Finished this book of poetry this morning. I am a fan of Carver short stories. And of course there was a pretty good movie made of a compilation of plots from them:

 So I was pleased to find that I like his poetry as well.

I nailed the prelude which was enough of a concern for me to practice it daily prior to performance. A composition by Pamela Decker from 2009, it was based on “Joy to the world” our opening hymn. I have tons of easy to medium easy music I can pull out of my hat with little practice but this procedure has been less and less satisfactory to me lately. So even though this piece of music puts the familiar melody prominent in the ears of the listener what is happening around it (a running obbligato and a walking bass in the pedals) requires my attention as a performer and is interesting enough to learn and schedule it.

So this medium challenging prelude went well. This was good because the day before I felt like bloody hell all day. Aches and pains accompanying my cold precluded me from a really thorough rehearsal that day.

I managed to find some time to play through some Beethoven and Schubert at the piano yesterday. This seemed to clear my head a bit. I started out with headphones on the electric piano and then later after everyone was awake on the acoustic piano.

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Afghan Police, Betrayed in Sleep, Suffer Losses – NYTimes.com

A startling story of murder and sex slavery.

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China passes new law requiring real names for Internet services | Digital Trends

Daughter Elizabeth says she had to show her passport to sign up for internet in China. Maybe that’s just for foreigners.

Here’s another report along the same lines.

China Toughens Restrictions on Internet Use – NYTimes.com

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The Wilson Quarterly: Beyond the Brain by Tanya Marie Luhrmann

Newer insights about mental illness combining physical science with other factors. Haven’t read yet. Bookmarked to do so.

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The Once and Future Liberalism – Walter Russell Mead – The American Interest Magazine

Another unread bookmarked article. David Brooks says Mead points out the two brands of liberalism which dominate American politics (according to the article).

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The American Scholar: Death by Treacle – Pamela Haag

Sentimentality crippling private emotional life. Bookmarked to read.
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How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – Kathleen McAuliffe – The Atlantic

Son-in-law Jeremy says it’s more interesting that cat urine has a chemical effect that causes mice to be less afraid of cats. (He says this is not an entirely accurate quote so I say google it if you’re interested)

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Paul Berman: The Thought Police | The New Republic

Book review.

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Falklands War Caused Rare Friction for Thatcher and Reagan – NYTimes.com

Surprisingly Reagan tried to dissuade Thatcher from the Falklands tragedy.

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A Perfect Mess by Mary Karr : Poetry Magazine

The Obscenity Prayer by Mary Karr : Poetry Magazine

A couple of poems I like I found online. I also decided that Poetry Magazine doesn’t have many poems in it that interest me these days.

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Le Morte D’Arthur, vol 1 by Thomas Malory – Free eBook

Put this on my new Kindle.

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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – Multimedia Feature – NYTimes.com

Interactive thing. Haven’t read but looks like nice graphics about a ho hum story.

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Senate Votes to Extend Electronic Surveillance Authority – NYTimes.com

Same as it ever was. Big brother has been watching you for decades.

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Nonprofit Operator of New Jersey Halfway Houses Paid Millions to Founder – NYTimes.com

Daughter Elizabeth pointed out this as a story she has been following. Corrupt profiting from non-profit organization.

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Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

This is from Mary Oliver’s Red Bird. I know it’s kind of goofy but somehow it’s a good epigraph for a blog entry.

I am sick. Yesterday morning I got up out of my chair in the living room and felt more aches and pains than usual. Soon I had figured out I had what I think of as a body cold. Yuck.

My brother and his wife drove away in the morning. Jeremy and Elizabeth are still here. Jeremy is planning to get down to Chicago tomorrow to see his sister before flying home to China. Elizabeth leaves the next day for China.

I received an email from the chair of the Ballet department. She is offering me the same schedule as the fall plus three more hours per week. The fall schedule had me dragging but the extra hours will help money wise. At this point I have sort of decided to take whatever they offer me. I start on Jan 7.

