Category: writing

Creating something every day for 365 days: the writing

Mugshots: No whining!

Posted on by Dale

And I mean it.

This mug is actually more ritual than neurosis.

I found this mug in the gift shop at Montreat, the Presbyterian mountain conference center.

As usual, a little history: growing up at First Baptist, I was aware of Ridgecrest, where Baptists had their summer music camps.  I never went to one, and I’m not sure why.  It’s possible that my family could not afford it, and very probable that I was too insecure to go to something like that.  (Maybe there is more neurosis here than I thought: I was in many ways a blighted child.)

Montreat is right over the ridge from Ridgecrest, and I became aware of it while serving as music director for Newnan Presbyterian Church, a position that I discovered I had been appointed to while I was away at GHP in 1990.  Because of GHP, though, I was not able to attend that music camp either.

However, in 1995 I was not doing GHP, and it was decided that the church would send me to Montreat.  I was actually excited about this: a week in the mountains with 300 musicians, studying music and conducting and arranging. Plus, we got to sing!

There was a select chorus, but you had to send in an audition tape, and I was too insecure to do that. When I got there, though, it seems that a lot of people were too insecure to do that, because they were having auditions the first afternoon.  So I went, and I made it into the group.  That was cool, because we were singing the Duruflé Requiem and a couple of other pieces, and our conductor was a British man whose name I forget—he was John Rutter’s conductor.

There was also Alice Parker—yes, Alice Parker of Robert Shaw/Alice Parker fame—and she was awesome.

Anyway, on Wednesday, I got a phone call: Ginny’s paternal grandmother died.  I had to leave to drive to Abingdon for the funeral.  The only time in my life that I got to go to music camp, and I couldn’t even stay.  Not that I’m bitter or anything.

So, the mug: I found it in the gift shop at Montreat and I snapped it up.  It’s perfect for a church choir director, of course, because choristers are notoriously whiny.  I won’t say mine were.  I will not say that.  Just not going to say that.

Two years later, I was the assistant program director for instruction for the Georgia  Governor’s Honors Program, and as I was packing for the summer this mug made the cut to go.  It became my ritual to bring the mug with me to the first staff meeting on Thursday morning while wearing my Space Ghost “Don’t make me use the spank ray!” t-shirt.  Those two items were my staff management policies in a nutshell, and I think they were effective: a firm hand, but a light touch.  [Jobie, do not go there.]

Whining is pointless and should be stamped out wherever it occurs.  Whining is, as far as I’m concerned, just a way to tell me that you don’t want to be there, and for GHP staffers I can make that happen.

Whining is not bitching.  Bitching is OK, because bitching is targeted.  Bitching can identify a problem that I will then invite you to help solve.  Feel free to bitch to me.  But whining?  Go do that somewhere else.

And please don’t be like Jobie, who strives to provoke me into using the spank ray.  Such a nerdvert…

Mugshots: Ask Dr. Science!

Posted on by Dale

Here’s a fun one:

This mug was always part of the grand prize at the NCTC interactive dinner theatre murder mysteries.  It came from the inimitable Archie McPhee in Seattle, and yes, we visited the home store on the same trip we bought my new kilt in 2010.  It was nerd heaven.

I actually have two of these.  I think I ordered one to be a prize in a putative You Don’t Know Jack tournament in the faculty dorm at GHP, but that never came off and so now I have two.  I’d be willing to part with it, so first come, first served!

Dr. Science is a wonderfully snarky anti-anti-science humor site/column/blog/radio bit with the tagline, “Ask Dr. Science!  He knows more than you do—he has… a master’s!”  I’d hear him every now and then on NPR, and occasionally his column would run in the Funny Times (which, if you do not subscribe to, you should).

I was thinking when I started this post that there wasn’t really any neurosis or ritual associated with the mug, but upon reflection I see that there is plenty.

Just carrying this mug around invites multiple meanings, all inhabiting the mug at the same time.  First is the literal statement which just dares people to confront you with your hubris.  Of course, when you’re carrying the mug at an elementary school, it’s even more fraught: the kids giggle because it’s true, and your fellow faculty members have a tendency to get a little defensive.  (Sidenote: it is always amazing to me how the general public assumes that because you teach children their ABCs and 2 +2= 4, your mental capacity must be somehow commensurate.  When I announced I was leaving East Coweta High School for Newnan Crossing, I had people actually ask me if I were taking a pay cut.  No, really, we’re not paid by how tall they are.  At any rate, the people I worked with at the Crossing were amazing; there are more than a couple I would hire for GHP if they had the content I was looking for. Never ever underestimate the elementary educator.)

