A revelation!

Posted on by Dale

Get me the President on the phone. I’ve just had an insight that’s bloody brilliant in re: negotiating with our new BFF, the Republicans, over the stimulus package.

I am reminded of Green Acres, that masterpiece of American absurdism, whenever Oliver Douglas went to haggle with Mr. Haney. Oliver would behave in a rational manner, starting with a low bid, and then when Mr. Haney countered with something higher, attempting to meet Mr. Haney somewhere in the middle.

Except it never worked like that. Every time Oliver would raise his offer, Mr. Haney would respond by raising his. Rather than the paradigm of honorable compromise that Oliver was following, Mr. Haney saw that he didn’t have to give anything away because his opponent was willing to give up what he had started with.

This is in fact what is happening now with the Republicans and the stimulus package. President Obama stated his goals with the stimulus package, and the Republicans immediately made a counteroffer: more tax cuts. The President offers to cut taxes, the Republican counter with “no contraceptives!” And so it goes.

Instead, the Current President should enter that room with the Republicans this afternoon and deal with them like Lisa Douglas: they say to ditch the contraceptives, he returns with raised taxes. They respond with OK, you can keep the contraceptives. He responds with draconian regulation of Wall Street. They say, OK, Clinton-level income tax rates, but that’s our final offer.

You see how that works? When you’re dealing with Mr. Haney, you have to be Lisa Douglas.

Hm. Haney. Cheney. Mere coincidence? I think not.

Random thoughts

Posted on by Dale

Today (Jan. 27) is the birthday of both Mozart and Lewis Carroll. I’m setting my iTunes now to celebrate. (Yes, I could celebrate Alice on iTunes, had I actually uploaded David del Tredici’s In Memory of a Summer’s Day, one of his several pieces based on the Alice books. It opens with sweeping strings and a wind machine, a thrilling effect.)

Have you ever noticed that a person who drives 35 mph in a 45 mph zone will maintain that speed when he hits the 25 mph school zone? From this we are allowed to conclude that such a person is senile or drunk or both.

The rightwing noise machine is in full roar:

  • making up Congressional Budget Office reports
  • making up Al Qaeda operatives released from Guantanamo (61 is the magic number, pulled from its ass by the Pentagon, and let us not forget the actual releasees are prisoners freed by the Previous Administration because it had completely botched their interrogation/imprisonment)
  • stating flatly that terrorists are going to be let go in the middle of our fair country (we need to invest in companies that make rubber bedsheets and Depends, apparently)
  • stating flatly that an extension of Medicaid benefits in these troubled times for the victims of the PA’s policies is nothing more than pork spending by Pelosi on contraceptives (because if you’ve lost your job, you should not be having sex!)
  • stating flatly that the stimulus package won’t benefit anyone for years and years and years (despite an actual CBO report that says the opposite)
  • and in trivial matters, comparing the cost of Bush’s last inauguration minus the cost of security to that of Obama’s plus the cost of security

There’s more, there always is, but it’s too wearisome. I am curious to see whether the public will fall for the terror!+egregious spending!!+people-not-like-you-and-me having sex!!!! smokescreens this time. I work with some who do so only too gladly, and the number of media people who parrot these lies without correction is very disturbing. Still, I have hope.

The dumbing down of our schools… not

Posted on by Dale

I just spent 30 minutes teaching 2nd graders what a database was, how one works, how they use at least two nearly every day (the online library catalog and the Accelerated Reader™ quiz software), how I built and use one to keep track of AR™ Point Club tags, and we even built one based on a test question they had had.

Yes, that’s right, we’re testing 8-year-olds on what a database is and when to use one.

For the record, they were fascinated by my lecture/demo and a couple even asked how they might build one to keep track of stuff in their lives. I didn’t even have to prompt them on how we might sort the little cards I had them fill out: they were right on it with “last name,” “homeroom,” “birthday,” or even “homeroom THEN last name.”

This has been a message for those who are convinced that schools have gotten worse since they wrestled with Think & Do workbooks when they were in 2nd grade.

Creating

Posted on by Dale

I worked for an hour and a half this morning with some music, and despite my best efforts to piddle with fragments, no pressure, I ended up solving a couple of problems with the first movement of the Symphony. Nothing to share yet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Short version: the main motif has been reimagined as an opening fanfare/intro, and what used to be the B theme is now the A theme, since it opened with the same notes.