I dragged myself over to church to prepare for this morning’s service. I really needed to rehearse the prelude more thoroughly but what can you do if you’re ill? I am playing a piece by Pamela Decker based on “Joy to the World.” I have had to practice it daily in order to perform it well today. I have also been practicing daily the other organ pieces I am going to play today and next Sunday. Today’s postlude is the lovely “In dir est Freude” by Bach from the Orgelbuchlëin.  This along with “In dulci jubilo” seem to be ones that I play annually around Christmas. I have decided in this time of banality a little repetition of what I think is quality doesn’t hurt. “You know, for kids.”

I have also been preparing a couple of pieces based on Epiphany type hymns: one by Sue Mitchell-Wallace on Dix (As with gladness men of old) and one by Alec Wyton on “The First Nowell.” It has felt odd during the holidays to dutifully sneak away and practice organ and instead of immersing myself in great art I am preparing goofy pieces based on recognizable Christmas melodies. This is the first year in a while I have done this. Usually I fill the Christmas preludes and postlude holes with French Noëls for organ. I love this corpus of organ repertoire and play it along with the Masses of these composers. It’s lovely music but I’m not sure how much it means to listeners at church (I know. I know. This is assuming they notice I am playing.)

Finished The People All Look Like Flowers by Bukowski this morning.

It seems like this is the third or fourth “last book” I have read by the late Charles Bukowski. He died in  ’94 but books just keep coming out of his work. He was nothing if not prolific I guess. I find that his mildly rough approach to life is a bit of an antidote to living in little old Holy/helland.

I have randomly ran across another poet: Catherine Barnett.

Checked her the game of boxes from the library.

Here’s a poem I like:

*****

HANGMAN

When did he start to play in reverse,
erasing the figures line by line now
they’re shadow and blank space and fragrance?
Sometimes he calls the vowels so quickly
it sounds like he’s laughing,
erasing limb by limb,
finger by finger,
until only the word is left.

Ably assisted by my brother, Mark, and son-in-law, Jeremy, I went out and bought a new computer and a Kindle yesterday. In fact I’m working on my new computer right now.

It is fast and the screen and keyboard are a good size. I have never had a laptop before that wasn’t a netbook (which is about half the size of what I am using right now). We also ran across the new Kindles which are lit up (NOT from behind my brother kept insisting, there is a layer of LEDs that shoot down on the surface you are looking at, he says).

I got up this morning and took it out of the box. Tech does seem to be getting easier and sleeker. Very nice. The computer was about $300, the Kindle $119. I feel very spoiled this morning.

Yesterday we did a Jenkins Christmas.

My nephew Ben, his boyfriend Tony, my niece Emily, and her husband Jeremy were not feeling well enough to come over to the west side of the state. We missed having them around for the festivities but shouldered on. Around 5:45 Mark and I went and got Mom and brought her to the house. Eileen arrived about a half hour later and we all ate the wonderful food we had laid out for munching and serious eating as well. Then we did stockings and gifts. By 7:15 Mom was tired so Mark, Elizabeth and I took her back.

Part of our stockings were miniature “crackers.”

This is an English tradition my daughter Sarah (who lives in England) has taught us. We found them at Meijers weirdly enough. One pops open the cracker hopefully making a pretty good “pop” sound. Then looks inside. There is a toy, a joke and a paper crown which everyone usually puts on if they don’t rip them.

I wore mine to the nursing home as we took Mom home. As I leaned over to kiss her goodbye she said  “Take that thing off your head!”

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Hardly a day goes by that I don’t access the OED. Today I read a poem by Bukowski and he used the world, dactylozoid.

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Iran Raises Level of Islamic Law Enforcement – NYTimes.com

Iran has decided that planes cannot fly during the prayer times.

According to Islamicfinder.org, which provides information on daily call-to-prayer times worldwide, they vary significantly in Iran. In Tehran, for example, they are at 5:38 a.m., 12:03 p.m., 2:40 p.m., 4:58 p.m. and 6:23 p.m. In the holy city of Qom, they are 5:42 a.m., 12:08 p.m., 2:45 p.m., 5:03 p.m. and 6:28 p.m.

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Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China – NYTimes.com

China companies beginning to respond to international standards of treatment of workers.

