I sent my Gateway netbook to Texas yesterday. The person who was helping me online said it’s probably a cracked screen.

It looks like they will replace the screen on it for about $100. Since it’s a $300 machine, this seems worth it to me. We’ll see how it all works out. I have had some pretty confusing emails from the repair center. One email suddenly identified the company I was dealing with as Acer instead of Gateway. Everything else was the same. Very odd. I will give them feedback via the provided link once the whole deal is over.

I finally finished the huge 10th Anniversary edition of American Gods last night. Apparently it has lots of additional material to the original version including 12K more words. I have to say I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Gaiman has interesting ideas and I love his America. It’s sort of a fantasy, murder mystery, road trip. Recommended.

So today is the first day of the new Hope term.

I am back at doing the ballet thingo at 8:30 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I woke up early. During the break I have found myself sleeping in more and more. Also feeling a lot of fatigue and stress. The stress has not, however, been expressing itself in my blood pressure which is pretty low this days.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time with that Bach fugue.

I almost have it transcribed for organ. I heard some recordings of it on organ and quite like that rendition. Couldn’t find a score online, so I am fooling around with making my own.

Not planning to play it soon, since I just did a heavy dose of Bach last Sunday (which went well by the way).

I also have been playing Beethoven and Mendelssohn. I recently read that James Dean really liked Beethoven’s last piano sonata, opus 111. Unsurprisingly this is a difficult one. I guess I’m trying to familiarize myself with all of Beethoven Sonatas, so I tackled this one yesterday only to find I have played through it before (as evidenced by the little notes I make to myself on scores).  A music prof once described this sonata as using jazz idiom before jazz was invented. I am finding that kind of thing pretty boring these days. I can see what he means because of the use of the triplet rhythm which is sort of like swinging jazz. I can only hope that that is not what James liked about it.

I read that story about Dean in a recent obit.

Earlier in life Mr. Hirshbein had taken up auto racing, as a consequence of his friendship with James Dean, a racing enthusiast. The two had met when Dean was an unknown young actor.

Dean was sitting on Mr. Hirshbein’s doorstep one day listening to him practice while waiting for a neighbor to return. When Jessica Hirshbein invited him in, Dean asked Mr. Hirshbein whether he could play Beethoven’s Opus 111 Sonata.

“That piece really swings,” Ms. Hirshbein recalled Dean saying. “ I love those syncopations.”

After Dean was killed in an automobile crash in 1955, Mr. Hirshbein gave up auto racing at his wife’s insistence.

link to entire obit of Hirshbein

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Just the Ticket – NYTimes.com

Speculation on the Democratic presidential ticket. Obama/Clinton (H.)?

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Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs – NYTimes.com

America’s Unlevel Field – NYTimes.com

Recent research is having an effect on public rhetoric and understanding of this subject.

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China as a Destination for Job Seekers – NYTimes.com

Come to China and get a job.

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Got up this morning and played through this fugue several times. Then I went on Spotify and queued up 23 versions of it, including one for strings and two for organ. Here’s the one for strings:

I remember reading about how Rosalyn Tureck interpreted these fugues years ago, but never bothered to actually look up her recordings.

I found two different recordings by her on Spotify.

I love the visualizations in this version:

When I first learned about fugues and Bach (9th grade or so?), I was very impressed with the idea of cleverly combining melodies that were constructed from the same little modules of note patterns. This fascinated me for years.

Now I distinguish between the craft and the beauty. Bach’s fugues are amazingly crafted but don’t always attract with the beauty of their musical ideas. This particular one really does it for me, however.

I decided it would be polite to just sit at the breakfast table with my wife (instead of pounding away at the piano first thing in the morning) and analyze this same fugue.

I knew there would be online versions I could quickly print up. Lo and behold I found one of this 5 voice fugue in score. This means there is a line for each voice and since Bach overlaps voices it is much easier to see the counterpoint.

(Little post posting note: I just found out that Bach’s entire manuscript is online to view. Here’s a link to a PDF of this prelude and fugue in his handwriting!!!!!)

I often use the interwebs this way. Yesterday, I introduced a new piece Tu Solus Qui Facis Mirabilia to my choir. I mentioned it in yesterday’s blog, I believe.

One of the sopranos started questioning the meaning of the words even though we were not singing the text yet (easier to skip the Latin the first couple of read-throughs).

I will probably blog about her specific question later.

But I came home and found numerous references and articles about this particular piece online.

