A list of books

Posted on by Dale

My mother-in-law called yesterday and asked me to put together a list of “25 books you should have read before graduating high school,” for the guidance of her younger grandchildren. Always wishing to avoid the appearance of didacticism, as St. Paul might have better said, I have renamed this list “25 books you’ll have fun reading before you graduate.”

This list can contain anything, from Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter. So, what are your nominations?

Here are my first thoughts:

  • Huckleberry Finn and/or Tom Sawyer
  • Harry Potter
  • at least some of the Sherlock Holmes stories
  • Feed

What about the heavies, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, 1984?

24 hour challenge #6

Posted on by Dale

from Terry, 1-581-2, which gives us:

And spread the plague of gold and blood abroad:

That’s line 287 of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life.”

Mercy. What am I to do with that?

5/25/09, 7:13 am

24 hour challenge #6, “The Plague of Gold and Blood,” for Terry: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

Everyone is still asleep around here, so I’ve opted for a bassoon version instead of my usual bawling. In fact, I’ve gone back and added a bassoon version to all of the pieces so far, for those who want to hear the music without my personal interference.

I’m intrigued by the way these pieces get written. Since I’m not spending a lot of time on any of them, I’m going with the first impulse and then reshaping that as the minutes tick by. That’s one reason you’ve heard a lot of clichéd writing: I’m just going with the obvious. In this one, for example, the “Pines of the Appian Way” kind of ostinato is pretty hackneyed; the orientalism of the right-hand is kind of surprising, since the poem is about the depredations of Western culture, but there you go.

Anyway, I’ll try to get the vocal version done later. I’m now up to twelve requests. It seems as if no matter where I am in the process, I’m only half done. It’s also occurred to me that I will probably have to pull back on all of this when I leave for Valdosta.

24 Hour Challenge #5

Posted on by Dale

from Aditya, 4-594-27:

That thou mays’t know mee and I’ll turne my face.

That’s the last line of John Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1603: Riding Westward.”

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/24/09, 4:45 pm

24 hour challenge #5, “I’ll Turne My Face,” for Aditya: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

This one’s not very interesting, just a ripoff of late English Renaissance music, and very much a fragment of that. Competent, and for me, that’s doing good, but not inspired. Sorry, Adi: send me another challenge and maybe we’ll get lucky next time.

24 hour challenge #4

Posted on by Dale

from Emily, 4-332-17:

And I thought; this is their day,
how it breaks for them!

From “Epithalamion/Wedding Dawn,” by Michael Dennis Brown.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/24/09, 9:18 am

24 hour challenge #4, “How It Breaks for Them,” for Emily: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

The worst part of this project is having to hear my voice. I’m never warmed up, and I sound awful. That’s OK, I think the vocal lines are fine and would only sound better with a real voice singing them.

Anyway, this one is short and sweet, very sweet. No apologies for the unsophisticated approach to the very real sentiment of the poem.

So, four pieces down, and four more to go as of yesterday afternoon. I’m sure there will be more, which is good. I am actually enjoying this (except for the singing part.)

24 hour challenge #3

Posted on by Dale

from Mike, 2-777-22, which gives us:

… I dance a
clubfoot’s waltz, my legs driven by horsemen,
bones hounded by lust.

Thank you, Mike! That’s ll. 20-22 from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 15,” by Nathaniel Mackey.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/23/09, 9:46 am

Well, that was fast. I must have been inspired or something.

24 hour challenge #3, “I Dance a Clubfoot’s Waltz,” for Mike: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

I really like the quartet. The vocal line I’ll have to grow used to, although the actual line “bones hounded by lust” I think is effective.

I just learned with this piece that I can record my voice in Finale, which is definitely easier to follow the score with these tricky rhythms. That cuts out using GarageBand in the middle. Now if Finale would export an mp3, I’d be down to one piece of software.

24 hour challenge #2

Posted on by Dale

from Marc, 3-751-20, which boils down to:

‘Clay Boy, you never saw
some little old gal
get all hotted up
with one of those mean low-down
Gospel choruses?’

Lines 16-20 of Paris Leary’s “Love Lifted Me.”