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A Don’s Life: My Christmas Puzzle

A blogger I read puts up an interesting Christmas challenge: trying to figure out a 19th century political Christmas cartoon.

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Evidence shows starvation did not cause saber-tooth cat extinction | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University

I’m a sucker for these clarification stories.

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The secrets of Cézanne | TLS

New book on Cézanne. Haven’t read this review but it looks informative.

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All We Can Eat – I Spice: Curry leaves

Son-in-law Jeremy brought home curry leaves from Meijers. Not curry powder. A different thing as the linked article makes clear. I added them to a curry as I was heating the oil and cooking the onions. They got brown very fast so I took them out and put them back in at the end of the cooking. They are a part of the taste but you still need to use other spices with them it seems to me.

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Finished Homes’ May We Be Forgiven yesterday sitting in the dentist chair waiting for my new tooth.  I’ve watched my grandson finish a book and immediately dive back into it, sometimes at the beginning but more often at random throughout the book. It is how we will continue to read a book long after the first read.

I did a bit of that yesterday with Homes. I had debated taken a second book with me to the dentist but was a bit self conscious about doing so so I didn’t. At the end of the book Horace Silver (the main character) says something about not fearing the other shoe falling, that he’s not even wear shoes.

The book comes full circle from one Thanksgiving to another and takes place in one fantastic year of events and changes.  Jane who is saddled with preparing the Thanksgiving meal for a large group of mostly unconscious people including her sadistic self obsessed violent husband George has been murdered by him. George is sequestered in state facility of some sort. Horace ponders what kind of Thanksgiving meal George is experiencing this year. He thinks of “pressed turkey breast,

jellied cranberry slices still bearing the ringlike indentations from the can,

lumpy gravy,

and glutinous white-bread stuffing.”

Silver wonders “Is there pumpkin pie in prison? If there is, does it have any flavor at all?”

For me these are potent musings at the end of a long and weird wonderful book. As the blurb by Rushdie (who made the Acknowledgments at the end of the book as did Zadie Smith) on the back of book says, the book “starts at maximum force.” The first hundred pages are brutal. But the reader spends the rest of the book inside the spinning head of Horace Silver as he feels his way to a new life of connection to people who seem to fall into his life almost at random but with charm.

Near the end of the book even sitting in the dentist chair I began to feel that Homes maybe went too far with her redemption thing. After the initial brutality the most intense moments are moments of comic genius studded throughout the unwieldy and complicated narrative. The surreal bar mitzvah in which Silver gathers a community around his nephew (that’s right, George’s kid) and makes a pilgrimage to a South African village is fraught with screaming foreshadowing that ANOTHER TERRIBLE THING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN.

The air goes out of this balloon and nothing terrible happens just surreal comedy and commentary. In fact there is a bonding between and a deepening maturing that Silver observes in the young people of the book that continues back in their lives stateside.

I wonder about the lack of a second terrible thing in the book. I wonder about the obvious point Homes is making at the end about the trajectory from a typical dysfunctional Thanksgiving at the beginning of the book and then an odd unreal happy Thanksgiving at the end of the book which includes turning off The Mighty Joe Young on the TV (also playing at the first Thanksgiving) and the absence of screens in the hands of the youth. Silver feels “a distinct absence of tension” that to me is a tad unconvincing.

Nevertheless I did like the book.

Yesterday walking with Elizabeth and Jeremy, a young man called to us from across the street. I recognized him as Nathan Walker. He is a friend of mine and an excellent musician I have played with in the past. He is now attending U of M and is pursuing a performance music major in double bass.  He and his companion crossed the street and gave me a big hug and chatted us up a bit.

Seeing him home from school reminded me that he is another in a growing list of people who reach out to me and value my work as much as I value theirs. While I have subsisted very well locally for many years with little of this, having it is sweet.

Yesterday was a pretty relaxed day. Eileen had to work. Elizabeth, Jeremy and I played santa elves and went to Meijers and bought a bunch of stocking stuffers for upcoming family visitors. We checked on Mom and got hugs. Then had a nice (in reality it was excellent) pizza lunch together at a relatively new downtown restaurant.

