Lichtenbergianism: rights update

Posted on by Dale

As you may recall, I emailed the permissions department of the New York Review of Books for help identifying the entity holding the copyright to R. J. Hollingdale’s translation of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books.

Yesterday I heard back from Patrick Hederman, who inquired as to the extent to which I would be quoting the book, as in “exactly how many  words.” Whew, I thought, that was easy: the little I intended to use could scarcely present a problem.

It was easy to determine: open up a new little file in the Lichtenbergianism Scrivener file and copy/paste all the aphorisms in there—let the software count the words. There were 509 words contained in 21 aphorisms.

Ah, replied Mr. Hederman, we don’t actually hold the copyright, but that little amount of text ought to fall under fair use.  My thoughts exactly, I replied, but I want to make extra sure.

Mr. Hederman did not know who the owner of the copyright was, but had the email of Frances Hollingdale, representative of the Hollingdale estate.  He also suggested contacting Penguin, from whom NYRB had subleased the work.

So yesterday I emailed Ms. Hollingdale and today I will contact Penguin, although my copy of the book states clearly that R. J. Hollingdale was the owner of the copyright.

I will also bookmark the original German text, just in case.

Lichtenbergianism: Chapter Two, part 2

Posted on by Dale

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here.  Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

 

The Nine Precepts

To recap:

  1. We are all creative.
  2. Creativity is not genius.
  3. Make the thing that is not.
  4. Beware the impostor syndrome.

And what does procrastination have to do with any of the above?

Before we decided to give that seminar at GHP, there really wasn’t such a thing as Lichtenbergianism. The Lichtenbergian Society was just us Lichtenbergians doing our Lichtenbergian thing. But as I began mulling over exactly what we would be presenting in the seminar—you know, that pesky content thing—my over-organized mind found that within the Lichtenbergian membership certain mindsets and processes seemed to be the rule. So I categorized them into the Nine Precepts of Lichtenbergianism.

  1. Task Avoidance [again, in the published book, these will be in small caps]
  2. Abortive Attempts
  3. Successive Approximation
  4. Waste Books
  5. Ritual
  6. Steal from the Best
  7. Gestalt
  8. Audience
  9. Abandonment

Each Precept is a loose collection of ideas and principles about the creative process, often overlapping into the others. Lichtenbergianism is incoherent, in the sense that there’s no rigor in its conception or application—you can pick and choose and ignore and embrace each part as it suits your needs.

Nor is it linear—you don’t “do” the Precepts in order. There is no “leveling up” from Precept Two to Precept Three. They all exist simultaneously in any project you choose to work on, each coming to the forefront of your consciousness as needed.

Lichtenbergianism’s value lies in its flexibility and its permission-giving: it gives you permission to create without the deadly threat of producing something “perfect.”

Only Mozart can do that—and he’s dead.

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” — Chuck Close[1]

—————

[1] Currey, M., & Currey, M. (2014). Daily rituals: How artists work (p. 64). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

3 Old Men: Shame and dirt

Posted on by Dale

In Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: mischief, myth, and art, he has a chapter called “Speechless Shame and Shameless Speech” in which he posits that shame is linked to societal rules about speech and silence, and that those rules have an “ordering function,” not just of society but of the body and the psyche as well.

He quotes from Hunger of Memory, the memoir of one Richard Rodriguez:

The normal, extraordinary, animal excitement of feeling my [teenaged] body alive—riding shirtless on a bicycle in the warm wind created by furious self-propelled motion—the sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied. I was too ashamed of my body. I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body.

Hyde goes on to note that “…an unalterable fact about the body…”—in this case, Rodriguez’s brown skin— “… is linked to a place in the social order,…”—i.e., less than white skin— “… and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.” [1]

The Trickster, however, subverts that trap. Remember that Trickster = Raven, Coyote, Br’er Rabbit, Shiva, Dionysus, Jesus.

Or Old Men.