And as I am typing this, it occurs to me that a further part of a solution to the thematic material is to re-declare the key of the thing. I’ve been thinking of it as in G major, but it might suit my purposes better to have it in C major, if my purposes are defined as maintaining the actual notes of the main motif (hereafter known as the Motif) as the opening of the theme.

There are a couple of reasons I don’t want to do this. One is the fourth movement, which is in G. Yes, I know, it’s a disaster and I might as well go rewrite it in C. (It actually opens in C minor, so the transition to C major would actually be easier.)

Another reason is that everyone’s first symphony is in C major. And almost no one writes in G major. Actually, almost no one writes in anything major these days, because it just sounds so damned cheerful and we all know the music can’t be serious if it’s cheerful. At any rate, I’m unreasonably stubborn about this. But something tells me I’m going to take the easy way out.

Yesterday, we went to the High Museum to see the First Emperor exhibit. Go, if you have the opportunity. It’s truly magnificent. There’s something awe-inspiring about the whole thing: the artistry that the culture brought to everything it touched, the craftsmanship, and above all, the incredible hubris of the project. The emperor in question, having united the Warring States under Qin, began immediately to construct this enormous tomb from which he could continue his glorious and blessed reign after death. It’s like 27 square miles of buried stuff: larger-than-life-size soldiers, yes, but also musicians, animals, acrobats, carts, banquets, temples, palaces–it’s literally an entire city for the emperor’s eternal use. (The half-size cart, which surprised me, because everything else was larger than life, was actually positioned next to a ramp, so the emperor could actually be driven up and out to travel around his domain.)

Equally impressive, though, were the two exhibits in the lower level, one of the sculptures of Ulysses Davis, and the other of works on paper from the folk art collection.

Ulysses Davis was an barber in Savannah, black, who carved amazing sculptures. Especially interesting to me was the way that he developed from very literal carvings and bas-reliefs to highly symbolic and imaginative pieces. He made a creative journey that trained artists can only pray for. He did it through the work, of course, although he did apparently study books on African art on his own. Follow the work, follow the work.

The drawings from the folk art collection is all “outsider” stuff, and like most of the genre is hallucinogenic in the extreme. I’ve never read of any of these artists ingesting entheogenic substances, yet there they are, acid trips and mushroom journeys, all on paper.

Many were schizophrenic and that’s usually credited with their bizarre visions, but having read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, my question is whether they are actually perceiving the world visually in ways that the rest of us have to take drugs to see.

The complexity of their visions is astounding. Can any trained artist achieve this? Part of the awful beauty of the work is the un-academic clumsiness, which the artists apparently recognized at some level because there is always a compensation in the balance of the composition to make up for the lack of draftsmanship, perspective, etc.

The very existence of the works is one proof of the evolutionary nature of artistic creativity. Two drawings struck me in this regard. I don’t remember anything about the artist other than his being male. They were two large pieces of drawing paper, and the drawings were pencil. There were straight lines drawn in regular graphite, with tiny little Klee-like, or perhaps Tanguy-like, blodgets extending from either side of the lines. These blodgets were all red or blue. Very nervous, frantic pieces, and their titles were like “Demon House,” very ominous.

It occured to me as I examined the drawings that he must have used one of those double-ended pencils that have red lead on one end and blue on the other. Remember those? Do they even make them any more? I remember thinking how neat they were when I used to see them in Woolworth’s over in the old Eastgate shopping center (where the Justice Center is now), and I know I owned at least one in my childhood.

Without knowing anything about the artist, I am imagining that he created these drawings with the only materials available to him. He had no choice about any of it: the paper, the medium, even whether or not to draw, or indeed what to draw. He had to do what he had to do. (Lacunans, refer to my piece from last week.)

The power of all the works in this exhibit was overwhelming to me, for some reason. As I start/continue my sketching/painting, I would love to produce something like these: simple, complex, untrained, chthonic in its source. The irony is that with my music, my lack of training is a real stumbling block, yet with my art, what little training I have will derail my ambitions.

Back to work, kind of

Posted on by Dale

With a clear evening for the first time in a long time, I did a little tidying up (tidying up being a time-honored Lichtenbergian tactic); changed one thing in the GHP video and exported, DVD’d, and burned three copies; had supper; and finally, finally, made myself sit down, turn off the web and email, and put some notes on paper.