I did manage to stay on track with practicing and treadmilling.

More family arrive today (my brother Mark and his wife Leigh). As you can imagine we are madly prepping for them to arrive.

Also I have an appointed to get my new front tooth at 11 AM.

Life is good.

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Charles Durning, Character Actor in ‘Tootsie,’ Dies at 89 – NYTimes.com

I loved this guy’s work especially in Coen brother movies.

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Museum Seeks to Update Thomas Mann for Age of Texting – NYTimes.com

I didn’t even know Thomas Mann had a literary brother. Fascinating description of the Mann museum and well as the Gunter Grass museum.

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Corrupt Chinese Officials Draw Unusual Publicity – NYTimes.com

Evidence of possible change in China.

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Barack Obama needs to explain drone strikes – Hina Shamsi and Vincent Warren

Another argument for transparency around drones. We kill our own citizens. Children.

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Blame for Our Record on Treaties – NYTimes.com

Letters regarding this. First one was from the inimitable Representative Barney Frank (who was also profiled on the PBS News Hour last night).

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Yesterday after everyone in the house got up we opened presents. Adult Christmas is kind of a funny thing. At this point, I don’t think anyone is looking with great expectations for getting stuff the way one does as kid. It’s more like the fun of giving other people stuff.

Having said that, I cleaned up.

To be fair I sometimes let Eileen know where am I at in my progress of getting her stuff for Christmas. I do this because I know it will slip her mind and then feel bad if she doesn’t get me stuff if I get her stuff. Tricky, eh?

Anyway about a week ago, I mentioned that I had spent around 60 bucks on her. A few days before Christmas she asked me point blank what books I would like for Christmas. Not a definitive list, mind you. But since my reading is so wide ranging and I am always in the process of procuring the books I’m interesting in, I can be very difficult to buy for.

Having made a few trips to the local bookstore myself I had the experience of looking at the books and realizing the shop was carrying many titles I am interesting in. So I tried to pass some of this info on to her.

The result is I got a bunch of cool books for Christmas from Eileen including the following.

This is my third book of poetry by Mary Oliver. I am finding her work pretty attractive. She is almost a bit too religious or sappy for me sometimes but always seems to step back away from goofy (I find that Louis Glück doesn’t always take that step back). Anyway I have been holding back on purchasing more work by her or checking out another book from the library. Have already used this one for this morning’s morning poetry reading session.

These are two writers that interest me and these are their new books. They are now on the floor next to my reading chair.

This was in the package Sarah left for me in the house when she returned home for England.  How ’bout that? Thank you Sarah and Matthew!

I was sitting in the room with three people all of whom received email gifts from me (and in the case of Elizabeth and Jeremy—me and Eileen).

I got Eileen a subscription to the New York Times crossword puzzle app. Unfortunately there is not one for her devise of choice—the Kindle Fire. But she did play with it yesterday and printed out puzzles for her and Jeremy to work.

Elizabeth and Jeremy were scheduled to receive gift certificate emails which they did.

After sating ourselves with opening gifts we went into a fury of trying to pull the sound off of Eileen’s video she had made for her Mom.  We were trying to make a CD of Eileen reading of a book she had bought for her Mom. This took up most of the morning. We finally gave up and everyone but Eileen vacated the main floor and she just made a new recording directly on the desktop  in the dining room.

After that we zoomed over for Christmas hugs with my Mom (who really wasn’t up for a drive to Whitehall or we would have taken her with us), drove to Whitehall and had a crazy inter-generational Hatch Christmas. It amazes me how much I enjoy these things.

By the time we were home and things were winding down (I did practice and treadmill by God) I felt like I was living in a Christmas movie.

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Literally Unbelievable

Woot

New links from son-in-law Jeremy Daum. The first is funny. It compiles The Onion stories that are taken for real on Facebookistan. The second is a site which provides Internet shopping with flat 5 dollar shipping. Daily deals.

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Walter Kirn: Confessions Of An Ex-Mormon | The New Republic

Ran across this article. Bookmarked to read. Did not realize Kirn had this background. He is a writer I like.