If you take Rodriguez’s passage and substitute old for brown, you can see another source of the power of 3 Old Men’s ritual at burns:

Wise to the tricks of language, the [Trickster] refuses the whole setup—refuses the metonymic shift, the enchantment of [societal] story, and the rules of silence—and by these refusals [he] detaches the supposedly overlapping levels of inscription from one another so that the body, especially, need no longer stand as the mute, incarnate seal of social and psychological order. All this, but especially the speaking out where shame demands silence, depends largely on a consciousness that doesn’t feel much inhibition, and knows how traps are made, and knows how to subvert them.[2]

That’s long and complicated. But what it means for us is that rather than be complicit in the role that society has constructed for the words an old man, the 3 Old Men troupe rejects that metonymy— “a kind of bait and switch,” Hyde says, “in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body”[3]—in this case, our aging male bodies—and instead substitutes a different reading.

This reading (about which you can read my original thoughts here) also links into Hyde’s contention that any social structure of meaning undergoes “purification” as it continues to create order, discarding undesirable or repellent bits, i.e., “dirt.” He contends that in an eternal dialectic, the Trickster takes the dirt, the waste, the excluded detritus of the system and revivifies the system by breaking it open and throwing the dirt back in.[4]

Thus, our society’s ideals of beauty and power have over the centuries focused more on the youthful male body—sleek, virile, strong—and rejected the aching joints, sagging breasts, and protruding bellies of the old. 3 Old Men uses its ritual to call attention to those attributes of “oldness” and to overturn and recreate that societal order in the labyrinth, and then to include that society which excluded the former “dirt,” by opening the labyrinth to the journey of others, ending with our agon encounters at the boundaries.

Ritual: Order. Community. Transformation.

—————

[1] Hyde, p. 169

[2] ibid., p. 171

[3] ibid. p. 170

[4] In a stunning bit of synchronicity, the chapter after “Speechless Shame” is “Matter Out of Place”: dirt is that which is out of place when we create our order. Matter out of place, or MOOP, is of course a key concept in Leave No Trace, one of the 10 Principles of Burning Man. (I do not know whether there is a connection between Hyde’s work and the growth of Burning Man—it would be interesting to find out.) UPDATE: Indeed, Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man, got the term from Hyde.

Lichtenbergianism: Chapter Two, part 1

Posted on by Dale

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here.  Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

 

Chapter Two: Framework

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.  GCL, J.115

—————

Before we begin looking at the Nine Precepts, I want to lay out some basic ideas about creativity that are critical to the way Lichtenbergianism works.

We are all creative. Every one of us. It is inborn in us as humans. As I say in my Arts Speech[1], every child on this planet sings, dances, draws, and pretends long before she learns her ABCs or can count to 10. This is true of you, even if you think it’s not.[2]

However, most of us don’t see ourselves as having the ability to create because we are cursed to live in an amazing world. We have at our fingertips perfect performances of perfect pieces of music, perfect paintings or sculptures, perfect novels, even perfect photographs of perfect gardens—and we have allowed ourselves to believe that this perfection is the natural product of creativity.

It seems clear to us that only creative geniuses can produce such a level of perfection. Mozart is the supreme exemplar of that kind of creative genius, and I think it’s important to embrace this truth: mere humans can’t do it.[3]

However, it’s also important to embrace this as well: creativity is not genius. We all want to be creative, and we all can create.

So what is creativity, then?

MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT.

It’s that simple.[4]

That’s art. Where there was not a thing, now there is. A poem, a musical work, a painting, a sketch.

A dance, an algorithm, a solution, a book, a lesson, an exhibit, an article, a movie, a manifesto.

A drumming, a journal, a cocktail, a script, a mosaic, a website, a children’s story, a documentary, a photograph.

It’s all out there—except it’s not, of course. It’s out there, but not until we find it and drag it—often kicking and screaming—into our version of reality.

