I’ve been inspired by Mike’s 24 Hour Toon venture, so I’m going to set myself a challenge, more about which in a moment.
The other challenge which I’ve set myself is to fill a couple of pages of sketches of people’s mouths. (I thought about leading off with some statement about sketching “body parts,” just to set your filthy minds in motion, but why waste the time?) Those Lichtenbergians who’ve had their reference photos taken will be my subject.
After I do mouths, I’ll move on to noses, eyes, etc. I may do chests or thighs.
OK, my 24-Hour challenge.
- Pick a number between 1 and 5.
- Pick a number between 1 and 1082.
- Pick a number between 1 and 40.
- Email those three numbers to me, in order: 2-563-24, for example.
Here’s what I’m going to do. I have selected five books of poetry from my shelves:
- The Best American Poetry 1999 (2000)
- A Controversy of Poets: an anthology of contemporary American poetry (1965)
- Master Poems of the English Language (1966)
- Poems for the Millennium: the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry, vol. II (1998)
- A Year in Poetry: a treasury of classic and modern verses for every date on the calendar (1995)
Those are not in order 1-5, by the way. Your three numbers will give me: a volume, a page number, and a line number. If the page number or line number exceeds the number of pages or lines, I’ll do the modular math thing until I get to a number which is contained in the volume/page. A couple of the books have essays interspersed; if the page number is within an essay, I’ll move to the first page of poetry after the essay.
And…?
I’ll post the sender and the line of poetry (perhaps the complete sentence, if I’m in the mood) and within 24 hours, I will compose a brief setting of that line for baritone voice, i.e, me, and post it here. I am not going to compose an entire piece, merely that one line, for voice and piano (or if I’m really inspired, a string quartet).
If all of you email me at once, I’ll take them in order as I get them.
Let’s see how far I get.