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The Innocent Man, Part One :: Texas Monthly

Also bookmarked this one to read. Looks like good reporting.

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American Indian Adoption Case Comes to Supreme Court – NYTimes.com

This is the story of conflicting legal and moral stuff.

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Old South Church in Boston to Sell Rare Psalmbook, Stirring Dissent – NYTimes.com

I own a replica copy of this book. Hey they have two.

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Alcatraz American Indian Occupation Graffiti Preserved – NYTimes.com

Guilt based historical preservation brought to you by you (if you are a taxpayer). I think it’s cool, actually.

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Real and Virtual Firearms Nurture Marketing Link – NYTimes.com

Take that, N.R.A!

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The Christmas eve services went well. The choir sounded pretty good and I mostly nailed Messiaen. Today I have more family holiday stuff to do and not too much time to blog, so here’s my annual airing of my favorite religious Christmas poem:

The Burning Babe
BY ROBERT SOUTHWELL, SJ (c. 1561 – 21 February 1595

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

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All the World’s a Game, and Business Is a Player – NYTimes.com

Gamification hits businesses

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In Aiding Quake-Battered Haiti, Lofty Hopes and Hard Truths – NYTimes.com

Excellent lengthy report by Deborah Sontag

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Let me spit breath mists of introspection, bits of me,

So that when I am gone, I shall be in the air.

from “Jail Poems” by Bob Kaufman,The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 

This little quote from a Kaufman poem seems a fitting description of why I blog (which I have been doing via the interwebs since before the term was coined).

I believe I nailed the Handel organ concerto yesterday at church.

The video that I posted here (and on YouTube) helped me believe a bit more in my own sense of tempo than the metronome’s.  I concentrated on the emotion of the piece (which I thought of as sort of jazzy driving joy). That seemed to help tie the whole thing  together.

I spent the night alone last night since Eileen and Elizabeth drove to Ann Arbor to have a meal with family then spend the night near the airport so they could pick up Elizabeth’s partner, Jeremy, this morning. In fact they have probably already met him and are driving back to Holland as I write this.

I finished reading Neomonicron by Alan Moore last night.

This was the graphic novel a South Carolina library pulled from its shelves recently. That’s how I found out about it. I like Moore’s work. This book is built on premises and ideas from H. P. Lovecraft’s work but it has its own little clever twist to it. Very clever in my opinion.

And the rape scene described in the article was not as depraved as I feared it would be. There were actually much more disturbing scenes of mutilation that went unmentioned in the Guardian article I read about it. Figures.

I practiced Messiaen on the piano yesterday. Have already worked on it some this morning. At this point it feels very good that I have chosen something a bit more challenging to do at the later service this evening. It helps keep me engaged. Otherwise I find myself very distant from the societal Christmas experience.

This is probably something I have fallen into over the years as I have been called on to lead prayer around Christmas.

I have a sad memory from my youth of stopping at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in mid-Ohio and seeing a man weeping over his meal on Christmas day. I still think of him each year and wonder about the high expectations and emotional implosions that occur around this time of year.

Add to that the inevitable incongruity of doing church and I have difficulty connecting to the season.

Walking home from church yesterday Eileen said that she sees what I do at church as the practice of an art. I told her I did too and it was one thing that kept me engaged.

I’m not sure if many people understand my work as an art, but I do and I guess that’s what matters.

I also spent some time with Schubert piano sonatas yesterday, playing them carefully. As I age I play and rehearse more and more carefully. I believe that many of the local trained musicians see me as a hack.

Sometimes I think they may be right. Certainly my playing rarely rises to my own aspirations of excellence. And I seem to have been dropped by the coffee house scene.

I suspect I am too old for them.

Nevertheless whatever my abilities perceived or real, I continue to improve via careful work. It puts me in mind of when John Hartford received a death sentence from his doctor.

It was cancer or some awful thing. His response was to practice harder and more often. Like he knew he didn’t have much time left to savor being alive.

So I continue to savor and cultivate care in what I see as my art and craft.