How do we do that? Or rather, more to the purpose of this book, how can we make it possible for us to do that?[5]

Many years ago I encountered a very early version of an e-zine, created in Apple’s late, lamented HyperCard. I think it was called “The Bad Penny.” Its focus was on publishing work from people anywhere and everywhere, to give them an Audience. In its first issue, the editors wrote a manifesto that contained a key idea that has stuck with me: what the world needs is more bad poetry. Create with abandon. Create more and more poetry. Make it happen—flood the world with it. Don’t worry whether it’s good or not, just write it.

The point was to encourage people to create, and that’s the purpose of Lichtenbergianism.

But, you will object, I’m not really an artist. I buy those adult coloring books, but I can’t really create something new. I enjoy my Friday night sessions at the Sip ‘n’ Paint studio, but I can’t really paint a real painting. I scribble notes in my journal, but I’m not a real poet.

Right. So what do you call a person who paints or writes poetry or composes a song?[6]

Before we even begin, we must beware the “impostor syndrome,” that still small voice in the back of our head constantly warning us that sooner or later all the Others will discover that we are not who we are pretending to be. “They” will take a good look at our work, realize that we are a fraud, and they’ll set up a hue and a cry to alert the others. (Don’t you have the image in your head of Donald Sutherland raising the alarm at the end of The Body-Snatchers? You do now.) Really, we all feel this way. I feel this way.

I cringe every time I post a new piece of music on my blog or refer to myself as a composer—or when I started posting bits of this book online and pretended to be an author—because I’m not really.

Pfft, is my advice to you (and to myself.) There are so many ways to put this: Assume a virtue if you have it not. Fake it till you make it. Just do it.

Just Make the Thing That Is Not.

Tomorrow: the rest of the chapter

—————

[1] cf. The Arts Speech, Appendix B

[2] Of course you think it’s true. You wouldn’t be reading this book if you didn’t think it was true.

[3] (Professor Peter Schickele reminds us that this is why the completely incompetent P.D.Q. Bach is such a comfort to us: after encountering Mozart, we feel like inadequate parasites; after encountering dear P.D.Q., we feel as if perhaps we could do as well if not better.)

[4] Ha. As if.

[5] (Creativity is not limited to artists, of course; I will use the word artist to include and connote painters, designers, actors, composers, writers, scientists, programmers, teachers—et al.)

[6] Answer key: a painter, a poet, and a composer. If Margaret Keane, Rod McKuen, and Coldplay have earned the title, so have you.

Lichtenbergianism: Chapter One, part 2

Posted on by Dale

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here.  Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

 

So what does the Lichtenbergian Society actually do? We meet around the fire pit in my back yard, we drink, we talk. We have our Annual Meeting on the weekend before or on the Winter Solstice. We go on Retreat in the fall to a cabin in the mountains. We share and discuss issues online, mostly in our secret Facebook group.

That’s it.

Then where does this book and its philosophy come from? A very odd thing happened after that first meeting in 2007: despite our claims of being committed to procrastination, every single active member of the Society became incredibly productive. We’ve produced books, plays, musical pieces, countless blog posts. Careers have blossomed; some have changed completely.

Our annual goals[1] have gotten stronger and stronger, and often we achieve them.

How?

It was my honor to work with the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) for nearly 30 summers, rising to the position of full-time director of the program, a position I thoroughly enjoyed for the summers of 2011-2013.[2] That last summer, two Lichtenbergians—Turff and Jeff A.—took a week’s vacation to come visit, Turff because he had attended a similar program in Tennessee, and Jeff because he had helped supervise part of the theatre majors’ audition process for a couple of years; both wanted to see the program in action.

Since we already had four other Lichtenbergians on campus (myself, Jobie, Michael, and Mike), I posted a Lichtenbergianism seminar on the afternoon activity board for students and whipped up a brief presentation on the history of the group and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The rest of the session was simply each of the Precepts in an elegant font on a white background, and the assembled Lichtenbergians talked about how they used that precept in their creative work and in their careers.