Very cool.

I am loving the interwebs for sure.

Here is the Hilliard Ensemble recording of this piece. I am moving away from their lovely interpretation to one that is not quite so ethereal. But they do sound pretty good.

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Bookmarked several articles to read yesterday:

What Happens To Old And Expired Supermarket Foods – Forbes

Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television? : The New Yorker

Supreme Loser – By Ali Vaez | Foreign Policy

Why Iran’s ayatollah-in-chief always gets it wrong.

The Q Factor – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Q = Queer theory.

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The Folly of Fools — By Robert Trivers — Book Review – NYTimes.com

I have been very interesting the idea of deception and self-deception lately. So this book and the very interesting review caught my attention. I particularly liked this story the reviewer tells about Trivers:

Throughout the book, he recalls instances in which he lied — to girlfriends (he has apparently had many), wives (two), children (five) and colleagues. In one especially poignant passage, Trivers recalls walking down a city street with an attractive young woman, “trying to amuse her,” when he spots “an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling.” Trivers abruptly realizes he is seeing his reflection in a store window: “Real me is seen as ugly me by self-­deceived me.”

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More bookmarked to read:

Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral | The Economist

All They That Labored – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

This about the King James translators of the Bible.

On Neutrinos and Angels – The Express Tribune

Haven’t read this all the way through, but this excerpt will give you an idea of what it’s about:

Speed of light issues have often moved sections of religious people in rather strange ways. Way back in 1973, as a young physics lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University, I had been fascinated by the calculation done by the head of our department. Seeking the grand synthesis of science and faith, this pious gentleman — who left on his final journey last month — had published calculations that proved Heaven (jannat) was running away from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His reasoning centred around a particular verse of the Holy Quran that states worship on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr(Night of Revelation) is equivalent to a thousand nights of ordinary worship. Indeed, if you input the factor of 1,000 into Einstein’s famous formula for time dilatation, this yields a number: one centimeter per second less than the speed of light!

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Edge : Conversations on the edge of human knowledge

A blog I have bookmarked to check intermittently.

By the way, I found a lot of these links on an excellent filter blog: The Browser. I am checking this one a lot lately.

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I found a particularly moving poem yesterday:

To an Iraqi Infant

by Sinan Antoon
December 2002
Translated from the Iraqi by the poet


do you know
that your mother’s nipples
are dry bones?
that her breasts
are bursting
with depleted uranium?

do you know
that the womb’s window
overlooks
a confiscated land?

do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?

do you know
that your mother is weaving
the slowness of her moments
into an elegy?
And she is already
mourning you?

(click here for the whole thing)

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As one ages one looks in the mirror more carefully, I think. The wrinkles, the age spots stand out more and more clearly. The stranger in the mirror becomes a more familiar. As do his well examined flaws.

One of my flaws I have been pondering is my own sensitivity.

Although I manage to conceal my overreactions more and more, I do notice that I tend to be thin-skinned. This is probably the flip side of the coin of awareness. But it’s actually a bit more self-centered than that.

On the inside, I tend to react quickly and often negatively to what I perceive as mistreatment or slights. Also on the inside, I mull my reactions around and often find them childish or way off base.

I spent my childhood watching my father do the same thing. At least, he seemed unable to help reacting and often in negative ways.

I think learning to control my responses more has been a step toward maturing.  Rabbi Friedman used to comment on the space between an act of bad behavior on someone else’s part and one’s own response. He got me to think about that space.

Although I have gotten better, I am reminded the standard of Friedman and his teacher Bowen for mental health is never more than 80% or so and more often we act maturely about 50% of the time if we are lucky.

This doesn’t have much to do with anything other than me figuring myself out.

Yesterday was a very busy day for me. I began working on a manuscript of an anthem for the choir to learn in the next semester. About half way through I realized I was setting myself up for a large task. So I gave myself permission to not have it done by today and turned balancing my and my Mom’s checkbooks.  Then I took my weekly look at bills.

I had the borrowed dishes and glasses in the dishwasher. I planned to return them to the church after they were clean. So I had to wait for the cycle to finish. In the meantime I returned to my arrangement (Tu Solus Qui Facis Miabilia by Josquin Desprez).

Basically all I was doing was putting the notes from an online version into my music software, changing the clef on the alto part (from tenor to a more usual rendering in treble), and adding dynamics and breath marks. I found a recording by the Hilliard ensemble of this on Amazon and bought the MP3 for 99 cents.