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Cats at Hemingway Museum Draw Tourists, and a Legal Battle – NYTimes.com

Battle of the six-toed cats in Key West.

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Mormon Women Wear Pants to Church – NYTimes.com

At Western Wall, a Divide Over Prayer Deepens – NYTimes.com

Mormon and Jewish women take stands.

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Senators Say ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Torture Scenes Are Misleading – NYTimes.com

I guess it’s much easier to publicly disapprove of a movie of torture than the actual scandalous torture itself.

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Looking for Lessons in Newtown – NYTimes.com

Facts in this article include pointing out there are more annual suicides by gun (19K) than murders (11K) in the USA.

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Arrests in Freshman’s Drinking Death at Northern Illinois – NYTimes.com

More depressing facts in this article: 18K college students age 18-24 die in alcohol related deaths per year in the USA.

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Use of Death Sentences Continues to Fall, Numbers Show – NYTimes.com

I end with a bit happier link, but can’t help but cynically observe that this reduction is more about cost effectiveness than morality.

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Christmas approaches and as usual my teeny tiny bit of faith gets beaten down by sentimentality and sadness.

I think it might help to have children around at this time of the year. But alas, none are here. I did spend some time with children of Rhonda a couple nights ago and that was nice (thank you Rhonda for inviting us over).

Eileen and Elizabeth are driving over to Ann Arbor this afternoon for a meal with my nephew, Ben, his boyfriend Tony, and possibly niece Emily and her husband Jeremy B.

Then they spend the night with Ben and Tony and rise early to pick up Elizabeth’s partner Jeremy at the airport. I have to remain behind to preserve my energy for Christmas Eve. Bah.

The Messiaen is coming together nicely. I have high hopes for a good performance tomorrow evening. This morning I get to perform seven minutes or so of Handel (organ concerto). That will be fun. This morning’s Advent IV service is a service of Advent Lessons and Carols. I suppose it will be good. At least my congregation will sing, the choirs will probably sound okay. All will go fine.

Here’s the poem I liked from this morning’s poetry reading.

*****

dog

is much admired by Man
because he believes in
the hand which feeds
him. a
perfect
setup. for
13 cents a
day you’ve got
a hired killer
who thinks
you are
God. a
dog can’t tell a Nazi from a
Republican from a Commie from
a Democrat. and, many times,
neither can I.

Charles Bukowski from The People Look Like Flowers

*****

Aint it the truth.

I finally managed to get back to treadmilling yesterday. So here are a few bookmarks from that and other reading.

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Is President Obama Really A Socialist? Let’s Analyze Obamanomics – Forbes

I put this up as a sad example of how distorted political discussion is in the USA right now.

The OED says this about socialism: “A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement. Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.”

Even in this definition one can sense a shifting of meaning from “collective ownership” of the “means of production, distribution, and exchange” to “social justice and social reform.”

But, Peter Ferrara, the author of the linked article, doesn’t start out calling Obama a socialist, rather he insists that he is a Marxist (it was here I admit that I first quit reading the article and came to the conclusion that the rhetoric was extreme and involved in stupid framing instead of analysis).

The OED says this about marxism: buy diazepam online china “Central to Marxist theory is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base which determines or influences the political and ideological superstructure. The history of society can be viewed as showing progressive stages in the ownership of the means of production and, hence, the control of political power. Marx and Engels predicted the final revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society.”

Unfortunately, the “means of production” in the USA are the big corporations not the government (which would probably also be disastrous). In fact the corporations now own our government, not the proletariat or as I sometimes like to call them: the people.

Both socialism and marxism borrow heavily from Christian values especially St. Paul in their communitarianism. This must make religious communist haters uncomfortable when they also identify themselves as Christian. Or maybe they just don’t know or care about the story of the early Christians as one of a community which held things in common.

Anyway, I deplore intellectual use of ideas to fan the flames of  ignorance which is what I think this article artfully does. (I did read more in this article but will spare you further critique).