I was not very successful. I returned to the opening theme of the symphony and played with that for a while. I played with some chord structures for a while. I played with a few countermotives for a while. I looked at my Fragmentary Exercises and plopped down one measure that might pass as a half-assed attempt.

I wasn’t wearing a hole in that psychic wall, I was just wearing out. So I stopped. But at least I got something on paper, whether it’s worth anything or not.

In other news, I took one of those CDs sitting in a stack on the left-hand side of my table and have been listening to it for a couple of days in the car. This one is the untitled Mercury Living Presence re-release of Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra playing some mid-century American greats.

Meh.

Sorry, none of it does anything for me. It’s all very daring for its time: Colin McPhee’s faux-gamelan Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra; Roger Sessions’ The Black Maskers, with its crashing seconds and clusters; Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune, which has passages of great lyrical beauty, which he insisted on undermining with bizarrely acerbic passages of snark.

But none of it sticks in my head, even after two days of listening. It just registers as so much fashionable claptrap from the 1930s. Into the giveaway pile it goes.

Next: John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s book of alleged dances. I remember them as being too determinedly “modern,” as if Adams was trying desperately to show the musical establishment that he could resist the siren call of tonality. We’ll see.

As savvy as the Obama team has been about the 21st century, I find it incredible that they didn’t have the John Williams piece performed at the inauguration all ready to roll out on iTunes by 12:01 pm, January 20. I know I said I wasn’t buying anything at least until June, and I haven’t, but I would break my vow in a heartbeat if it were available on iTunes.

An approving look back

Posted on by Dale

After yesterday’s epic cleaning/therapy, it was serendipitous that the first thing iTunes chose to play this morning was Am Südpol, denkt man, es ist heiß. This was the “penguin opera” I wrote back in 2004 for a competition for the opera company in Cologne, Germany.

The libretto was based on a popular German children’s book about penguins who live for opera and the annual visit of the Opera Boat. It was a totally engaging little story, with Scene 1 introducing us to Uncle Otto, his niece (who hates opera, she says), and the young boy penguin; Scene 2 with the opera company as they squabble over roles in La Traviata; Scene 3 in the opera house and the hilarious opera-gone-wrong; and Scene 4 back on the ice, with young Lottie recognizing how much she loves both opera and the boy penguin.

The big finale is all about how Musik fills our lives and is a huge gift, even at the South Pole. Since I began the opera with a Latin overture (keeping with the title’s erroneous claim that it’s hot at the South Pole), I made the finale a bumptious calypso number, ending with everyone onstage dancing in sombreros and sunglasses passed up to them by the ever-rebellious orchestra.

I say all this to say that listening to it again this morning, I was delighted with my work, the entire piece. (I didn’t win the competition, needless to say, but boy did I learn a lot.) The finale is especially engaging, and I offer it to you here: Am Sudpol finale

What’s my point? It was a boost to my self-image, another little nudge to get back to work on something, anything, because when I’m at the top of my form, I’m quite good.

(We will ignore for the time being the flipside, that I’ll never write anything that good again.)

Punishment

Posted on by Dale

There remains to be decided where to put George W. Bush.

If I were a powerful liberal blogger, I would feel compelled to link to news stories which documented my decisions here, but I’m not, so I won’t. You will just have to accept this as the last ravings on eight years of hell.

And so, on to hell, specifically Dante’s Inferno, where he has generously categorized all the places one can end up if one is a) non-Christian, and b) unrepentant. For my purposes here, which is chiefly anticipatory schadenfreude, we’ll just plop George W. Bush down in one of the Circles rather than somewhere in Purgatory, where I’m sure a just and loving God would allow him entrance. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Unlike Dante Alighieri, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up.

Circle 9: Traitors

Well, of course. W would easily gain entrance to Round 2, traitors to homeland. Yes, his apologists will whine that he thought he was doing the right thing, but you know what? So did Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, and they’re down at the bottom in Round 3. W has betrayed everything this country has stood for to the rest of the world, and he could easily find himself up to his neck in ice.

