Back to basics...
/And the “basic” to which I have been returning is our first Precept: TASK AVOIDANCE.
The one, the only, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
For those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading the book, TASK AVOIDANCE, i.e., procrastination, was the founding joke of the Lichtenbergian Society. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was renowned for his aphorisms and for his procrastination, and when I and my buddies discovered him we claimed him as our patron saint. The rest is history.
The basic idea behind TASK AVOIDANCE is that you can get a lot done by not working on project A and instead working on project B — and vice versa. At some point you’ll finish at least one of them. Usually.
Here’s a concrete example.
We’ve been undergoing The Decoratoring™at our house, by which I mean my Lovely First Wife has had her thirty storage bins of holiday decorations pulled out of the basement and has proceeded to cover every single surface in the house.
I am not exaggerating.
Mostly she does not require me to participate, but I know that at any moment I could be called upon to do something requiring tallness or manual strength or even æsthetic decisions occasionally, so I’m on call, as it were, whenever she needs me.
So I’ve been avoiding The Decoratoring™ by… finishing Ten Little Waltzes.
Before you get too excited, be aware that I still have to execute my final GESTALT, s which involves listening obsessively to the suite and pinpointing spots that need — shall we say? — polishing. As I’ve been listening to the whole suite, I’ve found some egregious errors, some in the music (my fault) and some in the layout (attributable to Dorico squirreliness, aka my unfamiliarity with the program).
And I’m still not sure about “9. Passionately,” which you will recall was rated as “not exactly playable by a competent if not professional pianist” by my piano goddess Maila Springfield. I’ve made adjustments, but I’m not sure it works as advertised. There is a not small chance that I will decide to write a replacement.
But that’s in the future. At the moment, I will ABANDON it here with the understanding that if you download the scores and start learning them, you may have to make adjustments in the future. (For real, if you download the suite and play through it, I would truly appreciate your telling me which bits absolutely do not work for you.)
There is one more aspect to the piece that I will share more about next week, plans that may or may not come to pass. But if they do… hoo boy, it’s exciting.
And with that…
Ten Little Waltzes
This past Saturday was Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night Newnan, which was a bit lackluster this year mostly because of my failure to organize after being out of town for last year’s event. I hereby promise to do better, and one of my strategems is to have a centralized information distribution system, which you might have thought I would have already established for Unsilent Night like I have in the past for the Governor’s Honors Program, the Newnan Community Theatre Company, Alchemy Placement, and the Backstreet &… Zine. (New issue out, btw…)
So if you want to be kept in the loop for the next Unsilent Night Newnan, go fill out this form. All we need is your email, and we’ll check with you next year to see if you’re still interested before emailing you.