The room was, to my surprise, packed with kids, and the presentation went so well that I wish we had videotaped it, if for no other reason that writing this book would have been a lot easier. After it was over, the non-educator Lichtenbergians expressed amazement that “the kids were taking notes!” Of course they were, I said: #1, that’s who they are; #2, this is very important information and it’s the first time they’ve had it laid out for them. I myself began this process at GHP with my painting teacher Dianne Mize; this is the beginning of that process for these kids.

That’s when it occurred to me that our little circle might have something to offer the world. This book comes from that thought.

Lichtenbergianism is a philosophy we take mighty seriously. For a Lichtenbergian, nothing is more shameful than getting right to work and doing All The Things. It shows a lack of moral fiber, we think, not to be able to avoid one task or another at will. Only slackers like Pablo Picasso, Johann Sebastian Bach, or Anthony Trollope never take a day off.[3]

It sounds completely counterintuitive, but Lichtenbergianism is in some ways like the description of Alcoholics Anonymous in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: a rickety structure that shouldn’t work, but it does.[4]

Lichtenbergianism is not a prescriptive set of rules or procedures that, if followed, will make you creative. It’s not a way to become rich and famous, nor to quit your day job. This is not an instruction book.

Instead, Lichtenbergianism is a set of attitudes, of framing, within which it becomes easier to produce… something… anything. These attitudes/precepts give permission for the creative person to blunder[5] their way through the creative process as a means of achieving personal understanding/satisfaction. And to write that novel. Eventually.

None of the Precepts are new. We are not reinventing the creative process here. Lichtenbergianism is making no claim of originality or exclusivity to any of its components. We are shamelessly STEALING FROM THE BEST.

—————

[1] see RITUAL.

[2] GHP was a four-week (originally six-week) residential program for gifted and talented high school students in all fields. I attended the program as an art major in 1970 and, as we say in GHP-Land, it changed my life forever. The level of intellectual, artistic, and personal empowerment provided by the program can hardly be believed.

[3] Picasso created nearly 148,000 pieces of art over his 75-year career. Bach composed cantatas for three years’ worth of church services—that is, 209 surviving cantatas, and that’s ignoring the rest of his output. Trollope wrote for three hours a day, producing 47 big, thick, Dickensian novels; if he finished a novel before the three hours were up, he just pulled out a blank sheet of paper and started the next one. Do you really want to be like these guys?

[4] citation needed—still waiting on Daniel to get me those page numbers…

[5] see Appendix C: The Invocation

Lichtenbergianism: Chapter One, part 1

Posted on by Dale

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here.  Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

Chapter One: Introduction to Lichtenbergianism

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.   GCL, L.23

—————

What is a Lichtenbergian and why does it have an ism?

This is not actually a book about procrastination, as useful a strategy as it is.[1] Rather, it is how a loose-knit group of creative men in a small town upped their game by forming a society the purpose of which was not to create anything.

This book will not make you creative—you are already creative, just as every human is creative.[2]

This book will not free the artistic genius within you. It will not get you a record deal, a Tony Award™, or a one-man show at MOMA.

This book will not give you “creative exercises” to sharpen your skills. There are plenty of other books that are better for that and more specifically attuned to your own area of creativity.

This book is not even necessarily for those who make a living through their creativity. But if you are a Citizen Artist who thinks he/she might like to try writing a novel, or painting a portrait, or designing a labyrinth, but who keeps putting it off for fear of failing—that we can help you with.[3]

In late November/early December 2007, I sent out an email to a collection of friends noting that the Winter Solstice fell on a Saturday and would anyone like to join me around the fire pit for an evening of drinking, conviviality, and earnest discussion on the nature of art? Since that date was the weekend before Christmas, I was amazed when all six men accepted my invitation.

Most of us knew each other through my time at the Newnan Community Theatre Company, where I had been the artistic director for 20+ years. Not everyone had been there at the same time, so there was an interesting web of relationships from the very start.

All of us were creative in ways other than theatre—composers, photographers, writers, musicians—and moreover were creative in our careers as well—educators for the most part, but also a reporter, a computer programmer, even a clown.