I didn’t ape their performance. But I did feel better about interrupting Latin sentences with breaths after listening to them do so.

So I did manage to get this arrangement ready for today. I gathered up the clean dishes and hymnals I had brought for church for the choir party. Loaded up the car.

Then I remember the choir wanted to sing today’s anthem in parts if possible. The only version available (in the hymnal) did not have alto, tenor and bass parts in their copies. So I plopped myself down and did that in my music software. It took about an hour.

Then I was off to check on my Mom. She was doing better after her fall Thursday night. No broken bones. But they have ordered physical therapy for her to offset her increasing number of falls.

I went to the church after that and unloaded stuff. Then I spent a good hour or so at the copy machine making legal copies of three anthems (including the two I had prepared in the afternoon). Stuffed them in the choir slots and then practiced organ.

I was pretty tired after all this. After all I’m an old man. Heh.

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The G.O.P.’s ‘Black People’ Platform – NYTimes.com

Racism alive and well in the land of the free.

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Last night was the choir party. I think it was pretty much a success. People seem to have a good time. Almost every choir member either showed up or let me know they wouldn’t be there due to illness or previous commitment. I try each year to broaden these social events to include all the music ministers. But this essentially ended up being choir members and significant others. Besides eating and drinking, we sang hymns. I brought over hymnals from the church (as well as dishes and glasses to use, clean and return).

This was my first church party. I have kept a pretty low profile at church and have not wanted to rush into letting people into my private life. But now I’m ready. This group of singers is doing a phenomenal job. Plus I like each one of them quite a bit.

So the blog is going up a bit late this morning. I got up and cleaned a bit, then sat down and tried to prepare a score. The piece is “Tu Solus Qui Facis Mirabilia” by Desprez. It is beautiful. I found an online edition and am redoing it because the alto line was written in the wrong clef.

As I’m doing this, I’m adding interpretation as is usual in this kind of a score (16th century choral music). I have been listening to a recording of it by the Hilliard Ensemble (one of my favorite choral groups).

I decided about an hour ago that I’m not going to try and get this manuscript ready for tomorrow’s post service rehearsal. We have enough to learn and it’s not scheduled until mid-Feb.

So now I’m waiting for the dishwasher to finish cleaning the plates and glasses. After it’s done, I will cart all the stuff I borrowed back to church and then practice, make a couple anthems legally on the photocopy machine and put them in the slots for tomorrow.

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Chevron’s Ecuador case takes new twist – FT.com

Ray Hinkle linked this article in yesterday’s comment section. Warning, you have to register in order to read it, but it is free.

After doing some more poking around, I found that this disaster is under reported for sure. Petroecuador, Texaco and subsequently Chevron (who acquired Texaco) have ruined large swathes of South America plundering it for oil and leaving chaos in their wake.  Apparently this is the biggest environmental lawsuit in history (so far) 7 times bigger 1989 Alaskan debacle and comparable only to what happened in the first Gulf War when Hussein trashed Kuwait’s oil fields.

Chevron fights Ecuador pollution lawsuit – FT.com

Back in June, Naomi Mapstone (who co-wrote the first link with Ed Crooks) outlined the whole mess in the above link. There is also a slide show but I couldn’t get that to work.

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From Senator Bernard Sanders – Free Trade vs. Jobs – NYTimes.com

Senator Sanders continues to gain my admiration. This is a link to a letter he wrote recently.

He was recently on Stephen Colbert and kicked butt (link to the whole show).

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Study Says Looks Matter as TV Covers Congress – NYTimes.com

Is this surprising? Not to me.

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Study of Medicare Patients Finds Most Hospital Errors Unreported – NYTimes.com

Hospital employees recognize and report only one out of seven errors, accidents and other events that harm Medicare patients while they are hospitalized, federal investigators say in a new report.

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Meet the Online Mischief-Makers | Inc.com

My daughter, Elizabeth, is quoted at length in this article. I am very proud of what she’s doing!

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10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot | Primer

Also got this link from Emily Jenkins on Facebook.

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The title to this morning’s post comes from a William Carlos Williams poem, “The Flower.”

The phrase struck me as I read it this morning.

As you may know, dear reader, I have taken to rising and soothing my mind with poetry and non-fiction before starting my day.

I have to wonder if this procedure has allowed my blood pressure to fall (which it has ever since my last doctor visit in December). Of course it could also be a faulty sphygmomanometer (blood pressure machine).

