Moral thermometer

Posted on by Dale

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*?

Posted on by Dale

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

Posted on by Dale

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.)

Snow threatening

Posted on by Dale

For the past several years, whenever we’ve been threatened with snow, I have stood alone in my hopes that school is not canceled.

My reason was simple enough: I usually had a very small number of days between the last day of post-planning and the first day of GHP, and I had no desire at all to have to sit in my media center twiddling my thumbs for any of those days.

This summer of course I have planned to sit in my labyrinth and drink paint, perhaps wearing some sandals and a possibly new Utilikilt. And so my attitude towards this impending snow day(s) is more in line with the popular mindset. Let it snow!

To that end, I stopped by the Kroger this afternoon and am fully prepared to tough it out by making Cheeseburger Soup, Yucatan Chicken Lime Soup, and/or Leek & Potato Soup, plus any number of breads, starting with Cuban Bread and moving on through French Bread and Whole Wheat Bread. If pushed I can make brownies, with or without walnuts, or a astounding variety cookies.

We can be snowbound until Monday and I will not suffer in the least.

Allow me to say that for me, “snowbound” means “there’s some snow on the ground.” I don’t get out in the stuff. It’s cold and wet. All of human development has been towards this point, i.e., that we don’t have to get out into the cold and wet stuff. We have constructed a civilization that is warm and dry, and that is where I shall be.

Feel free to join me.

Labyrinth: input requested

Posted on by Dale

Here we have a Natural Bamboo Reed Fence…

…available here.

This would be to give the labyrinth a little more privacy than it has at the moment, particularly the men’s loo. I think I’d like it better than some of the other options, i.e., vinyl slats woven through the chain link, because it’s more natural and would weather more interestingly.

What is the consensus of the habitués?

Labyrinth, 12/30/09

Posted on by Dale

I went out to prep the labyrinth yesterday afternoon for an evening with Craig, lighting all the candles as dusk approached so that I wouldn’t have to do it later.

I got to the men’s loo, and suddenly realized…

…there was no privacy. My neighbors had had all the shrubbery/underbrush cut down on their side of the fence. I don’t think it’s the Ellis’s exactly, they are not at home. I think it’s my other backyard neighbor, because all the growth on his side of the back fence is gone too. I think probably he did the Ellis side of the yard as a favor to them. (The dog pen in the area right there also appears to have been pulled out. I’d really like to buy that small piece of property. I’d really like to buy the shed as well, maybe have a studio or something in there.)

Here’s a view of the firepit area.

Well. One feels naked. As it were.

So now I’m in the market for artistic/nice ways to obscure the view here. More bamboo, clearly, although that won’t work along the western/back fence. Climbing vines of some kind, perhaps.

The floor is open for discussion.

Lichtenbergian Goal #6

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian Goal #6: in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

Right. This one may be the hardest one of all.

First of all, it requires time. It’s all fine and good to say that the more you produce, the more likely it is that you’ll produce something of value in the midst of all the crap, or that “10,000 hours of practice” blah blah blah and you get good at whatever it is you’re doing. But producing a lot of crap also requires that you have the time to do it, if you’re going to be mindful of what you’re doing.

And that’s the problem anyway, isn’t it? Lichtenbergians don’t really procrastinate, we just don’t have time available to us to sit down and work. Just now, for example, I was stopped in the middle of a sentence by the appearance of my lovely first wife with marching instructions for my day off. This is in my upstairs study, where she never comes, at a time when normally she should be at work. And that’s just for a quickie morning blogpost, never mind the ELP or the symphony.*

Real life intervenes. Leaf by Niggle. Family and friends. Nine-to-five. We wait for a block of time that never comes, and we keep pushing our hearts’ desires forever ahead of us, out of reach.

, , ,

* Polemics aside, I am bound in honesty to say that my lovely first wife is not a stumbling block to anything I need to accomplish. Quite the contrary: she is amazingly supportive in almost never demanding my presence when I’m trying to get something done. Just had to say that.

Clarification

Posted on by Dale

When I said I had a “dread feeling” about getting started on A Perfect Life in the previous post, I didn’t mean that I have some silly premonition that I’m running out of time to do this. I meant that I have a real dread of the messiness, the incoherence of how I think I need to approach the project.

I have a vague image of what a finished version might look/read like, but of course I cannot sit down and start writing that finished version. First of all, I only have a vague image. Duh.

Second of all, there is no second of all. I only have a vague image of what should be in the book (“Everything!” is the only answer I can get out of the Muse), and absolutely no idea of where to begin.

So I must simply begin. Open the book and start writing about my life and how I live it, here in Newnan, on College Street, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

How I wake up and get ready. What College Street looks like, winter, spring, summer, fall. My study. Driving through downtown. Walking through downtown. Being married. Being a father. What I wear. What I don’t wear. Front porches, their decline and fall. School. Parks. The theatre. Lichtenbergians. Lichtenbergianism. The ELP. William Blake’s Inn. The changes in all of the above over the years.

“Everything!” says the Muse.

And that fills me with dread. My stomach churns and my shoulders tense up even as I type this.

“Everything!”