All of us were at a point in our lives, both personal and creative, where we wanted to sit around a fire and talk about the nature of art with someone like us. In the intervening weeks, discussion on my blog ebbed and flowed, until one day I posted a (very negative) review of the Bavarian State Opera’s production of Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland.[4]

Discussion in comments became vigorous as we defended/trashed the “old forms” like opera and and debated whether they were still viable. Good times.

After a particularly vibrant exchange, Turff intoned, “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation,”[5] and credited the aphorism to one Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I headed over to Wikipedia to find out who this Lichtenberg chap was and discovered someone after our own hearts: an innovative thinker who puttered around in many fields; a physicist and an educator; an Anglophile, who on a trip to England once visited the widow of the great typographer Baskerville to explore buying the designer’s elegant typefaces.[6]

And then… there was this sentence:

Lichtenberg was prone to procrastination. He failed to launch the first ever hydrogen balloon, and although he always dreamed of writing a novel à la Fielding’s Tom Jones, he never finished more than a few pages. He died at the age of 56, after a short illness.[7]

“He never finished more than a few pages.” Here, surely, was our patron saint. I teasingly assigned everyone the task of writing the first chapter in a “Tom Jones-like novel,” and we were off. Within a week, The Lichtenbergian Society had a charter, officers, and an agenda for the inaugural meeting.

Our motto: Cras melior est. Tomorrow is better.

Tomorrow: the rest of the chapter

——————

[1] Instead, see The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing , by John Perry

[2] See Appendix B: The Arts Speech

[3] Of course, the professional who finds him or herself in the grip of “writer’s block” or frozen perfectionism will find a lot to like in this book too.

[4] We were in Munich visiting our son, who was there studying German.

[5] Lichtenberg is today most highly regarded in Europe for his vast collection of pithy aphorisms, scribbled down in his WASTE BOOKS.

[6] Simon Garfield. Just my type: a book about fonts. Gotham, 2012. p. 98-100.

[7] Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. (2015, June 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:35, November 10, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg&oldid=669229256

Oh, Republicans

Posted on by Dale

So here’s an odd thing:

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday that President Barack Obama has politicized the Supreme Court nomination process by putting forward veteran appellate court judge Merrick Garland during a presidential election. (Reuters, 3/16/16)

He did what now?

Let’s back up a bit.  This is not news, of course.  The republicants have been pissing and moaning about how it tain’t fittin’ for them to even consider a Supreme Court nominee ever since Tony Scalia was found dead in a bed with a sheep.  Allegedly. [1]

Here’s Orrin Hatch, just last week, pissing and moaning:

“[Obama] could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man,” he told us, referring to the more centrist chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia who was considered and passed over for the two previous high court vacancies.

But, Hatch quickly added, “He probably won’t do that because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the [liberal Democratic base] wants.” [Newsmax (!) 3/13/16]

Well, okay then.

So now that President Obama has nominated the very judge that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Oopsies) has said would be the perfect nominee, we can all go back to wondering where Ted “The Zodiac Killer” Cruz was the day Scalia was murdered.

Wait, what?  What’s that?  Senate republicants are still pissing and moaning?  You don’t say!

They want the “American people to have a say” in the Supreme Court nomination by voting for the man who makes the nomination.[2]  Like we’ve already done.  Twice.

Not only that, but surveys indicate that a yoooge majority of Americans want the Senate to do its damn job.  Sounds like the people have had their say.

Republicants have also been pissing and moaning about how Democratic senators have said terrible, terrible obstructionist stuff about republicantist Presidential nominations in the past, which was just terrible.

And that’s what I really wanted to talk about today.

We have Sen. XYZ (R-Natch) pissing and moaning that Sen. ABC (D-The Past) once said they’d rather the Current Occupant nominate someone they like, so it’s only right that they (the republicants) refuse to consider any nomination made by President Obama, who has only 307 days left in office.  Why, that’s hardly any time at all left to do any real governing! [3]

So here’s what I always want to know when our republicant officials trot out the old tu quoque defense:

Are they saying 1) that what the Democratic Party did when they weren’t thrilled about potential SCOTUS nominees was a good thing to do and so they (the republicants) are going to do it too?  Or 2) that what the Democratic Party did was a vile and reprehensible thing to do and so they (the republicants) ARE GOING TO DO IT TOO?