I tend to rise in the grips of thought.

“Thought was never an isolated thing with me; it was a game of tests and balances, to be proven by the written word.”

William Carlos Williams (again), Autobiography xiii

WCW seems to concur with my brother’s observation that writing itself can be a process of self-illumination. This phrase from WCW’s autobiography was also one I read this morning over coffee.

As was this one:

“What becomes of me has never seemed important, but the fates of ideas living against the grain in a nondescript world have always held me breathless.”

William Carlos Williams, Autobiography xiv

Ah yes, ideas, the bane of my existence.

HE SITS IN THE SUN rearranging the past, and tries to keep warm. He knows words, says them, but has forgotten their meaning. They hand all about, sparkling, just out of reach, the crystals on a chandelier he can’t light. His memory rings like a wind chime, sounding clear and bright, then dwindles to random jingles and clinks.

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 151

I’ve been reading in the book my brother and his wife gave me for Xmas, 420 Characters by Lou Beach.

This morning several of the entries in it jumped out me as well. The one above seems to be a telling portrait of loss of memory.

In his author’s note, Beach says that “The stories you are about to encounter were written as status updates on a large social networking site. These updates were limited to 420 characters…”

Stories? More like poems to me way of reading. Beach is a visual artist. The book says it’s his first book of prose. They are just dark enough to keep one’s attention:

I FLAY my skin for you. It hangs from my chest and arms and back like a fringed jacket, like I’m going to a Neil Young concert, like I smell of patchouli and boo, like I stick to the seat of your VW. Except that the shreds have hardened and clink against one another. I’m a human wind chime. Hey man, can you hear me now?

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 151

So a big thank you to Mark and Leigh for this book. I quite like the poetry or whatever it is in it.

“LET ME IN!” The failed artist from around the corner, 6 ft. 4 in. of canned ham, and his wee wife, 5 ft. 1, a regular pill bug, was banging on my door. A bird had just shit on his head, an avian comment on his life. Drug-riddled and depressed he was making lots of money in the video game industry. “What should I do?” he asked. I thought he should shoot himself, but didn’t say so. I handed him a towel.

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 144

Finally, I close with another passage I read this morning. I think about what it means to live in artistic isolation and the relationship of journaling as I do in public. WCW puts it nicely.

“There is a great virtue in … isolation. It permits a fair interval for thought. That is, what I call thinking, which is mainly scribbling. It has always been during the act of scribbling that I have gotten most of my satisfaction.”

William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, xii

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Internet Access Is Not a Human Right – NYTimes.com

Ok. I guess you can make an argument that Internet access is not a human right, but this guy goes on and says it’s not a civil right. Is education a civil right? I suspect this writer’s motives.

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Ecuador – $18 Billion Ruling Against Chevron Is Upheld – NYTimes.com

From the people who underwrite PBS.  I usually yell during their commercials.

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Guilty Verdicts in 1993 Racial Murder Case That Changed Justice in Britain – NYTimes.com

Racism in the U.K. is just as hidden and perverted as it is in the USA. That’s saying quite a bit. When Dick Gregory arrived in the old Apartheid South Africa, he gave a bitter smile and said that he recognized the place…. it was like the USA.

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I have been thinking about how exactly one accomplishes expression on piano and organ. It’s not like string instruments where one touches the string or wind instruments where the embouchure is critical. Fingers on an organ keyboard basically only turn the sound on and off. On a piano keyboard they also affect the loudness or softness of the notes produced. But what about tone?

I have seen studies that say no difference shows up on an oscilloscope (or whatever one uses to physically measure the sound) between using a pencil to play a note on the piano and using your fingers.

As a student of piano I have learned that one can somehow make a good tone on the piano. This involves using as much of the skin of the finger in contact with the key, we are taught.

And I can tell when a pianist is doing this.

But I have to ask myself what am I hearing when I hear a good tone quality in music?

Also when I was an organ grad student at Notre Dame my teacher, Craig Cramer, talked to me at length about thinking about producing a good tone with organ technique. He used to say that the beginning of any musical technique on any instrument is determining how to make a good sound.

This is borne out by a story Mr. Olson, (a clarinetist & teacher at Ohio Wesleyan University where I briefly attended) once told me. He said he was studying clarinet with some famous player in Paris. He went and played for him. The Parisian teacher stopped him. He said, play this note. Then he said, that is a good note. Go away and don’t come back until they all sound that good.

