Category: Lichtenbergianism

Meditation: From separation to serenity

Posted on by Dale

One reason I have not been faithful to the “daily meditation” thing is that the meditations in A Quiet Strength are just so sappy. I knew they were, and I figured I would either react to the sentiment therein or just use the title for my own purposes. But the overwhelming blue-ness of it all gets to me.

I know everyone is wondering how much I accomplished on the labyrinth today, and the answer is nothing. Coriolanus rehearsal all morning, of course, and then I got home and realized that there’s nothing more to do until I learn how to lay paving bricks.

Sure, Home Depot has instructions, but they’re mostly for nice, rectangular areas. Plus which, the actual installation, rectangular or not, involves skills and equipment I don’t have yet. One has to excavate the earth to a depth of two and a half inches, how exactly does one do that? The paving stone catalog says you then till the soil to mix in concrete to form a base. I’m not going to do that: too expensive, too permanent. Then everyone agrees you add an inch of sand, pounding into place with a pounder thingie.

I am under no illusion that this is a one, two or even three-day job. This is a year-and-a-half job. Either I pound that sand with a pec-inducing hand pounder, or I find a way to buy or rent a machine to do that. You can see the rental fees mounting up, but buy one? Sheesh.

Then the circularity of the thing. I know I have to buy/rent a bandsaw to cut curved stones. Again, sheesh.

Then there’s the actual purchase of heaven knows how many tons of paving stones. Yes, tons. One pallet of stones will cover 144 square feet, and it weighs over 2,000 pounds. I don’t have the math skills even to estimate how many square feet this thing is. Kevin?

My interior argument is to go ahead and get started, and by October 25, I can play freaking Aufidius with my shirt off. Let’s see if that happens.

So, anyway, today’s meditation.

The gist of the book’s little screed is that we’re all wounded fellows, don’t you know, who have been abandoned or left to die or something, and that if we just stand tall, and I mean that as a Shakespearean pun, so snicker away, we can all avoid the trap of drugs and destructive behavior. Or something.

You see what I mean?

All right, let’s give this a shot. Grown ups, in the Lylesian sense of the word, figure out soon into their adolescence, if not before, that we’re all alone in this together. Further, it does no one any good to bewail our lonely state in the universe. After all, what does the universe care for our wailing?

(Side note: if there is a God, the same applies. What does s/he care for our wailing? Even if she’s an all-loving God, her attitude would have to be like those of us who have slept through our baby’s insistent screams. At some point, God figures, we have to figure out for ourselves how to get through the night.)

Yes, we’re alone, and yes, it hurts. That’s why I have my family, my kitchen, my music, my blog, Lacuna, the Lichtenbergians. That’s why we have Art. We can amuse ourselves with these connections while waiting for the universe to come to our rescue. Which, as grown ups, we know is not going to happen.

So that “serenity” arrived at by the poor hurt creatures in A Quiet Strength should be the natural state for all of us grown up men. It’s false, of course. I don’t think we can ever shake that sense of wanting to be whole with the universe, but as long as we know that we can pass the time with all these distractions, and that that’s what they are, then I think we can figure out how to get through the night.

Now I think I’ll go light a fire in the labyrinth and sip my martini.

91 days: no progress

Posted on by Dale

After a late night last night at the Venetian Ball, a fundraiser for the Centre and a whole lot of fun, I was in no shape to work seriously on the symphony, despite not having touched it in days.

This afternoon I opened it up and toyed with the harmonies in the Grandiose Bit. I’d been thinking that the three repetitions of the two-measure phrase was just a bit too repetitious, so I played with changing the middle repetition a bit.

It didn’t really work, but that was because I’ve had my laptop in the living room all weekend instead of upstairs, where I can actually figure these things out on the keyboard. Changing one chord was such a mess that I decided against playing with it any further and reverted to the original. Maybe tomorrow or Tuesday I’ll try again.

Later in the evening I worked on the Lichtenbergian website, adding the seal to the header, and the author to each post. That actually took a while, because CSS/PHP is cranky. But now we know who wrote each post, at least.

I have been most impressed with my fellow Lichtenbergians’ mock exposés of themselves. Varying degrees of outrage and satire abound. I am actually keenly awaiting the exposés of some members who are in reality the more outrageous of us all: Matthew, Mike, Craig and Jobie. If they don’t post by the middle of the week, perhaps the rest of us can write one for them.

95 days: Busy, busy

Posted on by Dale

A preview of what I have on my plate tonight:

  • cooking supper
  • paying bills, planning my finances for the next few months
  • putting together a video of our hearing-impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for Friday morning’s announcements, complete with closed-captioning for those who are not hearing-impaired
  • my exposé of me for over at lichtenbergian.org
  • a job description of the GHP media position, plus communicating with our three applicants, which I should have done over the weekend
  • laying out the program for this weekend’s concert of Fauré’s Requiem, if I get the rest of the info from Bizarth
  • writing letters of reference for some GHP instructors
  • perhaps some work on the symphony

I’ll have updated results later.

later: I got the first three done. Cras melior est.

96 days

Posted on by Dale

All right, what gives?

In the past two days, we have…

  • Misha Defonseca, 71, Belgian, whose memoir (Surviving with Wolves) about her fleeing from Nazis and being sheltered by wolves was, oddly, fiction. Not real. “It is not actually reality,” she pleads, “but my reality, my way of surviving… I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost.” Her real name appears to be Monique De Wael.
  • Margaret B. Jones, 33, whose “critically acclaimed memoir” Love and Consequences is not in fact about her life, given that she grew up in a well-to-do nuclear family in an affluent suburb, not in foster homes in gang-riven South-Central LA. “I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Jones. “I did not do it right.” Her real name is in fact Margaret Seltzer.
  • Robert Irvine, 42, celebrity chef of Dinner Impossible on Food Network (‘ware, Marc!), is not in fact a British knight, owner of a castle in Scotland, or chummy with Prince Charles. He felt pressure “to keep up with the Joneses,” he said. Whether he meant Margaret B. Jones is unclear, and Robert Irvine is apparently his real name.

This is preposterous. What is with people, that they seek fame and fortune by creating stupendously bogus lives? Certainly, I wish I lived a more exciting and monetarily rewarding life, but on the whole my life is pretty glamorous as it is. And anything I concocted would be shot down in less time than it took for Margaret Seltzer’s sister to see her photo in the New York Times and call the publisher to blow the whistle.

As Georg C. Lichtenberg says, “Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. (D.25)” So here’s your assignment, Lichtenbergians: hie thee over to the Waste Book and create the news story (in the Times, of course) about your newfound fame collapsing because of your outrageous lies have been detected. Make sure to include your excuses/apologies.

97 days

Posted on by Dale

It being a Monday, I didn’t get any work done on the piece, other than listening to it in the car going here and there.

The other reason I got not a lot done is that lichtenbergian.org finally came through: whatever Noah’s been tied up with finally let him loose enough to give me access to the domain. Within minutes hours I had our blog up and running, including the beginnings of a huge collection of Georg Christoph’s aphorisms.

So, Lichtenbergians, pile in.

Applaudity

Posted on by Dale

I wish lichtenbergian.org were up and running, because this entry really belongs there. (Noah received his weekly reminder yesterday; I have heard nothing from the man. My lips are pursed and eyebrows raised.)

My old-word-of-the-day calendar provided us this weekend with applaudity: clapping hands for joy, from Henry Cockeram’s 1623 Interpreter of Hard English Words. One can imagine the wheels already turning in Lichtenbergian brains.