I mean, there’s not really a third choice there, is there?

Do your damn job.

—————

[1] Tony Scalia was not found dead in a bed with a sheep.  That we know of.

[2] Or woman.  Heh heh.

[3] We may raise our eyebrows and purse our lips at this claim since Congress worked only 132 days in 2015.  That means President Obama has almost exactly 2-1/3 Congresses in which he must not try to accomplish anything.[4]

[4] Which, given this particular Congress, would not be difficult.

Lichtenbergianism: Why me?

Posted on by Dale

We’re working our way through the advice given in The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, and today we get to answer the question, “Why me?”  In other words, why am I the person to write this book?

As I said in the Introduction, I’ve been a creative person my entire life, and my entire adult life has been spent giving others permission to be creative people themselves.  Sometimes I taught the knowledge, skills, and attitudes directly; other times I’ve provided the framework for that to happen.

For example, one of my favorite memories at Newnan Community Theatre Company was our 1995 production of The Winter’s Tale.  Our Hermione was a professional actress from Atlanta, Equity even, whose personal goal of playing all of Shakespeare’s queens overrode her concerns about union rules.  (She did perform under an assumed name.)  She was amazing to work with and had a great time with us.[1]

[slideshow_deploy id=’5168′]

At the cast party after our last performance, I was looking at my large cast running around enjoying themselves, congratulating themselves on a job well done, and Jen walked up and said fondly, “They don’t know they’re not supposed to be able to do this, do they?”

“No, they do not,” I replied.  And they didn’t.  They had no clue that tackling one of Shakespeare’s late romances was out of their league.  But I had provided the opportunity, and not knowing any better they jumped into the deep end without a second thought.  And they did it!

So my commitment to the creative process is absolute, and I’ve developed lots of mad skilz in encouraging it in others.

EGGYBP also asks whether I have anything to say that’s new and different about the topic.  I believe I do.  Lichtenbergianism (as I state clearly in Chapter One) is nothing ground-breaking; the creative process is the creative process, after all.  What’s new and different about the book is the whimsical attitude of the Lichtenbergian Society towards productivity. There are some hardcore ideas in the Nine Precepts, but essentially it’s a way for the reader to stop worrying about getting it done and to step back and see the larger picture.  There are strategies for getting started, there are strategies for TASK AVOIDANCE, there are strategies for stopping—but over all, it’s all about permission.

Give yourself permission to create.

—————

[1] I have two other favorite stories from that production.  Three—I have three more favorite stories.  Story #1: One reason I chose the play was its very unfamiliarity to audiences.  How would they take a sprawling play that they didn’t know anything about?  In the final scene, Hermione (who died in Act I) ‘s lady-in-waiting Paulina is showing King Leontes a statue of his dead queen.  She claims to be able to make the statue move, if he will pardon her use of magic.  Every night, when Paulina charged the statue to speak, Jen would do this amazing “come to life” bit, shivering up from her diaphragm as the statue appears to take a breath for the first time.  Every night I would watch the audience, and every night they were visibly shocked.  It was great.

Story #2: This was the first Shakespeare we did in full Elizabethan drag—and what a show to choose to do that on!  The play spans 16 years, covering two completely different fashion periods, and ranges from royalty down to peasants.  We went full out, ruffs and corsets and bum rolls and satin and brocade and everything.  A week or so before we opened, Becky Clark (goddess) came down from the second floor, where we had chained actors to sewing machines and ironing boards.  She was distraught.  We weren’t going to be able to finish the 60+ costumes before opening.  At that very moment, Act I began onstage: Leontes and his court swept on, everyone wearing as much of their costumes as they had available.  Becky was electrified.  “That is so beautiful! Yes, we can do this!” and went back upstairs to whip the actors harder.  (Corollary story: about a week later, we were running the show and I was out in the seats taking notes.  It was Act V, and on came Jennifer Sodko as some lord or other, and I realized with a shock that I had done something I had sworn never to do: create a complete and complex costume for a character who is seen once for less than a minute.)