So Mr. Olson rented a church basement in Paris and played long tones attempting to match all of the notes in his register to the quality of the note his teacher had pointed out.

Tone is basic.

But I have come to suspect that the subjective experience of when notes occur in organ and piano playing  and how loud they are in piano playing creates a transmission of meaning and tone.

Another factor in my thinking is observing how technology allows complete accuracy in rhythm and pitch. One can either use it to make deadly accurate sounds or use it to adjust sounds into absolute accuracy.

The result is often curiously sterile.

So maybe the intention (usually not conscious) of beauty in sound on the piano and the organ causes tiny inaccuracies that end up sounding like meaning to the listener.

I recently was watching some YouTube videos of a masterclass by the pianist György Sebök.

I was startled when he made this comment: “”We play the notes sooner and later, and louder and softer, and technically that’s all we can do.”

He was actually trying to gently lead a pianist to a less subjective rendering of a Haydn sonata movement.

So when you play a note on the piano and how loud and how soft you play it can lead to more or less coherent actual subjective meaning.

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Frozen Dead Guy Days, a Festival in Colorado, Stays Put – NYTimes.com

Sick humor.

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The Iowa Caucuses – NYTimes.com

Partisan but on the money. I especially like the phrase “dark and disturbing” when referring to the images Republicans are putting forth.

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Oedipus Rex Complex – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd reminds us of the history of Mitt Romney and his dad.

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The Forgotten Wages of War – NYTimes.com

Essay that says something I often think, what about all of the people being killed in wars?

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Relatives of 9/11 Victims, Suspecting Hacking, Await Answers – NYTimes.com

Wonder if it will ever be known who was tapping this phones and if they used the information as this article implies.

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China Set to Punish Another Human Rights Activist – NYTimes.com

Blithely reading this article and ran across quote from Jerome Cohen. He is the boss/mentor of my quasi-son-in-law, Jeremy Daum.

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Manhattan Street Grid at Museum of City of New York – NYTimes.com

The history of cities fascinates me.

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English Pronunciation | The Poke:

My niece, Emily Bastian, put this one up on Facebook. I enjoyed reading the whole thing aloud. I love words.

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“The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar.”

So writes William Carlos Williams in a prose-poem marked 11/13 (presumably 1928). As I read this passage this morning I was struck how it still resonates despite the slightly dated feel of the sentences and words.

“Fragmentary stupidity of modern life….” This definitely describes the internet and other assaults on our sensibilities.

I maintain it doesn’t have to be an assault. But that requires more thinking, context and effort than many seem interested in making.

A “lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity..” also accurately describes the Interwebs.

But at the same time I insist that at this point access to online ideas is for me the same as having a vast reference library of not only ideas, prose, and sources but also musics of all kind.

It feels fragile like a bubble about to burst. Or rather it is hot and alive like a piece of cooling metal that will soon solidify into something that will be much less beautiful and wonderful.

By this I mean, that I have a foreboding that this magnificent tool of connecting humans with themselves and knowledge will soon be sort more of a Walmart experience. One can buy things that others are interested in, but eccentric interests will be left in the dust.

Christopher Logue observers in his introduction to his War Music that there are “those whom we may choose to count among the hopelessly insane: the hard core of Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers, Homer’s lay fans.”

I have played around with Greek with the goal of reading Homer in the original. I aspire to the kind of madness Logue speculates has kept Homer alive to lay readers for centuries.

It is just this kind of madness that might get lost in the dust of an evolving Internet for consumers. But we’ll see (assuming we both live long enough, dear reader).

Finished off The Given last night. I had to download it to Eileen’s netbook which she has graciously loaned me for the duration until I replace or repair my own.

As I approached the ending, the story became more and more familiar to me. I suspect I may have read this book a while back. The beginning 2/3rds of the book was unfamiliar. But I have found that I read so much more slowly and thoroughly than I did even 20 years ago that I rediscover prose I have passed through before in startling ways.

Also I think as one ages one can actually expand one’s understanding and horizons via the experiences of paying attention to being alive.

Hey. It could happen.

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Newt Gingrich Stumps in New Hampshire : The New Yorker

About half way through this article. Gingrich fundamentally disinterests me in the same way Evangelical preachers do, I find him boring, distasteful, woefully misinformed and basically obviously operating from a sense of self interest. But mostly I ignore him as much as possible. This article starts out pretty sympathetic so it’s probably a good idea for me to read it to get a bit of balance.

