I did not know until this very moment that the author of
is the same man who wrote
I am gobsmacked. I never made the connection.
(I found out at this blog, an amazing place to visit on a regular basis.)
An approving look back
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
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
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
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.
New Year’s Day
I have only one resolution of any import, and I’ll get to that in a moment. In the meantime, I was very unsocial last night, turning down a couple of very kind invitations and issuing none of my own. This is what I did while waiting for the New Year:
One of my Lichtenbergian goals last year, and the only one repeated for this year, is to start painting again. I say again as if my cessation were a recent event, but it has been years since I used any of my art supplies. And the last time I did “art,” rather than costume or set designs, has to be nearly 30 years ago.
So I dragged out all my stuff and got to work. I have in mind for the coming year a couple of series, and I’m thinking about just painting a plain coffee mug over and over until I have control of the media again. For last night, I decided just to play with color and brush and surface, just to get back in my fingers how the stuff works. (My medium at the moment is gouache, a kind of thick tempera, also known as designer’s colors.) I also had another agenda, but that remains secret for the moment.
It’s interesting to me how much some of the stuff looks like what I was producing in high school. This is not a good thing, of course, but maybe I can catch up with the rest of my life as I go along. It was fun to do, and I have enough art supplies to last for a lot of exploration (vide infra).
It has not escaped my notice, either, how mutually incompatible my composing and my painting are, not only in time, but also in space. Both require me to cover a sizable surface, and in my case it’s the same surface: my drafting table. Oh well, let one be a distraction for the other, I say.
I normally do not bother with New Year’s resolutions. They have always implied that you spent at least part of the past year in some kind of existentialist bad faith, from which you awaken somewhere around Christmas and, in a fit of newfound self-awareness, make decisions about how you are going to change. More bad faith, as far as I’m concerned.
Still, a couple of days ago I decided to try an experiment, which we will call a resolution. I think I was getting dressed, and I began to pay attention to my shirts. Over the holidays, I’ve worn essentially t-shirts and henleys or sweaters, so all of my shirts are clean and hanging up. There’s an enormous number of them. I have, and I’m going to allow myself enough bad faith not to go count them, over 30. I can take a dozen shirts to the cleaners and not break a sweat about having something to wear to work for a week or even two, any season of the year.
Likewise, I have enough Christmas ties to start at Thanksgiving and wear one a day until school is out without repeating myself. And that’s just a subset of my total tie collection.
Books? Just the unread ones by my bed would probably carry me through the rest of the year. Working my way around the house, I could catalog for you the surplus materiel available to me in any area of my life.
So that’s when I decided to try an experiment: how long can I go without buying anything?
I don’t need anything, as evidenced by the very short tour of possessions above. By any standard on this planet, I am comfortable beyond the imagination of most of the six billion people who live here. I certainly have spent a great deal on the labyrinth, all of it on my credit card, and I need to exercise restraint in order to pay that off in a timely manner. And I think it will probably be salutary to force myself to confront every desire that would normally have me reaching for the 1-Click button at Amazon.
Clearly, I am talking about discretionary spending here. Yes, I will continue to buy groceries and pay my bills (which I ought to be doing right now instead of philosophizing here). I will maintain the car and the house, etc., etc., etc. But books, music, software, art supplies, clothing, all those fun things that encrust my life, and quite honestly I enjoy, I won’t be buying any.
My goal is to see if I can make it to June. Stay tuned.
Labyrinth, New Year’s Eve
Labyrinth, 12/30/08
I finally got my drill press put together yesterday, and had a blast all afternoon drilling things.
My main goal was to get a little trio of lighting fixtures done. Here they are:
There’s a piece of rebar driven into the ground, and each of the paving stones has a hole drilled through its center. I have probably given myself lung cancer doing it. (I bought dust masks today.)
The white tubes are actually plastic tubes from my wide-format printer at school, i.e., the “poster printer.” It prints on 24″-wide rolls, and these are at the center. It dawned on me that a candle sitting inside one of these would light up the whole tube.
The tubes are sitting in pieces of wood, through which I have drilled enormous holes in the top half, and smaller holes in the bottoms to fit onto the rebar. The number of drill bits I have added to my collection is very impressive.
So now I have these three lights sitting in an attractive little grouping over in the ivy. I’ll test them tonight, and if they’re as lovely as I hope, I can make more.
Yesterday morning there was an enormous branch down off the pecan tree in the First Baptist parking lot. I retrieved it for firewood, but it was doing a nice zen number, so I dragged it out to the middle of the labyrinth for a while:
It is very marvelous at night, when light from the house hits it and it glows dimly white, its fractal probings of the darkness contrasting starkly with the geometry of the labyrinth paths. It reminds me of the White Tree of Minas Tirith, actually.
In the upper right of that photo, you can see what I did today for the most part: haul dirt down the driveway again and build up the northern sweep of the labyrinth. It’s a lot more level now, although you probably cannot tell from the photo. I have some dirt still left over; I may use it to shore up the northern end, or perhaps the western rim. Don’t know yet.
Also today, in the same vein as the light tubes, I built wooden holders for cans of Sterno. These will sit on the little plinths at the ends of the arms of the labyrinths and flame brightly. Until someone is scorched. I’d actually like to built the tower/columsn I’ve discussed previously, and put the flames on top of them. If I could be sure they wouldn’t be knocked against, spilling flaming Sterno on drunken and barefoot labyrintheers.
Musings
I don’t have a coherent post to offer today, just random thoughts.
I’ve been having a recurring dream for the past few days. It’s annoying and I can’t figure out why I’m fixating on this particular image. It involves the Union Jack and its components somehow: I am usually trying to explain the pieces, or assemble the pieces, or explain how to assemble the pieces, or something. I’m not clear on what’s going on, and I’m thinking the dream itself is not very linear.
Sometimes a little girl is involved (hush, Jeff), sometimes a large group (hush, Jobie). The overriding feeling is one of frustration, but since I don’t have any clear (waking) idea of what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m not sure what the frustration is about. It’s entirely possible that not knowing what I’m trying to do in the dream is the frustration.
The easy symbolism is that it’s a metaphor for my composing. I know what the pieces are and have some idea of how they go together, but I don’t know enough to actually assemble them. What the little girl has to do with it, I have no idea. It’s like Faulkner’s Little Sister Death that I mentioned the other night at the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting: in the face of some college student’s question, he claimed not even to remember the character in The Sound and the Fury. (I think I placed her in Absalom, Absalom at the meeting, but I got the character Quentin Compson right.)
As for the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting, let’s just say that I was the essential Lichtenbergian: of the seven goals that I had listed at last year’s meeting, I had accomplished not one. The ones I can remember are picking up painting again; completing the symphony; completing the songs for A Day in the Moonlight; writing a trio for piano, trombone and saxophone; and getting some pieces done for a couple of choral competitions. There were two more, but I can’t remember even what they are.
I put off working on Moonlight to work on the symphony. That was scuttled when Czarkowski decided not to return to GHP. I didn’t have time during the summer to work on the trio, and no drive to work on the choral works, and then everything was subordinated to the labyrinth. So there you go.
All the non-Lichtenbergians in my life ask if I just rolled them all over to next year, and the answer is, of course, no. I’m pulling back in a lot of ways. Fewer goals, smaller goals, baby steps. Who knows? Perhaps the symphony will come bursting out of me in January, but I’m not planning for it.