Story #3: The show is long, very long, and late one night in the middle of Act IV, I heard a huge roar erupt from the bar next door.  I think it is a testament to the quality of the performance that none of the audience even tried to get out to go next door to celebrate the Braves winning the World Series.  (The cast, who had been following backstage, announced the win during curtain call.)

Story #4:  All right, I have four more favorite stories.  My son Grayson played Prince Mamillius.  He was seven at the time, and I needed a Mamillius who could read and whose television privileges I could threaten.  My mother volunteered to sew his costume, but she balked at putting on the codpiece—so that night at dress rehearsal I’m safety-pinning a codpiece onto my child when he objects. “What is this?”  I explained it was called a codpiece.  “What’s it for?”  I explained its origins as a “safety valve” from tight leggings in the late Middle Ages, but that at this time period it was merely decorative.  “Do the other actors who are male have one too?”  (That is literally what he said.)  Yes, I said, they all do.  He considered for a moment, then announced, “I can use this in my scene: ‘No, my lord, I’ll fight!’” and waved his little codpiece about. I proposed that that might be funnier to spring on his fellow cast members backstage rather than as a bit of onstage business.

The Lyles Rule of Outrageous Truthiness: a review

Posted on by Dale

So today on Facebook…

Never Would Have Guessed

WHY MR. ROGERS WORE
A SWEATER?

Captain Kangaroo passed away on January 23, 2004 at age 76 , which is odd,
because he always looked to be 76. (DOB: 6/27/27 )
His death reminded me of the following story.

Some people have been a bit offended that the actor, Lee Marvin,
is buried in a grave alongside 3 and 4-star generals at
Arlington National Cemetery His marker gives his name,
rank (PVT) and service (USMC). Nothing else.
Here’s a guy who was only a famous movie star who served his time,
why the heck does he rate burial with these guys?
Well, following is the amazing answer:

I always liked Lee Marvin, but didn’t know the extent
of his Corps experiences.

In a time when many Hollywood stars served their country
in the armed forces often in rear echelon posts where they
were carefully protected, only to be trotted out to perform
for the cameras in war bond promotions,
Lee Marvin was a genuine hero.
He won the Navy Cross at Iwo Jima There is only one
higher Naval award… the Medal Of Honor!

If that is a surprising comment on the true character of the man,
he credits his sergeant with an even greater show of bravery.

Dialog from “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”:
His guest was Lee Marvin….
Johnny said,”Lee, I’ll bet a lot of people are unaware
that you were a Marine in the initial landing at Iwo Jima ..
and that during the course of that action you earned
the Navy Cross and were severely wounded.”

“Yeah, yeah… I got shot square in the bottom and they gave me
the Cross for securing a hot spot about halfway up Suribachi.
Bad thing about getting shot up on a mountain is guys getting
shot hauling you down. But, Johnny, at Iwo , I served under
the bravest man I ever knew… We both got the Cross the same day,
but what he did for his Cross made mine look cheap in comparison.
That dumb guy actually stood up on Red beach and directed his
troops to move forward and get the hell off the beach..
Bullets flying by, with mortar rounds landing everywhere and he
stood there as the main target of gunfire so that he could get his
men to safety. He did this on more than one occasion because
his men’s safety was more important than his own life.

That Sergeant and I have been lifelong friends. When they brought
me off Suribachi we passed the Sergeant and he lit a smoke and
passed it to me, lying on my belly on the litter and said,
“Where’d they get you Lee?” “Well Bob….
if you make it home before me, tell Mom to sell the outhouse!”

Johnny, I’m not lying, Sergeant Keeshan was the bravest man
I ever knew.
The Sergeant’s name is Bob Keeshan.
You and the world know him as Captain Kangaroo.”

