Category: writing

Creating something every day for 365 days: the writing

Piddling (Day 339/365)

Posted on by Dale

For some reason my brain would not engage today. For once I had gotten plenty of sleep, but nothing would make my head start working. I listened to the two songs from Moonlight a couple of times, but nothing new occurred to me. I thought about getting through another handful of pages in the Logic Express book, I’m only on page 141 out of nearly 600, but even just following instructions was too much.

Finally I decided to open up the lyrics for Moonlight and see if anything happened there. Nothing did, exactly, but I decided while I was in there I’d go ahead and create pages for each song.

I’ve been using a little program called CopyWrite to work on the lyrics. Why not just a word processor? I don’t know. This popped up at some point in my life, and its quasi-notebook approach seemed a good place to work. It allows me to scratch out lyrics in the writing window, and keep notes about the song in a little “drawer” out to the side, and since it’s a notebook, I have all the songs at my fingertips. It also allows writers to tag pages with things like “chapter,” “draft,” “character,” etc.

However, it has some shortcomings that have begun to bug me. For example, its text formatting is very limited, with no strikethrough, which is very odd for a project manager, I think. Changing the name of a page, from “Harrison’s song” to “Sheer Poetry,” for example, was a matter of right-clicking instead of just hitting enter like it is everywhere else in the Mac world. Lots of other little things as well.

The last straw was when I went to create a page for “We’ll Run Away” and it wouldn’t allow an apostrophe in the page title. That’s just stupid. CopyWrite saves all your pages as separate files in a project folder it creates, and Finder naming conventions do not prohibit apostrophes, so why was CopyWrite balking?

Online I go to look once again at Circus Ponies’ Notebook. I’ve been eyeing this program for a while, but every time I download it, I think that I really don’t need it. But now I think perhaps I do. I look at all the screenshots, I watch the rather long video tour, and I am impressed.

Just to make sure, I head over to MacLife’s website and double-check for all the similar programs. I’ve looked at most of them over the years, and none of them have ever gotten me excited enough to download them, and Notebook seems to have the edge. So I download it for at least a 30 day trial.

(It also occurs to me that Grayson might find the voice annotation function useful. I know if I were sitting in a political science class being conducted in German, I’d like to be able to take notes while recording the lecture for later listening, on a Cornell note-taking page, no less.)

So I spend most of my morning transferring the pitifully few lyrics I have from CopyWrite over to Notebook, and then tracking down my post where I list all the songs and transferring that information over.

Notebook doesn’t have a little drawer for notes on a page, but I decided to create a separate “divider” for the notes on the songs, then link them back and forth.

I can also drag the Finale files into the Notebook to link each song to its score. For “Sheer Poetry,” for example, I could drag a couple of poetry websites onto the page for quick reference.

All in all, not a bad decision.

In other news, the All-Campus Chorus concert was this afternoon. Vivaldi’s Gloria went off without a hitch, and then the orchestra played Smetana’s The Moldau and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, both of them fabulously. The Moldau especially is just a beautiful piece, a work of genius undimmed by its lush popularity.

And finally, tonight I taught my last Period Dance lesson for the summer, the “ragtime” dances: tango, foxtrot, Castle Walk. The kids have had a great time, and it’s been fun watching the regulars get into it. What’s really neat about the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice is how hard the kids will work to have fun. My heart is always especially warmed by the number of boys who show up every week to learn these dances. Next Sunday, the Grand Ball!

A little bit here, a little bit there (Day 331/365)

Posted on by Dale

Let’s see, I finished the additional material for the Big Ideas column, outlining exactly what GHP is like:

What is it we do here? In the past three weeks, I have seen classes in multicultural eschatology, cultural violence and Titus Andronicus, and “fuzzy billiard ball” math. I have heard concerts which included a full symphony orchestra, string quartets, 20th century songs using 14th century Dutch texts, and percussion kids banging out Rossini on tin cans.

I have watched seminars on Casablanca, “Life at Yale,” and how to waltz. I’ve seen theatre majors working on Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints and comedy improv. I’ve watched dance majors switch from ballet to hiphop in a heartbeat. I’ve listened to agscience majors describe how to palpate a cow and debate carbon neutrality as it affects agribusiness.