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Queens Libraries Serve 59 Languages – NYTimes.com

59 languages. This is so cool to me. I love libraries.

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Broad Institute Collaboration Began With a Disastrous Lunch – NYTimes.com

Broad Institute Director Finds Power in Numbers – NYTimes.com

Interesting couple of articles. Broad (pronounced to rhyme with “code” according to one of the articles) Institute represents an encouraging collaboration between institutions (Havard and MIT). But more interesting to me is the second article which profiles a fascinating thinker: Eric Lander. I love it when people jump around in disciplines and exhibit extraordinary abilities while ignoring accreditation requirements.

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In Play-Off Between Old and New Violins, Stradivarius Lags – NYTimes.com

In blind tests, violinists could not tell expensive old violins from newer ones. The proof is always in the sound. But subjectivity obviously plays a strong role in how we understand ourselves and what we prefer.

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Reaching Back 2,000 Years to Unravel a Curse – NYTimes.com

I love this stuff.

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Angkor, Seat of the Khmer Empire, Wilted When Water Ran Low – NYTimes.com

Why do empires come and go? Water supply in this case?

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Yesterday, I had a nice back and forth conversations on Facebook regarding this article.

Do the Classics Have a Future? by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books

I like that she mentions late Christopher Logue’s renditions of Homer since he is someone I read and admire.

Basically she reviews from an insider’s point of view the history and the arguments for and against the use of the classics to understand our civilization.

“.. cultural understanding is a collaborative, social operation.” she writes and I agree

For me, context is very helpful at this stage of my life and my thinking.

She uses the play, The Browning Version, and subsequent movies based on it as a springboard.

I have put the 1951 version at the top of my Netflix queue.

“Browning” is Robert Browning and the “version” is his version of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.

You can click on Mary Beard’s wonderful essay if you want a synopsis of the plot of the play and movie, The Browning Version.

In the conversation on Facebook yesterday I pointed out

that an understanding of history via the classics, the bible and other sources is necessary to an understanding of the arts. How does one understand great art if one doesn’t know the stories of what is being portrayed in the pictures? How does one understand Mendelssohn’s Overture to the Midsummer Night’s dream if one doesn’t know the play? (I love the way the 18 year old M orchestrates the hee haw of the donkey…. I guess this was actually a suggestion made to him by a friend…. M himself was a classicist and read Greek and Latin…)…

The conversation verged on actually talking about ideas online. Go figure. This is tantalizing since that was my idealistic (quixotic?) idea of what the Web could do when I first learned about it.

My netbook died last night. Bah.

I will have to replace it soon. I can use Eileen’s old one in a pinch (treadmilling)…..

Planning this upcoming Sunday, I chose to have my choir sing “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam” in English.

There is a solid version of it in the Hymnal 1982 which preserves the rhythmic treatment of the original.

I am planning to pick out a postlude and prelude based on it, probably by Bach. I play a couple already. I need to get to the console and goof around to make this decision.

I have been in a foul mood for most of the holidays despite the wonderful company of my wife and the rest of my family. Yesterday Eileen put it well when she said that I seem to be somewhere else.

A small part of this mood is a determination that quality work is its own reward.  Although I feel appreciated at work, I would be naive to ignore the basic irrelevance of my interests and work to most people who hear my music. Hence, I want to do stuff at church that is of the highest quality so that the mundane and banal are challenged (complemented?) by the presence of well executed quality stuff.

If few take notice (as it sometimes seems), then I still get to do good music. So what the heck.

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The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online – NYTimes.com

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Four Attacks in Queens With Homemade Firebombs – NYTimes.com

You heard about the LA burnings, but did you hear about the ones in Queens?

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Gay and Afraid in Uganda – NYTimes.com

Intelligent comment.

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Nobody Understands Debt – NYTimes.com

I believe this.

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In China, the Grievances Keep Coming – NYTimes.com

Explanation of the unusual two tracks of Chinese national government and local governing.

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Homeward Goes the Dust Bowl Balladeer – NYTimes.com

Woodie Guthrie as dang liberal and communist.

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There is finally a covering of snow on the ground here in Holland Michigan this morning. We basically had a snow-free Xmas. I missed it.

I got up this morning and read poetry, non-fiction and then played some Beethoven on the EP with the headphones (Eileen is still in bed).