Circle 8: The Fraudulent

Where to begin? Bolgia 10: The Falsifiers? Easy, what with the whole WMD fiasco. No, I do not think for a minute he believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He lied to us. Bolgia 9: Sowers of discord? Heavens, the number of wedge issues used by this man and his cronies to capture the White House in 2001 and especially 2004 have filled several books. Bolgia 8: Fraudulent advisors: maybe more for Cheney and Rove, but I don’t mind letting W keep them company. Bolgia 6: Hypocrites: in case you had any doubts, W has given interviews recently that completely blow his cover on evolution and other key wedge issues. Now that he doesn’t have to pretend the Bible is literally true, he’s pretty open about it. But for the past eight years? You’d think he’d attended Oral Roberts U., which for all the good we’ve gotten out of his Ivy League education, he might as well have. Perhaps it’s simplest to put him Bolgia 5: Corrupt Politicians, and leave it at that.

Circle 7: The Violent

In the inner part of this circle, the Violent against God are bound to burning sands, with a rain of fire making their eternities particularly unpleasant. I’m not sure W qualifies for blasphemy specifically, but I’m pretty sure God cannot be pleased with W’s claim that He was giving W complete instructions on his policies. However, to be submerged in the river of boiling blood with all the other Violent against Neighbors, there can be no doubt. Throw him in!

We can mercifully skip Circle 6: The Heretical, although if you have any thoughts about this, I’d be glad to entertain them.

Circle 5: The Wrathful

Well, yes. Has any man positioned our country as a force of anger in the world as much as George W. Bush? Has any man incited as much hatred for our fellow humans, whether gay or liberal or Muslim? Put him in the swamp with the others.

Circle 4: The Avaricious

Again, no contest. The entire thrust of W’s two terms has been to reward his rich friends, the upper 1% of our population and to abandon the less fortunate to their well-deserved fate. And as for his incredibly immoral spending, taking us from a budget surplus to a record level of debt, he deserves far worse than rolling rocks around.

Again, we can skip Circle 3: The Gluttonous and Circle 2: The Lustful. Whatever else we can lay to his charge, being an overeater or, Pan help us, a satyr were not issues for him. As far as we know. Poor Laura. (If this were a high-powered liberal blog, then the wingnuts would recognize their cue to begin screaming, “But Bill Clinton! Got a blowjob! In the WHITE HOUSE!!~!!@!!!” So you see, it all balances out, doesn’t it?)

Circle 1: Limbo

At last, here, and only here, is where I want to put George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Like this blogger over at DailyKos, I am wary of attempting actually to punish him for his many, many, many crimes against this country. As much as I would love to see him standing in the dock at The Hague, I think a far greater punishment is to consign him to anonymity. Don’t interview him a month from now for 60 Minutes. Don’t give him the microphone the first time an international crisis erupts. Don’t refer to him (sort of like the Republicans at their convention last summer) and don’t mention him.

Instead, refer constantly to our efforts to “reform” and “fix” and “bring back” and “salvage” and “redeem” all the horrible things he did to our country. Let him see the joy in our nation at his departure and in the radical shifts of government and governance we embrace. Let the ideas he based his entire regime upon be reviled and ridiculed, publicly and without rebuttal. Let his name rank with Benedict Arnold and with Herbert Hoover in our nation’s mythos.

And let him live to see it.

Tap dancing

Posted on by Dale

I have not blogged. Sin of omission. And today’s post is a cheat, in effect tap, as the title says, dancing.

Having successfully completed the updating and reconstruction of the GHP parent orientation video (12 minutes of narration over video clips which answer everyone’s FAQ so that I don’t have to), I am now going to clean off my table.

I already wrote a Neo-Futurist monolog for last week’s Lacuna Group work session that was nothing but a catalog of the flotsam and jetsam loading down my desk. Today I’m going to be a little more analytical.

My goal is to clear off the table. Have a clear table. I have not a single inch of clear space. I am blaming this fact for my astonishing lassitude in blogging, in composing, in sketching/painting, in anything. So in the tradition of Wallace Stevens’ scraping down the garden, I begin again. My intent is to pick up an object and deal with it, not putting it down anywhere else, but putting it up or taking some action on it.

Starting at the back right corner, I have uncovered a stack of papers. A program for my brother Ken’s Eagle Scout ceremony, along with some photocopied Archive records regarding Hamilton Lyles, private in Co. B, 14th Georgia Infantry (Confederate) and his death in battles “around Richmond, Virginia.” These go into the trash. They were from my grandmother’s things, and I guess I held on to them thinking that someone might be interested in them. I am not.