On another note, there was this wimpy little man
(who passed away) on PBS, gentle and quiet.. Mr. Rogers is
another of those you would least suspect of being anything
but what he now portrays to our youth.
But Mr. Rogers was a U.S. Navy Seal, combat-proven in

Vietnam with over twenty-five confirmed kills to his name.
He wore a long-sleeved sweater on TV, to cover the many
tattoos on his forearm and biceps.
He was a master in small arms and hand-to-hand combat,
able to disarm or kill in a heartbeat

After the war Mr. Rogers became an ordained Presbyterian minister

and therefore a pacifist. Vowing to never harm another human and also dedicating the rest of his life to trying to help lead children on the right path in life… He hid away the tattoos and his past life and won our hearts with his quiet wit and charm..

America’s real heroes don’t flaunt what they did; they quietly go about their day-to-day lives, doing what they do best. They earned our respect and the freedoms that we all enjoy.
Look around and see if you can find one of those heroes in your midst.
Often, they are the ones you’d least suspect, but would most like to have on your side if anything ever happened……. Jus sayin

Oy.

The Lyles Rule of Outrageous Truthiness states that “Any time something from the internet sounds too outrageous to be true, then you can safely bet that it’s not.”

That can be boiled down to “Cool story, bro—whoa, if true!”

The above is a lovely story, born I guess of our national fetishization of the military.  Yes, it ends talking about leading children on the “right path in life,” i.e., kindness and gentleness.  But first, boys, make sure you shoot guns and get tattoos!  After all, they’re our “real heroes,” not men like Captain Kangaroo or Mr. Rogers.

And of course, the story is not true. Not in a single significant detail.

Jus sayin.

Lichtenbergianism: clerical work

Posted on by Dale

Today I got serious.  I emailed the permissions department of The New York Review of Books to start the process of securing the rights to use some of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorisms as the chapter headers.

I use The Waste Books as translated by R. J. Hollingdale as my source.  Here’s where it gets funky:

  • Translation, introduction, and notes copyright ©1990 by R. J. Hollingdale
  • First published by Penguin Books 1990
  • This edition published in 2000 in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books, 1755 Broadway, NY NY 10019

Normally, the copyright holder gives permission for this kind of thing[1], but the problem here is that Reginald John Hollingdale died in 2001.  I have no clue who holds the copyright at this point—heirs and assigns, sure, but who are they?

So the permissions department at NYRB is as good a place as any to start.

Lichtenberg is now more famous today for his aphorisms (written in his waste books) than his scientific research.  (He discovered the principles of xerography, for example.)  It was one of his aphorisms, in fact, that led to the founding of the Lichtenbergian Society in 2007.

Here are some of them:

  • Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum. (B.12)
  • Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure.  To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure. (E.36b)
  • If you want to make a young person read a certain book you must not so much commend it to him directly as praise it in his presence.  He will then go and find it for himself. (F.141)
  • It is good when young people are in certain years attacked by the poetic infection, only one must, for Heaven’s sake, not neglect to inoculate them against it. (L.69)
  • It is true I cannot say whether things are going to change for the better, but what I do say is that things will never be right unless they do change. (K.102)

The epigraph for the book itself is “Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.” (E.16)

The epigraph for the first chapter, “Introduction to Lichtenbergianism,” is “If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.” (L.23)

You get the idea.  It’s kind of important that I get permission to use the material.[2]d

In other news, technology reared its ugly head this morning when my actual Lichtenbergianism file caused Scrivener to crash repeatedly.  I was beginning to panic at the thought that those particular 21,635 words were screwed, but (tl;dr alert) opening a copy warned me that the original file was “in use,” which of course it wasn’t.  A shutdown and a restart of the computer sorted out the confusion there, and we’re back in business.  Whew!

—————

[1] Which is how I got permission to set Nancy Willard‘s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to music: she owns the copyright to the text and said “yes” with no hesitation at all.

[2] Or, of course, translate them myself, or have my German-Studies-degree son do it, or even my good friend Jennifer Schottstaedt who translates for money do it.