Where was I?  Daring people to challenge you on your genius: without putting my hubris on display overmuch, I risk even more of a reaction, because people automatically assume that I think that I do know more than they do.  (It doesn’t help that in many many cases I do.)  I would never carry this mug to a family gathering because the response would be vicious and neverending.

Which means that another layer to the mug is the false modesty that any of us with any brains are familiar with.  One has a hearty chuckle with the person reading the mug, assuring them that, you know, it’s a funny mug, isn’t it?  You show them the other side: see, it’s a catchphrase, that’s all.  Social comity is maintained.

And there’s another layer undercutting said comity: the hipster NPR in-the-know-ness of it all.  I may not know “more” than you, but I do know who this clever descendant of Firesign Theatre is.  And you don’t, you sad little man with your blinkered worldview.  And I shift the handle back to my right hand. Heh.

Mugshots: Utilikilts

Posted on by Dale

Freedom!

Here you see the triskelion-like logo of Utilikilts, built from its motto of “Form Follows Function.”  The mug came from the Seattle home store and was brought to me by Kevin McInturff.  He called and offered me the choice of a mug or a t-shirt, and one of my neuroses is that I’m pretty sure my torso in a t-shirt does not do justice to the product.  But I can rock a coffee mug.

My love affair with these sturdy masculine unbifurcated garments began when my son decided he wanted to wear a kilt to his senior prom, and that idea came from our trip to Scotland in 2003.  Actual tartan kilts are very expensive, and so of course I went to the web to find a kilt rental service. The wonders of the internet being what they are, I found several services in Atlanta, but I also came across the Utilikilt.

[Synchronicity break: the man from whom we rented the kilt was from Athens, and so he met us at St. Phillip’s Cathedral in Atlanta—where he was playing a music gig—so Grayson could try on a couple of kilts for size.  He had his young son with him.  While Grayson was in the men’s room, I wandered over to peek into the gorgeous sanctuary.  As I approached it, out came Mozelle Christian, who was the founder of the State STAR Student program.  I had not seen her in a couple of years, but I recognized her immediately and she me. (For those who do not know, I was Barbara Petzen’s State STAR Teacher in 1983 and have chaired the selection committee for about 20 years.)  Four or five years later, the inevitable bagpiper at GHP (we always have one, and yes, he wears his kilt) was the young son of the kilt guy.  It’s like living in a novel, guys.]

Anyway, I offered to buy Grayson a Utilikilt for graduation, since he was heading off to the dirty freaking hippie school of Guilford, and he accepted, choosing the Survival model.  I was already at GHP that summer (2006) and as I was getting ready to hit the Order button, I decided I wanted one too. I ordered the Mocker, since it was a little dressier than the other models.

The dressier styling was important, since I intended to wear it about the campus, which I did as soon as it arrived.  Instant sensation, of course: the GHPers were thrilled and intrigued, and I was cool.

As the years have gone by, I added an Original to my wardrobe, and Grayson handed over his Survival, which I now use for yard work.

These things are immensely comfortable, and the pockets are capacious, especially the Survival model.  At GHP, it has become my trademark so much that I come across things like “You know you’re not at GHP any more when you wonder why your assistant principal isn’t wearing a kilt” on the internet, or a student in Jobie Johnson’s class at Gwinnett School of Math, Science & Technology whispers to me, “You’re not wearing your kilt?”, or when at a STAR Student Banquet one of the Regional STAR winners bounces up to me and blurts out, “Mr. Lyles, I didn’t realize you were the kilt guy!” in front of my brand new DOE boss.

Now there are two other faculty guys who wear their kilts during the summer, though theirs are more traditional style, and as I mentioned, there are always at least one or two boys who bring their dress kilts and wear them to evening events.  We’re all cool.

