Creating something every day for 365 days: only not today
Last day of holiday, so I didn’t work very hard at anything. I got two more measures of Milky Way done and hated them, so I stopped and went back downstairs.
Instead, Ginny and I watched three episodes of Brideshead Revisited, and then I finished Octavian Nothing, M. T. Anderson’s new book. Two masterful works.
Today was Masterworks Chorale, so I guess I can count that, but otherwise it was a day of voting and worrying.
After Masterworks, Ginny and I went to Mike McGraw’s post-election party. By the time we got there, there was no suspense, alas. Despite the fact that most people in the nation seem to have tumbled to the Republican Party’s bottom-feeding nature, the Third District chose to send our particular plecostomous back.
I think if I were in charge of Democratic messaging, my main point would be, “If you re-elect Republicans, they will keep doing the same things.” And then list those same things: cut income for necessary government spending while borrowing money to pay for increased government spending; support a unitary executive without question or oversight; support disastrous foreign policy; indulge in rampant cronyism and incestuous lobbyists; and push a Taliban-like socioreligious agenda.
But that’s just me.
After giving Mike (and Renee) our condolences, we went home, and I went to bed. I couldn’t watch the election returns. I just couldn’t. I would have to wake up to a new world, for better or for worse.
The only creativity in evidence today was a couple of notes I made in my notebook about some changes I want to make in some of the pieces I’ve already orchestrated.
Otherwise, I cleaned house and rearranged the kitchen cabinets.
I finished reading Miss Hickory, a Newbery Award winner from the 1940s. A very, very odd book. She’s a doll made with an apple twig for a body and a hickory nut for a head. Very hard-headed she is, a point made repeatedly by Squirrel. She normally lives in a corncob house near the Old House, but the family has up and gone to Boston for the school year, abandoning her.
Through the kindness of several animals (which she barely appreciates), she finds a new home in an old robin’s nest, and the rest of the book concerns itself with inching through the fall and winter months, observing all the animals and Miss Hickory’s interactions with them. She’s a stubborn busybody and not very likable.
Still, it is incredibly shocking when, in the spring, she is forced out of her nest by Robin’s return. Seeking shelter, she goes into what she thinks is Squirrel’s abandoned cleft at the base of the apple tree. He’s there, nearly starving, and after she chides him one too many times for being an idiot, he eats her head. And it keeps talking while he’s eating it!! It sums up her failings for her and finally gives her a taste of her own medicine.
Headless, she climbs back up the apple tree until she comes to a limb with a split in it. She sticks her neck into it, and that’s where the little human girl who abandoned her in the fall finds her, now part of the apple tree as a grafted scion.
Ewww. It’s one of the creepiest endings I’ve ever read.
I forced myself to get started orchestrating the four big pieces. I had been dreading it because, as I’ve whined before, my nearly-four-year-old-laptop doesn’t have the power to handle even a small orchestra in Finale using Garritan Personal Orchestra.
I was right to dread it. For some reason, it couldn’t even burp out two horns, a cello, and a double bass plucking two notes. After getting not even four measures of Milky Way done, I gave up.
Which is not to say that I didn’t accomplish anything today. I redesigned a couple more pages of my website, which didn’t take any time of course. The pages that will take time are the ones that use formatting not already covered by my templated css stylesheet. I now have to actually tweak the css myself.
And a new feature of this column: I’ve decided to take paragraphs from Times articles about other places and substitute U.S. names and places in them. Where there are numbers, I’ll do like Juan Cole has done and extrapolate them to U.S. dimensions.
Today’s example, from “Bush, Facing Dissent on Iraq, Jettisons ‘Stay the Course'”:
Mr. Rumsfeld said Monday that the benchmarks under discussion included projections on when the U.S. might be able to take control of more of the country’s 50 states. Only five states are under full U.S. security administration, though officials say they hope the number will rise to sixteen or seventeen by the end of the year.
And they say the media doesn’t report the good news.
I didn’t create a lot today. I designed and started a spiffy display in the display case at school for the 100 Book Club, but nothing on William Blake or anything like that.
Since Grayson is home for fall break, we went to the Georgia Aquarium and then to eat at the Pleasant Peasant, so that’s where that time went.
The Georgia Aquarium is quite spectacular, although design-wise I much prefer the Tennessee Aquarium. Georgia’s big show, the whale shark tank, is huge, and I like the fact that you get multiple views of it, and that there are places to sit and just watch, something that Tennessee really could use for its biggie, the Gulf tank. Tennessee has more written material with each exhibit, but Georgia uses staffers (mostly volunteer) to answer questions and to engage the audience.
The main design issue with Georgia Aquarium is the great atrium. It really does look like a food court, and I don’t think the colorful facades of each attraction “pod” are going to age well. It’s also very loud.
Still, it’s worth the trip, because aquariums are always beautiful.