I’ve watched our students meet and bond and talk and laugh. I’ve watched them pack an auditorium to hear their new friends play chamber music. I’ve watched them crowd the circle between the dorms and dance their Saturday night away. I’ve watched them play soccer on the campus lawn, challenge each other at the math tournament, and perform “American Idol” in Latin. I’ve seen them as they slowly have become GHP.

I threw some ideas on paper for a third verse of “Love Song.” No real work on that, though. I still have to work on the melodic issues, plus come up with the bridge section of the song.

I got through another half of a lesson in Logic, learning to import audio files, MIDI tracks, etc. (Helpful hint: drag and drop.)

I found five more old MIDI exports of the Stars on Snow album material and imported two of them into Logic. I didn’t do anything with them other than to give them a quick listen to see if they were still worthy of my blockbuster new age album.

And then there is “Dance for Double Bass Duo.” I opened a Finale file yesterday and began playing with the idea of creating a piece for these unfortunate, lumbering instruments that won’t have the audience stifling giggles. The problem is multifold: the upper range is thin and powerless and hard to keep in tune; the lower range is impossibly low, more felt than heard, and melody is impossible. There’s a very narrow range in the middle where you can play a melody that is hearable and bearable. The strings are very thick, so they’re very sluggish, i.e., no quick runs and skipping about; because the strings are very long, getting from one note to the next (accurately) is a matter of a long reach, so again, no quick runs or skipping about. Double-stopping (playing two strings at once) is just about out.

As you can imagine, there is not a great amount of literature for these instruments to play solo, so what we’re usually subjected to is transcriptions of cello pieces or worse. This never works, taking a piece written for the most lyrical of instruments, the cello, and asking the poor behemoths to sing and dance to them.

So my intentions are noble, trying to write something that will accentuate the double bass’s strengths and avoid its weaknesses. The problem is that this is not at all easy to do.

However, today I gave up trying to actually write a piece and just started playing with melodic and rhythmic fragments, trying them out and hearing what the computer made of them. Fortunately, the GPO versions are very truthful, so I feel as if I’m getting a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. My intentions are to return to the piece tomorrow morning and really work on it, perhaps just forcing it out and surprising Stephen with it on Monday.

Finally, some time to work (Day 325/265)

Posted on by Dale

After I got the family on the road after lunch, I had some time to work before the Jazz Ensemble concert.

Today I started work on a column for Grant Wiggins’ Big Ideas website. Go ahead, click the link. I’ll wait.

Pretty astonishing, ne-c’est pas? The first time I went to the site, I was astonished. I wrote for them last year, and then they went on hiatus as they reorganized and rethought the website, so I was flattered when they got back in touch with me to write for them again. But I had no idea that I’d be featured quite so prominently.

So anyway, it’s time to produce again, so I pulled up my list of topics: “highly qualified” teachers; educational technology and the Red Queen; a national curriculum; or teaching about the Iraq war. Hmm.

Since I had forgotten that a column was due because time operates differently here in the Land of PDM, I suggested to my editors that I write a column about the LoPDM. They were intrigued and agreed.

This is harder than you think. How do you compress into a rather smallish column everything that GHP means to those who experience it? Worse, how do you make it interesting to those who haven’t? Even worse, how do you do it in your signature style of snark?

But at least I got a start on it. I’ll finish it tomorrow, with any luck.

Land of the PDM (Day 311/365)

Posted on by Dale

All is well here in the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice. Incredibly well, actually. I have a good staff, the copier is installed and working, everyone has a key to his/her classroom, and I even have my own parking space this year.

And today the pan-dimensional mouselings arrived. That also went smoothly: 700 students arrived on campus (complete with complete families), unloaded all their stuff, and got their cars out of the way, in about four hours.

And then, most miraculously of all, after the student orientation meeting, at which they were polite and attentive, all 700 of them went to the dining hall and were seated and eating supper in about twenty minutes! By the time I got there 45 minutes later, the crowd was actually thinning out.