This daring sartorial display is completely neurotic of course: every summer, I take a deep breath before heading out the door the first time, because I know that I risk 1) being ridiculous; and 2) being called out on it, if not by GHP kids, then by the many other types inhabiting the campus.  And of course I know that I look nothing like the men in the photos that Utilikilts.com decides to publish on its website, mainly because they’ve never published any photo I’ve sent in.

Utilikilts vision:

Me:

Like I said, they’re comfortable.

My wearing of this garment at GHP is also a ritual: it’s one of the many ways we shake the kids out of their presumptions about their reality.  If the director of the program is wearing a skirt, along with half the science department, we’re not in Kansas any more.  They begin to learn the GHP lesson that different is gooder than nice, or whatever it was Sondheim said.

Another ritual with the kilt: at Newnan Crossing, I would raise money for Relay for Life by challenging the car riders to donate $500—and if they did, I would direct car rider traffic in my kilt.  If the rest of the school chipped in another $300, I’d wear it all day:

So why do I keep the Utilikilt mug?  Because it is a talisman of my macho, cool, comfortable kilt.  You wish you had one.

Mugshots: BookCrossing

Posted on by Dale

You know how some things catch your eye and your heart, and they seem like a really important idea—because they are—but after a while you really forget you were ever a part of them?

BookCrossing.com is one of those ideas for me.

The idea is very simple: after you read a book, register it at BookCrossing.com with its own unique number, and then release it in a public place (which you have noted in the release notes online).

Others will find it and take it to its new home, whereupon they—reading both the bookplate and the bookmark you’ve left inside—will go online and let the world know they’ve picked it up.  Then they’ll release the book, and we weave a comfortable web of like-minded readers across the globe.

I did this quite assiduously for nearly five years  I ordered the official kit of stickers and bookmarks and bookplates (although none of that is necessary) and was quite supportive of the cause.

Generally I would release my books across the street from my house on the low concrete wall.  I think maybe once someone registered them, although they were all taken within 24 hours or less.

And of course I ordered the mug.  I’m all about supporting the cause if it means a mug.

My member name was theOtherDale, because some jerk somewhere had already claimed Dale, even though he had not released a book in years.  Jerk.  But I’m still there.  It seems I released 45 books altogether, the last on September 17, 2009, although its record says TBR, “to be released.”  That’s The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, and now that I think about it, I may have loaned it to a Lichtenbergian.

Before that, though, we have to go back to December, 2008, to the last book I actually released: One: the Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership.  I didn’t like it,  I find.

So what did I release?  Wizard of Earthsea, a couple of Wodehouses, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, Rules for Old Men Waiting, East Side Story, Lucky Jim, The Known World, The March.  Award winners, many of them.

Ah, February House, a non-fiction work which is now apparently a very appealing chamber musical.

An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth, which should be a movie.

Wicked, which ought not to be a musical, at least not that one.

More of course, but enough of listing.

So, neurosis and ritual…

Part of the charm for this… ritual… is the idea that I get to show off the depth and breadth of my reading.  Philosophy, National Book Award winners, Booker Prize winners, witty British humor—see who I am, you passersby?  And what a pleasant frisson for you, dear stranger, to go online and find that the book you have picked up, perhaps guiltily even though it’s clearly labeled as traveling, was sent into your life by Dale Lyles.  You know, the theatre guy, and doesn’t he do Governor’s Honors in the summer?

Clearly not, since no one who ever picked up a book made it their business to register it.

Is that why I stopped doing it?  I don’t think so—I think I just stopped buying so many books and reading them. And the ones I did buy and read I started to pass around to my friends.  You will note that the Lichtenbergians were founded right about the time that I stopped.

When the downtown Carnegie opened again, I suggested to the persons vested in that venture that it would make an excellent BookCrossing Zone, because I think the concept comes closer to saving the world when it’s centralized in some way.  People have to know where to find the books, and I’m sure it’s useful to be a regular at some spot.  I thought the Carnegie would be excellent, but the coffee shop downtown would probably be better, as would Redneck Gourmet, actually.

But I have failed to become the local champion.  I am not alone, as can be seen when Hunting for a book in Georgia.  Lost steam there somewhere.  It now appears you can link your  BookCrossing account to your Facebook account—I wasn’t even a member of  Facebook the last time I released a book.