This is going to be tough, because clearly this calls for some mimicry, and I have a Shubian shoot tonight. I’m hereby defining “24 hours” as “midnight on the following day.”

I have actually read this poem (my sources for this project are huge thick books; I haven’t read all of them) and love it. It’s a kind of narrative, which suggests to me treating this passage in a kind of operatic way, i.e., accompaniment with loosely fitting vocal line on top.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/22/09, 4:05 pm

24 hour challenge #2, “Gospel Choruses,” for Marc: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with this one. A live performance would have tenutos placed over mean and low-down, but amazingly, those are not built into Finale. They’re not even mentioned in the manual. Incidentally, I am not singing a wrong note on Clay. That’s as written. It just sounds wrong.

By the way, I now have four more challenges. I’ll get to them as soon as I can. Notice I never said that this was a daily 24-hour challenge. I promise I’m not cheating by thinking about these before I post them and set the clock ticking.

Labyrinth, 5/20/09

Posted on by Dale

After nearly two weeks, the seed for the Irish moss had produced nothing, so I broke down and got more actual plants. These didn’t look exactly like the plants I had already planted. It will be interesting to see whether they blend or not.

I got a whole flat of 10 plants and used five of them in the center of the labyrinth:

I actually split the plants and spread them out in the channels of the vesica. I have five more and may plant them over at the entrance to the gentlemen’s loo.

24 hour challenge #1

Posted on by Dale

Wow, that didn’t take long. Turff, who has made lurking a point of pride, was first off the mark with 4-872-22, which produced the first line of P. J. Kavanagh’s “November the First”:

A long farewell:

See you tomorrow. (I’ll post the results here.)

5/21/09, 4:27 pm

24 hour challenge #1, “A long farewell,” for Turff: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

My singing is quite awful. That’s OK, so is the piece. Everybody does understand these are going to be fragments of fragments, right?

Some new challenges

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been inspired by Mike’s 24 Hour Toon venture, so I’m going to set myself a challenge, more about which in a moment.

The other challenge which I’ve set myself is to fill a couple of pages of sketches of people’s mouths. (I thought about leading off with some statement about sketching “body parts,” just to set your filthy minds in motion, but why waste the time?) Those Lichtenbergians who’ve had their reference photos taken will be my subject.

After I do mouths, I’ll move on to noses, eyes, etc. I may do chests or thighs.

OK, my 24-Hour challenge.

  1. Pick a number between 1 and 5.
  2. Pick a number between 1 and 1082.
  3. Pick a number between 1 and 40.
  4. Email those three numbers to me, in order: 2-563-24, for example.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I have selected five books of poetry from my shelves:

  • The Best American Poetry 1999 (2000)
  • A Controversy of Poets: an anthology of contemporary American poetry (1965)
  • Master Poems of the English Language (1966)
  • Poems for the Millennium: the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry, vol. II (1998)
  • A Year in Poetry: a treasury of classic and modern verses for every date on the calendar (1995)

Those are not in order 1-5, by the way. Your three numbers will give me: a volume, a page number, and a line number. If the page number or line number exceeds the number of pages or lines, I’ll do the modular math thing until I get to a number which is contained in the volume/page. A couple of the books have essays interspersed; if the page number is within an essay, I’ll move to the first page of poetry after the essay.

And…?

I’ll post the sender and the line of poetry (perhaps the complete sentence, if I’m in the mood) and within 24 hours, I will compose a brief setting of that line for baritone voice, i.e, me, and post it here. I am not going to compose an entire piece, merely that one line, for voice and piano (or if I’m really inspired, a string quartet).

If all of you email me at once, I’ll take them in order as I get them.

Let’s see how far I get.

Labyrinth, 5/19/09

Posted on by Dale

I finished the new look for the southpoint lighting fixture:

It turned out very nice.

I have been nonplussed by how fast the grass grows in the labyrinth. I have to mow it every four days or so:

And it has rained so incessantly that it’s hard to keep up. The current forecast calls for one more day of sun today, then a week and a half of rain!

I also dug up as many daffodil bulbs as I could find yesterday, awfully hard to do through ivy, especially when the leaves have all but died off, and planted the remaining ferns, ghost painted ferns. I neglected to take a photo.