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I finally used my assigned Hope login and password to begin to access some of the information available to staff/faculty online. I think I was prompted to check this out because I have been thinking a lot about Ives’s use of hymnody and realizing there was probably discussion of this topic in academic music journals most of which do not allow access to mere mortals without paying.

I discovered yesterday that by logging in to the college library website with my Hope info I could get access to Project  Muse.

Project MUSE

Project Muse is an online resource that provides full-text access to many many academic journals. I downloaded several articles and interviews to my netbook to read later. Cool beans.

I’m also interested in other music information sources I might now be able to use. I plan to simply ask the music librarian about them before I go hunting through the labyrinth of the library and college websites.

Yesterday was also a red letter day for me because I finally (finally) got New York Times to allow me to pay for an online subscription.

I was a longtime print subscriber who decided a few years ago that online access was all I really wanted. But since I had a login, there was no mechanism for me to do so. I spoke to several operators online. The best hope one of them could give me was to wait for my cancellation to through and then resubscribe. This did not work. The software thought I was still a subscriber and would not allow me to do anything but resubscribe to the print delivery in order to get online access.

I think the New York Times does some of the best journalism in the USA,  but I do find their online presence to be very uneven. I have given much feedback to them and been pretty much ignored. Whippy Skippy. At least now I feel like I am remunerating the people I get a lot of my info from.

My goal yesterday was to get through my classes and do some treadmilling. This I did. At the end of the day I was pretty tired and even sleepy.

I have been scanning in material my father wrote and emailing it to interested family members.

Yesterday I scanned in another twenty pages of Dad’s memoir and accidentally omitted a page. Shoot! At first I thought I would just redo it. Then I considered how silly that was. So I looked for free software to edit Adobe PDFs. They do exist but the one I tried didn’t work with such large docs. Another watermarked the re-edited version on each of the twenty pages with large distracting brand marks. Fuck it, I just emailed out what I had, hoping someone else might have access to editing software. Eventually I’ll probably correct it somehow. In the meantime I forge ahead.

This morning I have one class and then I am booked to sit for four hours and wait for the Comcast guy. It makes me crazy that this is the way these outfits operate. Like so many parts of American life, stuff is set up for the convenience of the service provider (cable guy, doctors, and others) not for those receiving the service. Sheesh.

I am thinking of doing some church work while I wait. It has crossed my mind to arrange a hymn I have scheduled as an anthem and make it a bit more of a fit for my choir. Also I’m just beginning to feel the pinch of only being planned through Easter.

Yesterday seemed to be Beethoven day at the piano. I have been thinking and reading a lot about Ives. And not only does he dip into Americana hymnody, Beethoven is also very important to his Concord Sonata.

I ordered my own copy of his first piano sonata and a collection of some of his other piano music.

My advanced ballet class ended class with everyone learning the tap dance routine: “The Shim Sham.”

Apparently at an upcoming tap concert everyone in the audience will be invited up to the stage to dance this dance. The teacher invited me to try to learn. Which I hilariously did. Try. I still don’t have it.  Hey, I’m a music guy not a dancer.

Well yadda yadda.  I have been feeling pretty grateful about my life lately. Glad to still be alive at 59. I enjoy the people I love very much and try to savor as much as I can about the things I love to do (practice, read, compose, think).

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today's lynx

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Rolling Stone

The Kill Team by Mark Boal

I haven’t been able to bring myself to read this article due to its subject. It is, however, breaking news about alleged atrocities of US troops. I have been reading reports like this for years and my heart sinks every time.

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Post-Tsunami Japan Turns Away From Excess – NYTimes.com

This is a fascinating description of on the ground Japanese cultural response to the recent calamities: practicing self-restraint in sympathy with those who are suffering.

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The Dissident’s Wife – NYTimes.com

Chinese dissident’s wife writes about injustice and repression.

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The Reckoning – Words Without Borders

Got about half way through this. Seems to be fictional surreal account of experiencing  a contemporary facist state.

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2 thoughts on “yadda yadda

  1. Thank you ComcastMark. A tech came today and replaced my cable modem. Hopefully that will fix the problems I was having. Thanks for reading my blog. Come back again.

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yadda yadda

10:13 AM

Eileen is off swimming without me. I’m still not quite up to speed with this cold/flu thing. Apparently this stuff hangs on for weeks. Great.

I’m working from my backup computer and just discovered that its clock is an hour behind. When I tried to automatically update it via the web, it didn’t fix it. Screw it, I just set it myself.

I’m on the last chapter of The Trial and am seriously beginning to think of immediately re-reading it.  Kafka reminds me so much of Lewis Carroll. Everything is a dream like Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass. However, it’s a bit of a  low-grade anxiety nightmare at all times.

Am gradually loading up this computer with what I need to do my stuff. This morning I put the software on it that allows me to manage my Zen Creative MP3 player. I need this to do my playlist for tomorrow’s lecture.

Also hooked up my huge exterior drive to it. This back-up drive is where I keep everything important. So when the computer goes down it’s not near as nerve wracking. I haven’t figured out what to do when this drive fails. Start over I guess.

I was listening to an essay on Kafka last night and it pointed out that Kafka never writes the word Jew in all his stories. The essay writer thought this was interesting because Kafka was Jewish but was seeking a wider audience than German Jews. Who knows? Not sure what this means to his writings.

I just finished Chapter 9 of The Trial which takes place in a huge empty cathedral. Joseph K. (the main character) runs into a priest who tells him a parable about the Law and ends up admitting that he is the prison chaplain and is part of the Court. This is a chilling chapter and is about much more than church or even the Court.

Also, the first story on my Kafka audio CD takes place in a church (presumably Christian/Lutheran/German, eh?).  The CD calls this story something like “Conversation with a Worshipper” from “Three early stories.”

My complete Kafka short stories shows this as part of a larger story (the first in the collection) called “Description of a Struggle.” It is called “Beginning of a Conversation with a Supplicant.” These are probably edition and translation discrepancies, no doubt.

The more I look at Kafka’s and read portions of it, the more I understand why people think he’s so good. There is layer after layer in the meaning. I like that.

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