Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

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]

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.

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]

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.

Lichtenbergianism: Good idea or the best idea?

Posted on by Dale

Today let’s look at one of the basic premises of writing a book and getting it published: do I have a good enough idea for a book?  We will pretend that we do not already know that this is the best book idea ever and explore the main questions as listed in The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [hereinafter EGGYBP].

Audience. Who would be interested in reading a book about procrastinating and how to use that to become more creative?

Excellent question. As we’ll see when we go check out the competition, people really want to be more creative.  They are under the impression that reading a book will help with this—and who am I to disagree?  The current craze for adult coloring books, for example, feeds off this basic urge to MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT. [1] I talk about the genesis of this book in Chapter One as springing from a seminar I did at the Governor’s Honors Program in 2013—if the students’ response to the Nine Precepts is anywhere close to representative of a populace hungry for permission to create, then I think the audience will be solid.

Who knows?  This could be a niche book that only my friends and family will plow through, or it could become one of those freakish trends: “Become more creative by not doing anything!!”

Competition. If we go and look for books on creativity, there is no dearth of available titles.  Why add this one?

Leave it to an independent bookseller (hi, Janet!) to immediately link to a book about the benefits of procrastination, apparently also written in an entertainingly humorous style.  Missed that one in doing my research.  However, in the overall philosophy of Lichtenbergianism procrastination is really just kind of a gimmick to hook the reader’s attention.  There are eight additional Precepts that form a framework for getting your work done.

Also, most of the other books on the creative process are focused on specific fields: drawing, painting, writing, etc.  Lichtenbergianism is a concept that is usable in every field—and not just in artistic ones.  You can increase your productivity through TASK AVOIDANCE no matter what your job, hobby, or avocation is.

We’ll put off Marketability, Authority, and Salability until tomorrow.

—————

[1] In the book, I intend to set all our Precepts and Key Concepts in small caps.  Since my blog doesn’t do that, I’ll put them in ALL CAPS.  Ugh.  Bear with me.

And now, for something completely different

Posted on by Dale

Liberal rants are fun and all, but I want to refocus my efforts here on the original purpose of this blog: whining about my creative efforts.  (Don’t worry—the liberal rants will continue.  How could they not, with so much to rant about?)

To that end, I’m starting a series of posts about the book I’ve been working on, Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.  You get to suffer along with me.

This series will be a combination of excerpts from the book, moanings about my progress, and meditations on the advice offered in The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, which I picked up last weekend in Athens in my old friend Janet Geddis’ marvelous bookstore, Avid Bookshop.  Really and truly, if you live in the Athens area, you need to make her bookstore a regular stop on your route, because it’s lovely.  (There’s also a surprise about that purchase that I didn’t discover until I got the book home and started reading it; more about that later, much later.)

For those joining us from Facebook, please feel free to leave comments here rather than over there.  Your first one has to be approved, but after that it’s clear sailing.

I would start with some background, but since that’s Chapter 1, I’ll hold off.  So let’s start with the Introduction.

(For the record, this is a very scary thing for me.)

Cover.

(I just spent 20 minutes futzing with this image in order to avoid publishing this post. See how it works?)

Title page.

Copyright page.

Table of Contents:

  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Chapter One: Introduction to Lichtenbergianism
  • Chapter Two: Framework
  • Chapter Three: 1–Task Avoidance
  • Chapter Four: 2–Abortive Attempts
  • Chapter Five: 3–Successive Approximation
  • Chapter Six: 4–Waste Books
  • Chapter Seven: 5–Ritual
  • Chapter Eight: 6–Steal from the Best
  • Chapter Nine: 7–Gestalt
  • Chapter Ten: 8–Audience
  • Chapter Eleven: 9–Abandonment
  • Chapter Twelve: 10–The Tenth Precept
  • Conclusion
  • Appendices
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Introduction

 

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Dale Lyles.  I am, for lack of a better word, retired.

Before that, I was an educator for 37 years.  Most of that time I was a media specialist, teaching kids how to find and use information both at the high school and the elementary level.  For my last two years, I was the director of the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, a summer high school gifted program where I had worked for most of the 30 summers before that, about half of them as assistant director.

During all that time I was the artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company for 20+ years.  I directed, designed and built sets and costumes, and acted with more than 100 shows there.

I was a choir director for more than ten years.

I sing and I dance.

I paint and I draw.

I compose.

I write.

I design.

I program.  (Yes, I can build and program a FileMaker Pro™ database to do amazing things.)

Overall, therefore, I think it’s fair to say that I am a creative kind of guy.  (I also create cocktails, one of which—the Quarter Moon—ought to be in every bar in America.)

None of this is to say that I’m any good at any of the above (except for the Quarter Moon—it’s really really good, you guys) [1], but that’s not the point.  The point is that I have spent my life both creating and guiding others through the creative process, and I’ve learned a few things.

A lot things, actually.  I’ve learned a lot of things, and all of them point to my main idea here: you can do this too.

Who’s telling you can’t?  Let me give you a piece of advice right up front.  I call it the Lyles Eternal Truth About Actors, and I give this advice to any uncooperative or fearful actor: “There’s no such thing as an actor who can’t, only an actor who won’t.”

So if you want to write a symphony,  who’s going to stop you?  Getting it performed is another thing entirely and is outside the scope of this book, but no one can stop you from writing it.

No one can stop you from writing that novel, or forming a band, or creating a cocktail better than the Quarter Moon. [2] No one can stop you from blogging or taking photographs or painting or landscaping or whatever it is you would love to do but have been to afraid to start.

And the good news is you don’t have to do it today.  Or even tomorrow.  Procrastination is your friend.

By the way, it’s pronounced lish-ten-BERG-eeanism.

—————
[1] The Quarter Moon Cocktail: 1.5 oz bourbon, 1 oz Tuaca, .5 oz Averna Amaro.  Stir over ice, strain into old-fashioned glass over ice with orange peel garnish.  (You may also do it straight up in a martini glass.) The orange peel is essential.

[2] As if.

 

Grrrr

Posted on by Dale

I wish to make a complaint. And a confession.

I freely admit that I have not been assiduous in my composing. Part of it is being busy riding infuriating theme park rides, part of it is laziness, but—and here’s the complaint—a very large part of it is my keyboard.

It’s an M-Audio eKeys-49, a little 49-key keyboard controller. That is, it cannot produce sound on its own; it merely sends data to some other device when you play it. In my case, it sends data to the music notation software Finale.1

The problem is that it has stopped sending data to Finale. Or to SimpleSynth, the nifty little piece of software that I can use if I’m just noodling around and need sound out of the thing. Or to the computer’s MIDI Audio Setup app, which allows me to hook up this kind of thing or to check why it’s not hooked up.

It started getting flaky last year when I was working on A Christmas Carol, so much so that after I was done with that I really really avoided getting back on track with composing. It was too frustrating: I could input about five or six notes before the keyboard just lost its connection.

Today, as I started to work on a new song for Mike Funt because he really thinks I’m going to get that finished soon when in fact I started today, the keyboard completely lost it. I could play one chord, and not only would it drop off the map it also produced a “hung note,” requiring me to get to the menu to “turn off all notes.”

Blergh, as we say in the business.

Sometimes, especially with updates to the operating system and/or to Finale, it’s an issue of the driver needing to be updated. (That’s a tiny snippet of software that the system uses to make the equipment in question go.)

A brief moment on the googles was enough to show that M-Audio no longer supports the eKeys-49. Not only that, but a simple USB-connected keyboard usually doesn’t even need a driver.

tl;dr: my keyboard is officially an ex-keyboard.

What to do? I thought I would stop by Musicology to see if those guys had any recommendations for a keyboard controller that was affordable, but they don’t open till noon. I emailed them.

In the meantime, I went to the FacePlace and asked the hive mind, and within ten minutes I had some guidance. I found and have ordered the Korg microKEY2, 49-key version.2

Free shipping, it will be here Thursday, and then I can get back to whining about how hard it is to write Mike’s song.3

——————

1 Finale has its own issues. Grrr.

2 Just so you know, there are buttons on a 49-key keyboard that allow you to play the lower or upper octaves.

3 I mean, what do I know from Dixieland/gospel?

In which I grouse

Posted on by Dale

You may have wondered, if you are of an inquiring mind, whether there is anything on the planet as vapid, obnoxious, irritating, and offensive as a Michael Bay movie.

I am now able to assure you there is: a theme park ride based on a Michael Bay movie.

To wit: the Transformers 3D ride at Universal Studios Resort in Orlando. Sweet Cthulhu, what an indictment of humanity!

It did not help that during the supposed 30-minute wait the ride experienced “technical difficulties,” and so we were stuck in one room for an eternity listening to the same loud sound effects and storyline video without air conditioning or indeed circulating air. Or that this took place in mid-afternoon when I had about had it with all the intense joy generated by theme parks in general.

But my lovely first wife is for some unknown reason a fan of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, if I’m allowed to use the term in connection with a man whose entire output seems deliberately designed to kill off humanity’s fascination with plot once and for all. What Jorge of Burgos accomplished in The Name of the Rose1 with Aristotle’s missing treatise on comedy, Bay seems determined to do with the remainder of western civilization’s theory of drama.

And so I found myself dutifully accompanying my spouse into this disaster, knowing there was a possibility that I might not find it very enjoyable.

I did not find it enjoyable.

It may be that in the dim, dark future—and here I am thinking specifically of Idiocracy—Michael Bay will be hailed as a genius of filmic structure and this blog post will be included in one of those tidy anthologies of critical snipings that entertain us so today, e.g., the critic who called Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies, and in the Finale bleeding to death.”

Permit me to doubt it.

Full disclosure: I have never watched an entire Michael Bay movie, yet somehow I do not feel disqualified in assessing his skills as a storyteller. If you’ve seen one Transformers preview, you’ve seen the whole series.

