while other media centers might have six look-up stations, I had twenty-six. Woof!
However, a decade is a decade, and the poor things began to wheeze and complain about the bulky internet pages they were having to deal with. So I began to campaign for new computers. Two years ago, after holding my breath and turning blue, I was finally awarded six new iMacs, the first instructional Macs in a regular school setting in forever.
So I began to campaign for more. I was able to demonstrate to the powers that be how well they integrated into the network, give or take a few hurdles set up by the IT Crowd themselves due to the nature of the insecure network of PCs they have to manage.
To make an uninteresting story short, I got the money for two new iMacs from our PTO, plus a new printer, which was necessitated by the death of my old Apple LaserPrinter 16/600, after eleven years of solid service. The iMacs came last week, and the printer came yesterday.
But wait, there’s more: we were suddenly able to use some Title I money to purchase twelve iPads. I will soon have two instructional computers for each of my six tables. This should be interesting, given the real power of the things—and their real limitations. It would have been nice, for example, to have known about the money for the iPads before I ordered a new printer, because they will immediately print to an AirPrint-compatible printer, of which there are currently maybe eight, all made by Hewlett-Packard.
Oh well. I don’t think that’s something I get to complain about, having twenty Apple computers at my disposal.
However, there is something very sad about unplugging those trusty little iMacs for the last time and lugging them over to the wall, to be disposed of. And I had to say a few words over the LaserPrinter. I felt like a criminal pulling the plug on it.
Now that I’m slowly returning to the Land of the Drinking (my stomach issues have largely prevented the consumption of any alcohol) I’ve been playing around with some cocktails. At the moment, I’m experimenting with apple juice, my recent liquid of choice.
I’m not sure about this one. I’m halfway through my first attempt, and it may be a bit cloying. I’ll adjust tomorrow and try again if necessary.
YELLOW FAIRY
1/2 oz. Galliano
3 oz. apple juice
2 drops absinthe
Shake the Galliano and apple juice with ice; strain into martini glass. Add the drops of absinthe.
This weekend interviews/auditions for the 2011 Governor’s Honors Program begin. I’m once again in charge of the theatre interviews at Pebblebrook High School. I was asked also this year to corral and confirm the interviewers, and if no one backs out between now and Saturday morning, I will have the full complement of 35, which is a first for several years.
I have applied to teach either Theatre or CommArts this summer, and I’m adamant that I don’t care which. It’s been kind of fun to have both Jobie and Mike desire me. Of course, there’s no guarantee I will be offered a position since I took last summer off, but honey, please. Does that make me nervous? Yes.
I should write a post about the coursework I’ve planned for each department. Maybe later.