There were about 50 people at church yesterday morning. No one commented on the prelude (Mov 4 – The Word from Messiaen’s Nativity). Here’s a solid performance of this piece from Youtube. He plays the slow section even slower than I did. I like it that way.

I had problems with the organ during the performance of this piece. Somehow one of my presets reverted to a wrong setting. This sometimes happens with older organs. I managed to save the performance despite playing it on some of the wrong stops. It’s difficult to know what kind of meaning this kind of music has for the people who heard it. Music is such a background phenomenon in the United States. I did have a bulletin note explaining Messiaen’s intentions in it.

But I’m very glad that I have now learned and performed several of Messiaen’s meditations on the Nativity. I think it’s pretty solid music. And very beautiful to my ears.

During the offertory a soprano sang a Ned Rorem song (“Christmas Carol”). In the middle of it her cell phone began ringing.

She continued to singing and tried to turn off the phone at the same time. Here’s a nice little Youtube of the song she was singing.

The postlude was “Allegro” From Concerto 5 in F Major by G. F. Handel, op. 4 No. 5, HWV 293.

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The truth is the best bullshit – Boing Boing

Interesting explanation of bullshit and lies from Apple, Google, & Facebook.

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Now That the Factories Are Closed, It’s Tee Time in Benton Harbor, Mich. – NYTimes.com

Totally missed this extended article about a local Michigan town. Ran across it yesterday.

Letters in response:

The Strange Second Life of a Michigan Factory Town – NYTimes.com

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Do the Classics Have a Future? by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books

Bookmarked to read.

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After reading some William Carlos Williams, I then finished off Given by Wendell Berry.

Here’s one of the ones I marked to go back and re-read.

It takes all time to show eternity,
The longest shine of every perishing spark,
And every word and cry of every tongue
Must form the Word that calls the darkest dark

Of this world to its lasting dawn. Toward
That rising hour we bear our single hearts
Estranged as islands parted in the sea,
Our broken knowledge and our scattered arts.

As separate as fireflies or night windows,
We piece a foredream of the gathered light
Infinitely small and great to shelter all,
Silenced into song, blinded into sight.

I copied this from another blogger (too lazy to type it in if I can find it someone else has). I found some misspellings. I guess that’s the danger of doing that sort of thing.

I have been keeping track of books I read via the online (free) bookmarking service I use (http://www.diigo.com). I made this particular bookmark a permanent public URL: http://www.diigo.com/list/sbjenkins0/books-read

I note that the last two books I have finished reading use a form of the word, give, in the title (The Gift by Hyde & Given by Berry). Interesting serendipity.

I find a URL which features the book in order to put it on this list. This morning I was on this one. It’s the google book link. I noticed that 25 people had reviewed Berry’s book of poems. This was a bit startling to me, because I really have no one in my life right now that talks to me about poetry (or music for that matter).  Once in a while I feel sorry for myself about this sort of thing, but as I age I have come more and more to accept the solitary artistic life as one that has many consolations and rewards.

It’s nice to think there are 25 people out there who have actually read this book. Forgive my cynicism but many years ago (as a bookseller) I decided that owning a book has little to do with whether you actually read it or not. Most people do not read books it seems. And even the ones who have them, often do not do so.

So I like thinking that there are 25 little shards of light on google books that have read Berry’s book.

I found the book uneven. Berry is struggling with the whole pastoral thing he has made his own. We live in ugly times. He has responded with sermonizing about local economies and farming. But inevitably as a poet he must confront the ugliness in his work. He does some of this in this book. These are the poems that interest me the most. Also the ones about old age.

But he doesn’t seem as strong to me as William Carlos Williams (of course). Williams can write a poem in the 1920s that describes a scene of nature and to me it rings as clear and true as Japanese Haiku or pastoral Chinese poetry as I read it in this century.

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The Damage of 2011 – NYTimes.com

I think this editorial sums it up pretty well. I know it’s partisan but what the writers say seems to me to have happened.

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Kirk Douglas on Trumbo – NYTimes.com

Hey. Kirk Douglas wrote a letter to the NYT. Coolness.

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Cities’ Cost Cuttings Leave Residents in the Dark – NYTimes.com

Highland Park, Michigan is one of the cities.

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Keynes Was Right – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman makes sense to me.

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Norman Lear on fighting for the food fight – latimes.com

Wow. Norman Lear is still alive and keeping the liberal flame alive.

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A couple of artists who are new to me:

jonasburgert.de

Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

My brother and his wife gave me a book by the latter artist as an Xmas gift.