Still, it was a pleasant thing to do, and a gracious way to get rid of books you had no further need of—or indeed, that you didn’t like and had no intention of finishing.  I keep the mug to remind myself that if I got serious about cleaning out books again, I have a noble way to do that.

 

Mugshots: Essays in neurosis and ritual

Posted on by Dale

I know, Marc is salivating already.  (Well, he’s drooling, let’s put it that way.)

As noted elsewhere, I am at a standstill in my creative life.  Not only am I not working on anything, I have no impetus to work on anything.  It’s very curious.

This is despite the fact that I do have the percussion piece due sometime next month.  But am I fretting?  No, and that’s what worries me.

So, in order to grind out something just so I can make my brain/soul cry out in agony to stop it already I’ll work on the freakin’ percussion piece and the Five Easier Pieces and even oh god oh god oh god the symphony, I am forcing myself to write a series of posts on mugs in my kitchen cabinet.

Yes, you read that right.  Mugs. In. My. Kitchen. Cabinet. As it must appear to you, I am desperate.

A little background: one bare year ago, when I was still checking out books to kindergarteners and pretty much loving it, my morning routine would consist of having one cup of coffee while I answered emails, and then a second cup as I drove to school.  I would not have finished the second cup by the time I got to school, and so I would take it inside and finish it as I got into the morning.  The next morning, I would repeat with a different mug.

Eventually, after a week or two, I’d have more mugs at school than at home, so I’d bring a Tupperware® tub to school and bring them all back home, wash, rinse, repeat.

These mugs were collected over time and filled a shelf in the kitchen cabinets, stacked double.

However, when I started the job in Atlanta, I realized that juggling a mug of coffee up the Interstate was a rather different deal than tootling over to the Crossing, and so I switched over to my Lichtenbergian travel mug, which was safer and kept the coffee warm.

This left the other mugs stranded high and dry, and I didn’t often use them any more.  (There is a second shelf of hand-made mugs that I generally prefer to use on weekends—we’ll do a series on the neuroses involved there.)

And of course my lovely first wife asked why those mugs were taking up so much room if I were not going to use them.  Why not get rid of them?

The answer was, of course, that I couldn’t.  They weren’t random, they were collected, and each represented something.

But what? The question hangs in the air.

So now a series of essays in which I examine these mugs and try to explain why they still mean something to me.  I’m actually a fairly uninteresting person, neurosis-speaking-wise, but I’ll try to make it worth reading.

(Ironically, as I dragged out all the mugs on the shelf to take photos of them, I found that nearly half of them held no meaning whatsoever to me. Ha.)

The Parable of the Great City

Posted on by Dale

Once a man returned from the dead and began to tell his friends what had befallen him.

“I rose from my body,” he said, “and I was grateful to be free finally of the suffering of life. I could see you all standing over my body, stricken with what seemed to be grief, but I felt nothing but gratitude.

“I did not move. I did not go towards a light. There did not seem to be a light. On the contrary, as I hovered in the room, everything seemed to fade away. I cannot say how long it took, whether it were a long time or short, but eventually the room was gone and I found myself in a vast darkness that was nonetheless bathed in light.

“I felt no fear. There were with me countless others, suspended in the great void. There may have been a sound of singing, or music of some kind. I cannot tell now. I do not remember silence.

“All were moving towards what appeared to be a boundary of some kind. As we moved, I began to see what transpired as the souls reached that line.

“Some began to rise, slowly at first, but then more and more rapidly, to a great city that shone above us, from which a great light streamed and into which those souls entered. Others upon reaching the boundary gave a tremor and before our eyes seemed to unwind like great sheets of fabric twisted after washing in the river, their bodies changing in an instant into great swaths of gossamer, which then dissipated into the void and vanished with a whisper.

“Still I did not fear, but slowly approached the line and awaited my fate: the beautiful city, or nothingness?”

The man’s friends broke in excitedly. “Clearly we see your fate! You were elected to the city, to the beautiful city, for if you had suffered dissolution you would not now be here.”

The man replied, “It is as you say. I am in the beautiful city, I and all the other elect, where we live for ever.”

His friends rejoiced. “Praise be to those who made us and taught us to worship correctly! We see now the right path to eternal bliss. If we follow the teachings of our prophets and the writings of our scribes, we too shall join you in heaven after we die!”

But the man cried out, “No, my brothers, do not rejoice for me, for I am in hell.”