Anyway, the main Lichtenbergian aspect of the word is the attached historical trivia:

On February 9, 1810, long before the plot for The Producers was conceived, arguably the world’s worst actor, Robert Coates (1772-1848), made his English stage debut in Bath. His portrayal of star-crossed Romeo in a flowing Charles II wig got the crowd tittering, and soon afterward they roared uncontrollably at the sound of the seat of his tight red pantaloons splitting. He changed dialog outrageously, used inappropriate cadence, whispered soliloquies inaudibly, conversed with spectators, and greatly exaggerated Romeo’s death throes. Afterward the audience demanded an encore, shouting, “Die again, Romeo!” Coates obligingly repeated his ridiculous routine, and would have done so again had his furious Juliet not exited in disgust. Soon thereafter, Coates was playing to royalty and packed houses in London, where he developed a loyal following and corresponding prosperity. He enjoyed being seen in his gaudy, kettle-shaped carraige adorned with his trademark cock and his motto, “While I live I crow.” [ed: shame on you all!!!] Ironically, he died under the wheels of a more modest hansom cab.

An inspiration for us all.

Update

Posted on by Dale

Still no word from Noah on the website. Very odd. Perhaps he’s imbibed from the Lichtenbergian wellspring of procrastination. (I know he’s closing on a new house in San Jose, so he might have been gone for the weekend.)

Cras melior est.

Update, plus the Good Driver Fallacy

Posted on by Dale

I just checked http://lichtenborgian.org, and the coming soon page is up, but I haven’t received any access info from Noah, nor can I see it in my FTP utility. I’ve emailed him and expect to hear from him as soon as he gets to his computer out in California. And then… then…

So over on the Lacuna blog, Jeff pointed us to a book review in the Times, of Stumbling on Happiness, the main point of which in its applicability to us Lichtenbergians is that humans are an easily deluded lot, mostly by ourselves, and mostly to maintain our happiness.

The author cites the notorious statistical anomaly that “90% of drivers rate themselves above average,” which is usually used to show how self-deluded most people are. Because, clearly, 90% of drivers cannot be above the 50% mark, can they? It’s like, as is often smirkingly said, Lake Wobegon’s children. Or NCLB test scores.

But I have some questions about this much-quoted and much-derided statistic. Could it not be a fallacy itself?

For one thing, what’s the scale of “good drivership”? For the 90% figure to be wrong, there would have to be an objective rating scale of good drivership that would allow you to place all drivers along it. What counts? Accidents? Slamming on brakes? Driving with coffee? Cell phones? Five mph over the speed limit? Six?

For all I know, the original study that created this zombie factoid had such a methodology. I’m too lazy to go find it. But my next question was, were participants in the study asked to rate themselves with this scale, or were they asked to decide where they would fall on such a scale without being given any details? I suspect the latter, which is actually okay as long as then they were asked to fill out some kind of survey which then would place them accurately along the scale.

Because, and this is the important part, I think that the unexamined assumption of the 90% deal is that drivers are distributed across this scale in a normal curve, i.e., 70% of drivers cluster around the 50% mark, and the rest of us are strung out on either side, with very few awful drivers and very few perfect drivers, just like IQ.

However, I doubt that. I think it entirely possible that we are not distributed in a normal curve, but a J-curve, and in fact most of us are better drivers on an absolute scale than not. In other words, while the researchers were applying a norm reference, the real world is working with a criterion reference. Most people quite rightly examine their driving habits and say, “You know what, I’ve never had an accident, and I can’t remember the last time I even slammed on my brakes or went down a one-way street the wrong way. I did cut that guy off on the interstate last week, but he was a bad driver.” And so they rate themselves “above average,” because in fact they are.

Okay, so maybe it’s not a J-curve, which would mean that most drivers are approaching perfect, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s at least a shifted normal curve, with that main 70% clumped around the 80% mark and not the middle.

Damned statistics.

Lichtenbergian domain

Posted on by Dale

So what do we want for our Lichtenbergian domain name?

Jeff wants tomorrowisbetter.com, although I’m going to suggest we go with .org (with .com pointing to it).

I have a fondness for thelichtenbergiansociety.org or just lichtenbergian.org, both of which are available.

There’s also crasmeliorest.org, which I’m so confident is available I’m not even going to check.

Thoughts and suggestions? As soon as we pick one, I can have the whole thing up and running in about 48 hours.