After the horrors of last summer, with a copier that wouldn’t work even after being installed a week late (and in the men’s laundry room), and a dining hall under renovation so that we were fed in the Old Gym (poorly), and a host of other administrative nightmares, this is fairly Elysian.

Tonight, after the faculty met with their students for the first time, they came back to the dorm all rosy and optimistic, and I’d had about all the perfection I could stand. I reminded them of what Jeff Goldblum’s character says in Lost World: “Oh, yeah. ‘Ooooh, ahhh’, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s the running and screaming.”

And so it begins.

Temps perdu (Day 308/365)

Posted on by Dale

I may as well confess it, since Marc will blow my cover if I don’t: this post was written tomorrow.

The problem with the Land of the Pan-Dimensional Mice is that time is a mouse:

The Mouse Whose
Name Is Time

The Mouse whose name is Time
Is out of sound and sight.
He nibbles at the day
And nibbles at the night.

He nibbles at the summer
Till all of it is gone.
He nibbles at the seashore.
He nibbles at the moon.

Yet no man not a seer,
No woman not a sibyl
Can ever ever hear
Or see him nibble, nibble.

And whence or how he comes
And how or where he goes
Nobody dead remembers,
Nobody living knows.
–Robert Francis

And so today/yesterday passed with nothing creative from me. The Time Mouse ate it all up.

My great fear, and I knew this when I started this project last August 1, is that the rest of my days will be nibbled by the Time Mouse here at GHP. It’s entirely possible. I know for a fact that I will not, cannot, get anything done before next Thursday. It will be the first day of minors here, which outside the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice means “I will have 1:30-4:00 free.” It is realistically the only time I have to work on anything of my own: dawn to 1:30 is spent supervising the instruction here, plus lunch; 4:00-5:30, I usually am meeting with staff about the morning; 5:30-9:30, supper plus whatever evening activity is on; and 9:30-11:00, mopping up the day’s damage.

So I freely admit that today was a total miss. Or yesterday, depending on when you believe I wrote this.

Could have been worse, of course. I considered channeling Francis Urquhart and writing, “I was creative today in ways I cannot possibly talk about.”

Friends (Day 307/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today is always a wonderful day, although I feel as if I have been rolled down a hill. Today is the day the faculty arrives at GHP.

In so many ways GHP is like Brigadoon: we only exist once a year, and for a very brief time. (Weird thought popped into my head here: what happens if the village’s land has been developed into a strip mall or “lifestyle center” in the intervening 100 years?) The difference is that we don’t go to sleep and wake up a hundred years later. We actually live the time in between.

So we don’t just wake up and go about our business with our friends and relations. We haven’t seen them in 10 months, and today is the day we get to pick up our “other life” and continue with those who live it with us.

And it is an “other life.” Sometimes I feel like the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, members of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who poke only a tiny bit of their being into our universe (a bit that looks just like a mouse to us). I don’t think I am different at school or around town, but that most of who I am and what I do is never seen, or sensed, by people outside my immediate circle.

Here at GHP, however, we’re all pan-dimensional mice. We get to stretch our legs a bit without worrying about scaring the earth people. And it’s wonderful as people start showing up and checking in with me. It’s like a fabulous family reunion with a family that you actually look forward to spending six weeks with, if you can imagine such a thing.

Another difference between us and Brigadoon is that the villagers simply lived their everyday life. Our whole purpose, as pan-dimensional mice, is to set up an environment where extraordinary things happen. That makes for a certain anticipatory excitement in our gathering: what kind of students will we get this year? What kinds of wonderful things will they accomplish? What kind of spectacular crashings and burnings will we witness? How high will we fly, and how low will we go?

And so it begins.

Setting goals (Day 304/365)

Posted on by Dale

Enough whining. Having packed up my life for the next seven weeks, it’s time to move through this gateway and get back to creating.

Herewith are my goals for the summer:

  • Write at least three songs for Day in the Moonlight. I know I’ve got 15 or more to write, but given the realities of time at GHP, I’ll be lucky to get three done.
  • Learn how to use Logic Express. I’ve had this program since January and have yet to discover how it works. I bought a book, but haven’t had time to read it. I’ll do that this summer.
  • Contribute at least twenty-five items to the 100 Things to Do Before You’re 60 blog.

This doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ll be lucky to do this much. Time is our enemy at GHP, and I’m usually lucky to get two hours a day to call my own. Evenings are devoted to activities or working with faculty, and that’s my usual time for working. Sunday mornings are free, and I have been productive in the past during this time. Mostly, I have to get my brain trained to work during the afternoons, between 1:30 and 4:00, minors time, when everyone is in class and I’m not usually out observing.

61 days to go.

Pain (Day 298/365)

Posted on by Dale

A holiday. In this case, it means that I had a full day to clean house and to tackle the grinding noise of the new elliptical.

I had hoped that when we inserted batteries into the console, which thanks to the designers involves inserting D cell batteries up into the bottom of the console, that suddenly the magical magnets which create the resistance that will eventually turn my stomach flat and my chest into pure brawn, that those magnets would release their grip on the flywheel and we’d have no more grinding noise.

And of course that’s exactly what did not happen. By this time, I had vacuumed the house, and I had become aware that my lower back was not functioning. Probably something to do with all the bending over that goes along with assembling an elliptical on a previous occasion. Probably nothing to do with the mysterious numbness in my right arm spreading to my spine because it’s a dread disease that not even the estimable Dr. Ni suspects. Yet.

So now I was faced with kneeling, leaning, dismantling the heaviest bits of the machine, all with a lower back that refused to do anything but want to remain stationary. Not. A. Problem. I grabbed a footstool from one of the many pieces of furniture that for some reason have migrated to our basement from one or other in-law’s household (“It belonged to the Aunts” is the usual reason it is not sitting at Goodwill instead) and sat to my task.

After removing the hubcap, the pedal, and the flywheel cover, the problem was clear: the stanchion holding the flywheel was ever so slightly not upright. Bent, if you will. If I pushed against it with my foot, and somehow turned the wheel, the noise was gone.

So clearly what I needed to do was to provide enough pressure to bend a steel stanchion an eighth of an inch away from me without breaking anything it was attached to. With a nonfunctional lower back. Not. A. Problem.

I must confess that I also gave it a whack with a hammer. This was probably not a good idea, and I hope that in the future I am not startled by the entire flywheel assembly flying apart as I, buff and joyous, am charging along the path of most resistance.

But, hey, it worked. It whirs along with no noise at all now, other than the odd beeps from the console trying to give me information about something or other. If only my lower back were functioning; I might start getting buff.

Grumbling (Day 297/365)

Posted on by Dale

The saga continues.

Having left the elliptical machine in the back of my van overnight, I considered myself rested and completely up to the task of getting it out and hooking up the two or three main pieces of this thing. Ginny was going to go shopping for clothes, and I was going to get this thing together, maybe give it a whirl, and then spend some time actually taking a whack at a song or two for Moonlight.

Two or three main pieces: that’s what our very nice salesperson at Sports Authority, coincidentally named Dale, suggested we might find in the box. He was completely wrong.

There were a hundred pieces. The damned thing had to be completely assembled. Ginny apologized, then went shopping.

Understand that assembly holds no terror for me. My mechanical aptitude is higher than you might think, and the instructions were actually very clear, with life-size pictures of the screws and bolts, the most helpful thing ever. In fact, all the hardware came in a little egg-crate package, along with a piece of paper which told me exactly what was in which little compartment. Very nice.

All in all, it wasn’t bad. I did it outside so I could work in bright light and fresh air (rather than the dark corner where it will live, next to the litter box), and other than one tiny over-tightened bolt at the very end which prevented me from going back and putting on the pretty plastic piece which was supposed to be under that bolt, everything fit exactly as it should on a piece of precision equipment.

Still, it was four and a half hours of my time, time I had not intended to spend getting a piece of exercise equipment together. So you may imagine my feelings when I stepped on it and was greeted by a truly horrific grinding noise coming from the flywheel inside the plastic casing (the one part of the thing that came pre-assembled.)

I took a shower and made a vodka and tonic. Tomorrow is another day.