The perfect life

Posted on by Dale

I said yesterday I would write in more detail about my complicated relationship with the journal-effort that I’m calling A Perfect Life. It’s complicated.

First of all, a reminder of the physical object I’m talking about:

It’s a beautiful thing, a leather-bound journal with probably 120 pages or so of nice paper. I bought it at the Renaissance Festival two years ago with the intent of using it for something literary.

Eventually my intent coalesced around an idea that’s bugged me since childhood. When I was a kid, I had a burning curiosity to know how people lived in the past—not just “they lit candles instead of turning on lights,” but “What kind of underwear did they wear?” “How did they cook a meal?” “What did they do to be liked by each other?”

So I began to think about writing a nonfiction piece that would detail what it was like to live my life, i.e., an upper middle class white male of the late 20th/early 21st century American small town culture. To be sure, I am atypical. I won’t be writing about playing golf or dinners at the club or bedding the neighbor’s wife. There will be a lot more about gourmet cooking and music and architecture and the underpinnings of our social structure and examinations of my privilege.

Why didn’t I get started on this project this summer? Why didn’t I open the damned thing the day after I bought it and start scribbling in it? It’s not as if it’s the Red Book of Westmarch, although that’s exactly what it’s going to be, only without, you know, heroic quests and the passing of ages.

And I’d hold off judgment on the “passing of ages” thing as well. I’m not sure but that the world as a whole and the U.S. in particular is entering a new, more painful stage. It may be that the life I’ve lived will never be possible again, and it would be interesting to have a simple account of that life.

So why didn’t I start this project this summer? I know exactly why: the blank page. What is the first thing I need to write in this book? It is not my intention to create a “finished” book, i.e., that when I’m done all a publisher would have to do is photocopy it. I mean for it to be fragmentary, first-draft, exploratory. But where do I start?

Perhaps the answer lies in the Red Book: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.”

Can this be true?

Posted on by Dale

This is a conundrum. Every day I receive The Writer’s Almanac daily email, and usually I read the title of the poem and plunge straight into the poem without seeing the poet’s name.

If the poem is striking, even in part, I play a little game with myself: is the poet a man or a woman? Is it possible to tell the poet’s gender through his/her use of language, choice and treatment of topic, attitudes?

I’m not talking about gender-specific poems, just general life kinds of things that could rationally have been written by either sex. (And of course, as I always remind students, the voice of the poem is not necessarily the voice of the poet: Was dear Emily actually dead when she heard that fly buzz?)

It is astonishing to me how often I am correct in my guesswork. Is there a gender-based difference in poetics? Or is Garrison Keillor just drawn to poems that reflect the poet’s sex?

Nothing to say

Posted on by Dale

I keep thinking I need to write more. I keep wanting to write more. But I don’t. Dozens of quick ideas float into and out of my head every day, but I don’t get them out of my head and into the blog. Perhaps I need to do just one-liners until something real pops out.

I’ve been working on a post about Beethoven’s symphonies, but it’s hard to put into words. Maybe this week.

In the meantime, I just came across this poem hidden away on my computer. Weirdly enough, I remembered it earlier in the week and was wondering where I had stashed it. I wrote it when Garrison Keillor had a sonnet contest, and then promptly forgot about it. It was in a program called WriteRoom, a fabulous little program that I used for a while when I had to write without distractions, the purpose of which was to completely blank out your screen with the page. Just you and the words.

And then today I was showing Summer Miller all the little writing programs I had littering my hard drive, and when I opened WriteRoom, up popped all these little notes I had completely forgotten about, including the poem.

So, until I write something real, here’s a poem:

My back yard. Night. The vernal equinox.
We sit, all men, around a fire of oak
and last year’s Christmas tree. Our talk unlocks
our thoughts, and musings sift through light and smoke.
We drink. We talk: our lives, and what’s to do.
We talk of art and music, God and cause.
Someone’s removed his shirt. Now I have too.
I don’t know why this comforts, but it does,
to sit bare-chested, flesh exposed like mind
around the crackling light. Another drink,
I want to know if all these thoughts behind
these other chests can make me see, not think.
These men I love, and more than that, require:
we slowly start to move around the fire.

The last two lines should be indented, of course, but html prevents that.