So what exactly do I think about Transformers 3D: The Ride? It was loud, splattered over enormous screens, and visually incoherent.2 Perhaps aficionados of the genre could distinguish friend from foe, but I suspect that is beside the point. The visual field was simply filled with roiling bits and pieces, none of which ever stopped moving long enough to establish the who/what/when/where (and I understand that some consider this a feature not a bug.) Focus was always diffuse/split, and Bay seems to understand “pacing” to mean “sempre fortissimo e presto.” The whole thing was a brutal assault on both sense and sensibilities.

Lest you think that I did not enjoy this ride because I am an old fart, remember that I had waited even longer to ride Minion Mayhem earlier in the day, and it was essentially the same ride in terms of throughline and effects: swoops, jerks, reversals, zooms, bumps. But it was delightful: I laughed and giggled the entire ride. In Transformers 3D, I simply closed my eyes halfway through the ride to escape the boredom of the violence.

Likewise, even earlier in the day Harry Potter & the Escape from Gringott’s was a superb example of the exact same technology in service to a carefully crafted sequence of encounters.

So, yes, I am capable of enjoying a simulator/dark ride. Just not this one.

Here, for those who doubt me: https://youtu.be/4SQtBh_LCNs

And get off my lawn.

—————

1 RIP, Humberto Eco

2 In other words, a Michael Bay movie.

ULTIMATE SHAKESPEARE DEATH SMACKDOWN

Posted on by Dale

Oh, look, a not-rant!

Enjoy it while you can.

So, last month sometime, a bunch of Lichtenbergians were whooping it up in my living room, and I posited that we really ought to do something for the 400th anniversary of Bill Shakespeare’s death, since we missed the 450th anniversary of his birth two years ago, and now we have this to look forward to:

You find the rules/info at https://goo.gl/sVh9Uj, and the application form at http://goo.gl/forms/8N66OCs2WD.

Now to wrangle the Lichtenbergians into actually getting something prepared.

Interestingly, as I post this as a challenge to various people on the FacePlace, I find myself hesitating to enter into the spirit of the thing and talk smack.  (For example, the original title of this post was ULTIMATE SHAKESPEARE DEATH SMACKDOWN. [bitches], and I chickened out.)  So if nothing else, it will be an interesting acting exercise for me.

Mark your calendars.

A find

Posted on by Dale

Recently we traveled to Virginia to visit with the in-laws and to continue to help tidy up the old homestead in preparation for an eventual move, maybe perhaps.  One task this trip was clearing out the antique secretary in the living room (not to be confused with the antique plantation desk in the den), which meant looking through the collection of antique books contained therein.  I got an old edition of A Christmas Carol, and this:

What is it, you ask?  It is an actual field notebook, you guys!

For those of you just joining us, I am a huge fan of the Field Notes Brand notebooks, even going so far as to subscribe to their Colors quarterly special editions.  They are just the coolest ever; the recent Winter edition has a pure white cover that turns blue in the sunlight.  (I’ve written about them here and here and here.)

The company tells you on their website that they are paying homage to the old field notebooks given to farmers by one supplier or another as advertising, so when I opened my new find, I knew exactly what I had.

It has a leather cover, and I presume the front was stamped in gold which has faded.  The interior is fabric, cotton or linen, and you can see the stitching near the spine: that’s a pocket, both front and back covers.

The front pages are ads for Richmond Guano Co’s wares (fertilizers), followed by all kinds of helpful and inspirational platitudes.

The back pages are useful tables of yields and prices.  And the center…

…is the grid paper I’ve come to know and love as one of the papers used by Field Notes!  So cool, you guys!

It is unused, except for the top of that page on the left in the above photo and part of the last page of grid paper being torn out.  And finally…

It’s 115 years old.  Awesome.

Lichtenbergianism: an update

Posted on by Dale

When last we checked in on my progress, I hadn’t actually posted about my progress in writing Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.

So here’s your first real progress report.

If we posit a length of about 30,000 words—not a very long book—then I’m more than halfway there, having scribbled about 19,000 words.

The structure of the book is as follows:

  1. Introduction to Lichtenbergianism
  2. Framework
  3. Precept 1: Task Avoidance
  4. Precept 2: Abortive Attempts
  5. Precept 3: Successive Approximation
  6. Precept 4: Waste Books
  7. Precept 5: Ritual
  8. Precept 6: Steal from the Best
  9. Precept 7: Gestalt
  10. Precept 8: Audience
  11. Precept 9: Abandonment
  12. The 10th Precept
  13. Conclusion
  14. Appendices
    1. The Lyles Scale of Compositional Agony
    2. The Arts Speech
    3. The Invocation
    4. SUN TRUE FIRE

Also, I have begun and have almost finished an actual book proposal to start submitting to publishers, although first I’m going to run it by a friend who’s an editor with one of them fancy New York publishing houses to prevent self-embarrassmentation.

Having said that, though, I have to say that when I started looking at what I’ve written so far in terms of submitting sample chapters, a lot of it is still misshapen and raw.  Like the chapter on STEAL FROM THE BEST, what is that even about, Kenneth?  I’m thinking that I’ve passed that first gush of creativity and am now starting to hack my way into the real part of writing, i.e., psychic pain.  Physical pain.  Will the Lyles Scale of Compositional Agony apply to writing?  Stay tuned.