Some old school personnel paperwork, no longer relevant. A poster from Auntie Mame. Into the trash.

A sweet note from my wife, apparently on the occasion of leaving the child at college, a rough time for both of us, thanking me for the eighteen years it took to get rid of him. That one will go in a Memorabilia folder in the filing cabinet.

A black folder which I found in the Theatre Tech classroom last summer on my last walkthrough of the campus. It happened to be of a Visual Arts student who I knew was a friend of Galen Honea’s, and so I brought it home and even gave it to Galen to give to the kid. But Galen left it here, and so it’s been sitting on my table. I have now addressed an envelope and stuck the folder in so I can mail it tomorrow.

Various cables that have accumulated. Into the drawer.

Last year’s day-by-day New York Times Crossword Puzzle calendar. Keep handy for boredom purposes.

My iPod shuffle, just waiting for me to use it to exercise again. Set it aside next to the external hard drive.

Next stack: Jury summons for the week of February 9. Put it in my computer satchel.

Pencil/conté crayon/charcoal case. Replace into my paint box.

A clipping from the NYT, November 16, 2008, of a Titian painting:

Venus with an Organist and a Dog. I found the painting to be more than a trifle bizarre and thought I might blog on it. So I’m creating a folder called BLOGGING STUFF, and in it goes. The folder goes into the bookends to the left of the monitor.

Another clipping, a review of a play, Elizabeth Rex, by Timothy Findley. A play that looked as if it might be fun to work on. I already have a folder for that.

And now we see the issues of my task: in going to place the folder on the range of folders behind me, I discover an entire pack of folders dealing with William Blake’s Inn in its international children’s theatre aspect. I take those and consign them to the archival WBI tub.

Another clipping, one of affordable sparkling wines. I’ll have to put that in my billfold to see how many our sommelier at Kroger can offer.

An old issue of Utne Reader. Don’t know why it’s up here, although I suspect it got cleaned off the coffee table downstairs with all the other stuff in the pile: Guilford College Magazine, etc. Off to the “take to the hospital ER” pile. American Theatre: “down to the theatre” pile.

A charming pad of paper entitled “Shit List,” one of those clever things one finds at clever stores and I have no idea why it is in my house. It’s still in its shrink wrap. Toss it in the trash.

Printouts from Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0, used in Lacuna Group. Stick it back in the Lacuna tub.

A printout of an online article on speeding up one’s Mac. I am not going to stop to take care of that now. I must create a dreaded “do next” pile.

An antique German Bible, in fraktur script. The covers have come off, and Ginny wants me to fix it. I have no idea that the thing has any intrinsic value. It’s dated 1881 and has no real inscriptions in it and is rapidly acidifying. But I hesitate to apply bookmending tape to it. To school it goes for mending anyway.

A thank you note from Don Nixon for loaning works of art from our collection to the Centre. Memorabilia or trash?

A CD of Handel’s Fireworks and Water Music. Ironically, iTunes is playing William Basinki’s Watermusic II, a trippy space music album which I’ve grown very fond of. Back on the shelf it goes. Well, technically, back in the stack in front of the shelf it goes. The space in front of my CD shelves was just cleaned out of all kinds of storage tubs that had mysteriously accumulated over the years. Not naming names, but I’m grateful for the floor space so I can actually get to my CD collection.

A “Friends of the Guilford College Library” card, in appreciation for a small donation. I am entitled to all the privileges accruing thereto until March 31. I suppose I should put it in my wallet and then see exactly what privileges I can get away with when we visit in February.

Results of blood work done when I applied for a new life insurance policy. No news there. Into the trash.

We’ve now turned the corner and are working on the area in front of the monitor.

2008 City Ad Valorem Tax Notice. Into the tax folder.

The little attachment that goes on the bottom of your camera so you can put it on the tripod. Back onto the tripod.

The USB microphone I used to voiceover the updated sections of the GHP parent video. Back into the drawer.

A recipe for Yucatan Chicken-Lime Soup which I made on Friday. Ultra-delicious! It’s up in my study because I have entered it into my recipe software. Over to the recycle pile.

