Sarah and Lucy are now safely back in their English home. It was fun having them and Matthew around. It is so satisfying to see my daughters making families and along with their partners being such good parents.  Nothing surprising there.

My friend Jordan sent me the following video. I like this recording a lot. It’s not clear to me exactly how this piece works. It looks like and sounds like the solo flugelhorn at the beginning is playing a memorized theme. But it’s hard to parse out from his improv. At any rate I recommend listening to this lovely little piece.

I am still basking in the beautiful sounds Greg Crowell and Pablo Mahave-Veglia  made at the Sunday recital.

They inspired me. They didn’t say anything about Pablo’s cello (other than it had five strings and Vivaldi only wrote for four so he, Pablo, decided it would be cheating to use the fifth string and opted not to). However, I’m pretty sure it was a baroque cello. It appears to be the same one that is in the above photo. It sounded beautiful and had that early music sheen to it. They both played spectacularly. Very musical.

I finished What Happened by Hillary Clinton. After reading many comments and a few reviews about it I have come to the conclusion that her enemies (and possibly some of her supporters) did not bother to read it or read with so much bias that they misheard it.

I think despite the usual inflated politician language that floats throughout some of the book, it is an important contribution to understanding what the fuck is happening to us in America right now and how it seemed to run for president in 2016.

She clearly takes responsibility for her failure. To me, this feels like conducting oneself as an adult in a horrific public atmosphere that has dogged her all her public life. She also manages a lot of wonky prose that analyses the election and our country. I think it’s a must read, myself.

Here’s a good quote from it.

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Hillary Clinton, What Happened  72.9 % of my ebook

I also recently finished The Best American Poetry 2017. The editor, Natasha Tretheway, is a poet I read and admire. She has done an exceptional job of choosing poems.

In the Foreword by the series editor, David Lehman, I highlighted another quote about propaganda. It’s mostly the words of Orwell.

Ours is a great era for hate—what George Orwell called ‘a human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and have a good hate.’

George Orwell, Coming up for Air (1939) quoted in David Lehman’s foreword to The Best American Poetry 2017

more quotes from Lehman

beauty is out of favor, and paranoia and hatred have risen in its stead

I especially liked three poems in this book.

Two of them are online:

Good Bones by Maggie Smith | Poetry Foundation

 “Bullet Points” By Jericho Brown

Here’s the third one: