Category: writing

Creating something every day for 365 days: the writing

Typefaces and today (Day 42/365)

Posted on by Dale

I love typefaces. I love typefaces. I get an email from this company, and I go all quivery with type-lust. I want to fire up InDesign and make a big poster just to use the font.

Screw Times Roman and Helvetica, and don’t even talk to me about Arial or Comic Sans. Bleagh.

Give me Cyan …
or P22 Cezanne …
or High Society …
or Young Finesse …
or Leaf or…

You get the picture. When I was in high school, my girl friend actually gave me an ITC catalog for my birthday. It’s that bad.

So it was with great anticipation that for Christmas last year I gave myself a daily calligraphy calendar. Its premise was that every weekend it would give you a new typeface, and then the week would be spent lettering words that were grouped thematically. What fun, eh wot?

I should have been tipped off when the description on the back of the box simpered, “See if you can guess the theme for the week!” The typefaces were not very exciting, some of them required a brush and ink, not the kind of thing one wants to deal with in the bathroom first thing every morning, and some of them contained egregious errors, e.g., their attempt at an uncial font had a majuscule A and H rather than minuscule. (And you thought I couldn’t get worse.)

Not only that, but after six weeks, the typefaces repeated! What a rip-off! So I lost interest mid-February and have only desultorily pulled the looseleaf pages since then.

I was mildly curious this weekend, gazing on the umpteenth repeat of a swash style, as to what the theme would be this week, especially for today, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And it was therefore with slackjawed stupefaction this morning that I pulled the weekend’s page and saw today’s word: Airplane.

I am not easily shocked, as most of you know, but that was a weird way to begin the morning. The rest of the week had words like propeller, pilot, that kind of thing, but damn, people, did no one think? I would hate to be their email editor this morning.

I may have to go buy ArDeco or Chato Band just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

More 341 (Day 37/365)

Posted on by Dale

I guess Sunday’s editorial inspired me. There’s more:

So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest

this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter,
but even this cannot explain the sadder,
nagging feeling creeping up as we
zoom through the landscape. Inescapably,

we’re free in ways that go beyond the fact
that we are on vacation, overpacked
for condos, beaches, meals in brasseries,
regenerative sex. It’s more than these
that sets us on a road that’s so much more
than this deserted High Tech Corridor.

Others doing work (Day 36/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would think that I would have accomplished something on today, the 10% marker, but I didn’t really. I took a stab at adding another line or two to the poem:

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest

this thing? A hoped-for triumph over time,
this place, this culture, or some other kind
of booster shit? I rather think the latter.

But I think that hardly counts. (The next line will probably end with matter, of course.)

In the meantime, I explored some sites that have the same impulse as I, only a little more focused and a lot more successful:

Some are more successful than others, of course. Some are quite nice.

Hwy 341 (Day 34/365)

Posted on by Dale

Those of you who read the Atlanta Journal Constitution might have been amused or intrigued by the big editorial in this morning’s paper on the plight of schools in south-eastern Georgia: “Georgia Strands Its Rural Schools,” by Maureen Downey.

Her hook? “The four-lane highway leading into Hawkinsville in rural Pulaski County boasts an ambitious epithet: ‘Georgia’s High-Tech Corridor.’ But nothing along that stretch of U.S. 341 hints at a budding bastion of technology, unless you count the motorboat on blocks in somebody’s yard.”

We laughed. Apparently Ms. Downey missed the “boiled peanuts” sign.

The wrath of librarians (Day 25/365)

Posted on by Dale

So we’re down to eight planets.

In a cosmic game of Ten Little Indians, the International Astronomical Union has voted that to be called a planet, an object must be in orbit around a star, be big enough for its gravity to collapse itself into a round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

This vote on a topic contentious for the past year eliminates Ceres (an asteroid), and Xena (out in the Kuiper Belt) from the competition. It also knocks Pluto completely off the nation’s placemats. They are now lumped together under the new rubric dwarf planet. At least they escaped demotion to small solar system bodies.

Ah, well. C’est la astronomie.

Continue reading “The wrath of librarians (Day 25/365)” →

Head-spinningly complicated lives: a post (Day 20/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went for one of my walks this morning and sketched out an interesting B theme for the symphony, so I was going to post about that, I really was, but then the Times splashed all over its SundayStyles section a story I absolutely could not not write about. Kevin, cover your ears.

Above the fold is a huge photograph of a happy family, a happy toddler being tickled by the handsome dad, the warm-looking mother smiling into the camera on the sidelines. The headline is The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack, and the feature is about transgendered men: women who surgically become men. The dad, Shane, used to be Sharon.

Continue reading “Head-spinningly complicated lives: a post (Day 20/365)” →

More poetry (Day 19/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went back and worked on that missing line in the second stanza:

A trip, vacation time, a deep design
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.

Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear,
a proclamation unexpected here.
It’s almost past me, gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing?

More poetry (Day 17/365)

Posted on by Dale

More work on the 341 poem:

A trip, vacation time, a deep desire
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.

Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear.
– / -/ -/ -/ – here|clear|near
It’s almost past me, gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing?

On getting old: a post (Day 16/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’m now officially old.

I know, everyone will roll their eyes. How can I be old? I don’t look old. People younger than I look years older than I do. I don’t act old. There are people who now have tattoos who wouldn’t if it were not for my influence.

But I’m old. Yesterday, I proudly put on my rear windshield the obligatory sticker: Guilford Dad.

I could have chosen just a plain Guilford decal, or one that said Guilford College, or one that had their new oak tree logo next to the name. But with a strange feeling in my stomach, I bought the one that says what I am: Guilford Dad.

I’m not as old as the doctor from Louisville, 73, who has seven sons: the oldest is 41 and the youngest, 18, now at Guilford. This is a man who obviously does not know when to quit.

But I’m old enough to be qualified by a rear window decal: Dad. Someone who is old enough to send an ungodly amount of money to a wonderful college to educate his son. And clearly someone who is proud of his son for making it possible for him to send an ungodly amount of money to this institution.

Yes, he slacked his way through high school, preferring to come from behind for a finish that was “good enough,” and I’m worried sick that he has shortchanged himself in preparation for the tough courses ahead of him, but he’s smart, he’s funny, he’s kind, and he’s good. He’ll be okay. He’ll be better than okay. Of course, if he would email or call, I’d know right now how okay he was. See, I am old.

I feel like Monet in his garden, or Charles Ives after he quit composing. I don’t know why; their old age issues had nothing to do with sons. They just spring to mind. With any luck, I can be Monet and keep working, instead of Ives, who didn’t.

Further work on the 341 poem (Day 8/365)

Posted on by Dale

A trip, vacation time, a deep desire
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.

Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear.
– / -/ -/ -/ – here|clear|near
It’s almost past me, almost gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.