Hotel reservations for the first weekend of GHP interviews. Driving instructions to the new locale for the second weekend. Into the GHP folder.

This month’s Visa bill. Next life insurance bill. Over to the finances pile.

Old Guilford student account invoice. Taken care of, into the trash.

The receipt for my drill press. Into the receipts folder.

A pair of reading glasses. Into the drawer.

My mother-of-pearl barrelled fountain pen. It has brown ink in it. It’s been a bit balky, though, which is why it has been hiding on my table. Actually, it should have been in my dresser thingie back downstairs. I need to clean it out, but I’m not stopping to do that right now.

An eBay receipt for one of Ginny’s Christmas presents. All right, this is interesting. The Monday before Christmas, Grayson and I went to lunch downtown, and he was talking about getting his mother a digital picture frame. Somehow this led into a discussion of how cool digital photo coasters would be (triggered by the fact that we own photo coasters, but I haven’t printed any photos to go in them). I whipped out the iPhone and googled “digital photo coaster,” and was stunned to find, offered on eBay, a digital aerial photo of the roller coaster at Lakeside Amusement Park in Roanoake, VA. This was the very same roller coaster that our entire wedding party rode after our reception! I have never pressed that Buy It Now button so hard or so fast.

My Moleskine notebook. Back into my pocket.

The Bush Countdown daily calendar. God be praised.

A notepad with scribblings related to the video clips I used to put together the GHP parent video. Take out those pages, set aside for final jiggering, and put the notebook back in the cabinet. Also the script for same.

A printout of the PDF for Final Cut Express HD Quick Reference. Staple and shelve.

A QuicKeys installation disk, from when I was having issues last week and needed the activation key in order to purchase an upgrade. Back on the shelf, which is a whole other cleanup day.

The small Moleskine notebook that Kevin gave me at the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting as a waste book. It stays on the desk.

The business card of the woman at Amazon Stone on Farmer Industrial who sold me the granite for the center of the labyrinth. I recently used it to email her a photo of the center. I can toss it now.

A Moleskine music notebook. It can go on my drafting table behind me, which also needs clearing off.

A little prismatic kaleidoscope thingie, from one of those Christmas crackers. I think it’s up here because it would make a nice toy of an evening. Over to the nice toys pile.

Another clipping, a play called Animals Out of Paper. Into the play folder.

Bookmarks, sticky notes, and bookplates to use for Book Crossing books. Back over on the shelf.

MacWorld issue. Shelve

Christmas letter from a friend. Trash.

Checkbook. Check.

Dramatists Guild membership invoice. File.

Old lottery tickets, old bills, old receipts. Trash.

A Chick-Fil-A gift card. My GAE membership card, unactivated. Into my wallet.

A VHS tape about polar bears and the DVD I dubbed from it. Back to school.

Moving on to the left of the monitor.

The new book on labyrinths that arrived last week. It’s chock full of mysteries and mathematical coincidences and LIFE-ALTERING INSIGHTS. I just know it is. Down to my bedside reading pile it goes.

The Rider Pest Control bill. Over to the finances pile.

My Lacuna Group notebook. Back over to the Lacuna pile, along with the “what I see when I see us performing eventually” notes we generated last week.

The Masterworks Chorale rehearsal schedule. Back in the folder.

Betty Crocker’s Living with Cancer Cookbook. We’re putting together a set of recipes for Anne Powell to help keep her fed after her chemo sessions. Back to the kitchen.

Bank statement, balanced. Into the records box.

An entire Dining section from the NYT. I wonder why. No clue. Into the trash.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and The Natural Way to Draw. Reference for when I’m sketching. Which hasn’t happened more than once. But it will. Over to the drafting table.

“Hot White Andy,” a booklet-length poem I discovered via YouTube and posted about elsewhere. I ordered it via Amazon.uk. Into the Lacuna tub.

A notepad from downstairs. Back downstairs.

An issue of The Week, open to an art exhibit that I went to look at online. It wasn’t there, but I googled the artist, Tara Donovan, and was very impressed. Into the ER reading pile.

One of the afore-mentioned photo coasters, to remind me to print some photos. Into the school pile, where I have a color printer and photo paper.

A Danish modern tray thingie, used to carry charcoals from the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting fire to my study, before mailing them off to the members in absentia. Downstairs to the back yard.

A receipt for a refund check. A bulk materials price list from Country Gardens. Trash.

Instructions on establishing my email account as an IMAP account, so that my iPhone and computer emails are synced. Into the “do next” pile.

Email about re-registering all my domains (dalelyles.com, graysonlyles.com, masterworkschoralecoweta.org, lichtenbergian.org, lacunagroup.org, and perioddance.org) Taken care of, into the trash.

Two CDs, the transferred version of Aces & Eights. Into the “do next” pile so I can break it up into tracks.

Brochure for Essentially Choral’s 2009 competition. Deadline of Jan. 9, so into the trash it goes.

A statement from Wachovia about this year’s student loan. Really need to share the info with the wife, since she’s the one paying for this year. Hm… “Do next.”

Funny cards and funny postcards, including Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News with Baby Animals. I think I need to send one to Jobie right now.

My Lichtenbergian chalice, holding my coals from the fire. It stays where it is, my eternal non-flame of rebuke.

My lifetime lease on a square foot of Islay, plot no. 332561, obtained by my purchase of a fifth of Laphroaig scotch. It guarantees a yearly rent of one dram of Laphroaig, to be claimed in person. Also, they’ll give me a map to help me locate my plot, and “for the journey to the plot, protective headgear against low-flying GEESE; a thick overcoat to repel the inclement Scottish mist; a lifebelt and anchor to safeguard againt being blown out to sea; a ball of string for securing trouser legs from inquisitive stoats; and a towel for the Leaseholder to dry-off in the event of unwelcome attention from affectionate otters.” Hm. Into the memorabilia folder.

A phone book. Onto the shelf.

Art and intimacy: how the arts began, the prequel to Homo aestheticus, by Ellen Dissanayake, the latter of which I haven’t finished reading, much less the former. Downstairs.

A business card from an old friend. Transferred to Address Book. In fact, a series of business cards. Transferred.

Random notes on music. Trash.

Membership forms/invoices for AARP and ACLU. Trash.

We have finally arrived at the far left of the table. This is a real dead zone, since it’s on the far side of the stairs to the study. All the active stuff gets dumped on the right hand side. The left side is where things go to molder.

A copy of The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program. A humorous bagatelle. Downstairs for reading.

A small paper plate, Santa Claus, obviously carried snacks up here during the holidays. Trash.

Two stacks of CDs:

  • Psalms of David, Heinrich Schütz
  • chamber stuff, Robert Baksa
  • Gnarly Buttons and John’s Book of Alleged Dances, John Adams
  • … and it occurs to me that I’ve already blogged about this stack before. I will now make the effort to transfer one of these each week to my van, where I can listen to them while I drive and hopefully learn more about them.

Another notebook/journal of various musings. It stays where it is, on the left side of the table.

Mr. Lunch Fold and Mail Stationery, a pad of stationery with one of those oh-so-amusing faux-retro designs. I think I bought it to write people with. Sometimes I do that. Back on the shelf with all my other mostly unused stationery.

Some postcards I picked up in Munich and some photos, all of which usually live on the little organizing rack that Ginny gave me for my birthday several years ago. I think I never got them back on there after last summer’s trek back to Newnan from Valdosta. I shall put them there now.

A set of cards for said organizer that I used last summer to organize my efforts to get all the shots I needed for the GHP parent video. Now I remember that’s why the photos and postcards were not in their usual place. It worked, for the most part. I didn’t lose any major shots at all, and some of them were time-critical, moving in and convocation among them. Since they’re double-sided, I can recycle them for other GHP uses next summer. (I keep track of issues I’m dealing with, for example.)

A plain brown folder with a printout from the very first official Lichtenbergian Assignment, the one about the nuclear waste repository. I think I’ll leave it in the moldering pile.

A CD with one of the incremental recordings I always did of William Blake’s Inn. It goes in the big CD wallet with all the other incremental recordings.

A printout of Mike Funt’s “new” version of A Day in the Moonlight. Back in the pile.

A fragment of a very old piece, a setting of Psalm 100. I don’t seem to have the entire manuscript, and I’m not sure it’s more than a curiosity, not worth reviving. Never performed, of course.

A collection of documents: a printout of an editorial in the NYT back in 2006, by one Edward Tenner, purporting to show that Google has made us dumber. His argument was based on a 2001 study of education grad students in Tel Aviv, who were asked to find on the internet a picture of the Mona Lisa, the text of David Coppefield or Robinson Crusoe, and a recipe for apple pie with a photo, no time limit. They ::gasp:: couldn’t do it!!! ZOMG! Google will eat our brains!!! Except Google was barely in existence in 2001; the grad students used category-driven catalogs like the old Yahoo to do their search. I set two classes of 3rd-graders the exact same task, and of the 38 students, 24 found all three items in less than 30 minutes, without training and without any assistance, other than to explain the difference between the magician David Copperfield and Dickens’ novel. My conclusion? My 3rd-graders must be smarter than grad students at the University of Tel Aviv, sheerly through my teaching. (I actually went to the UTA website and found the original study. It’s perfectly valid, for a Stone Age report.) Into a folder for future reference.

A sketch for a theme for the second movement of the Symphony in G. Over to the drafting table.

Printouts of online articles dealing with overcoming shortcomings in Finale as a playback machine. Lists of instruments on the Proteus 2 synthesizer. Shelve.

A printout of an online Tarot reading back when I retired from NCTC. For kicks, I asked “what next,” and the reading was interesting enough to print. Into the memorabilia folder.

A notecard with some ideas for a choral piece that no longer interest me. Into the trash.

Installation disk for Contribue CS4, my stopgap for keeping my websites up to date, rather than spending the hundreds for the complete Adobe suite, at least until next summer. Shelve.

The books in the bookends on the left. William Blake’s Inn, both copies, autographed. The Big Bug Ball, for possible use by Lacuna back when we actually had hope that we had excited enough people about the international children’s thing to make it a reality. Joyful Noise, another Newbery winner that deserves to be set to music by me. Store them.

A file that says FILE and contains flotsam that needs to be filed. Over to the drafting table.

Fundamentals of Musical Composition, by Arnold Schoenberg. Keep it where it is, use it during my fragment exercises.

My old William Blake’s Inn journal. Store it.

A folder that says FIGURING IT OUT and which contains all kinds of models for structuring self-examination. Keep it.

My desk is now clean. I know this has been an extremely boring post, but it was quite therapeutic for me. I feel as if I have dealt with… something.

Next: the drafting table. Maybe the floor. But first, lunch.

Fred & Mary

Posted on by Dale

I have had fun at work today.

Each week, third grade classes come to me for Info Skills, wherein we learn to approach information problems in a structured way. The first half of the year is given over to learning the Big 6, the structure we use, and the various resources available to us.

It’s an interesting proposition, because when we begin, they’re still sort of second graders, and as such are just emerging from the “learning to read” stage into the “reading to learn” stage. They have no mental picture of how information is structured, nor how to decide whether or not they even have an information problem. They can’t disaggregate multiple strands within one question (e.g., “Who was President when Minnesota became a state?”). They don’t really have any sense of which resource is the best to use. And they are just unwilling to read through all the information to find their answer.

So we take it step by step, making lots of lots of mistakes along the way and debriefing each and every one. With any luck, we’re ready at the semester to begin applying our knowledge.

Which is why I was excited when the third grade teachers approached to see if we could combine Info Skills with the performance standards about Frederick Douglass and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Here’s the standard [SS3H2]: The student will discuss the lives of Americans who expanded people’s rights and freedoms in a democracy. Frederick and Mary are two among a small flock which includes Paul Revere, Susan B. Anthony, FDR and Eleanor, Thurgood Marshall, LBJ, and Cesar Chavez. We are also to explain social barriers, restrictions, and obstacles that these historical figures had to overcome.

(We also have to describe how these historic figures diplay positive character traits of… respect for and acceptance of authority. Wait what?)

So now we have something to which we can apply our info skills. I’m thinking we can do a timeline of these two’s lives, along with the others, and flesh them out with Presidents, wars, etc., just to give the kids some historical context. For one thing, of course, their lives barely overlapped.

Which gave me an idea. The children have no historical context. They really have no clue when it comes to sorting people and ideas and events into some kind of timeline structure in their heads.

So, I present to you Frederick Douglass & Mary McLeod Bethune: BFF! (Notice the next button down at the bottom; you’ll probably have to scroll.)

You like? I think we’re going to have a great time.