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The Problem of Evil | RealClearPolitics

I admire the courage of this writer to frame the current discussion of the gun madness in terms of evil. I think that’s probably salient. I disagree with his either/or proposition at the end of the article that we must either believe or perish. There are other more nuanced ways to think about this. I did find in the comments linked here:

The Problem of Evil | Comments | RealClearPolitics

a very interesting pointer to C.S. Lewis book (first chapter linked below). I have a hate/love relationship with Lewis. I liked his Screwtape Letters better than anything else he wrote. I loathed his victorian approach to sex in his work but now think I might check out The Abolition of Man.

 Men Without Chests

from  The Abolition of  Man  by C.S. Lewis

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The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole – NYTimes.com

I bookmarked largely because it pointed out that at  Columbine there was an adult with a gun. He fired four times at the killers. He missed them.

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Robert H. Bork, Conservative Jurist, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com

I watched the Bork hearing on TV and shuddered to think of this mind as a Supreme Court Justice. Now he would fit in nicely in a horrible way.

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Deaf Officers Keep Watch Over Crime in Oaxaca – NYTimes.com

Lip reading and more observant, deaf officers make a unique contribution.

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Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl Bernstein | Comment is free | The Guardian

Bernstein and Woodward back at it.

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If you checked my blog yesterday you may have seen a pretty weird sight/site. My daughter Sarahwho has been helping me with my blog “left a whole bunch of [my] old files (pdf and stuff) uploading from [my] old website to [the] new one – and it included an index.html file – which happens to act as a default main page! oops…! [but she has] fixed now [obviously].

I’m kicking myself for not taking a screen shot of it to put up here today.

My days have been so full since Wednesday that I have not had enough hours in the day to do everything I wanted to. One day I practiced much less than I meant to, all three days (W-F) I ended up skipping my treadmilling.

This also means I didn’t read the New York Times for those days (my standard reading material when I treadmill). This morning I finally gave up and checked today’s New York Times telling myself I would read deeper into the past three days when I treadmill today (which I WILL do by gosh and golly).

Yesterday Eileen asked me if it has occurred to me that I am a writer as well as musician. I was a bit amused that she wasn’t remembering (though I’m pretty sure she has heard several times from me)  the stories of my high school ambivalence between being editor of the high school newspaper and active in music department (trumpet, jazz piano).

The way I remember it, a young woman I had a crush on pointed out to me that she could see I was interested in writing/journalism and music and was surprised when I seem to be pursing the latter more than the former in my waning high school years.

From this vantage point I can see that I would have been a good writer (am one?) especially writing prose. I enjoy putting sentences together and thinking about meaning, ideas and clarity which is the way I see prose writing.

The feedback I get about my musicianship and my own assessment has led me to understand myself as someone who intensely enjoys music and is maybe medium to occasionally mildly good at it.

Admittedly my standards are sky high in these areas. I know that. Almost all listeners of any ilk these days compare us poor live musicians to recordings. Often (if not most of the time) this is an inaccurate comparison.

I have said in this space before that I think recordings are a completely different art from the art I practice in music (see the bad videos below of my practicing). I see myself as composer, improviser, analyst and live performer of music. I see recording as essentially “sonic sculpture.” I also see as an interesting and developing art, just not my art which is more along the experiential lines.

I knew an excellent player who was temporarily entranced with learning his music away from his instrument (with his MIND). When I was told this by a third party my reaction was “that takes the fun of out if for me which is largely derived from DOING music.”

This a prejudice I have mentioned here before: Music is something you (I) do.

Speaking of “doing music” I managed to find time to tape myself practicing three upcoming pieces I will play at church:

This Sunday’s Prelude

The Postlude:

We are using this tune with a very interesting text, “Mary, when the angel’s voice.” The first stanza is about Mary (Jesus’s Mom) and I am going to have only women in the room sing it. The second is about Joseph so just men will sing. The third is about Elizabeth the fourth starts “God whose name we magnify, all your children matter.” Three and four sung by all.

Here is the Messiaen I have rehearsing mentioning. Planning to perform it Monday evening in the Choral service that precedes the late Christmas eve:

Not sure how much I will be blogging in the next few days.

My daughter Elizabeth waited patiently at the airport yesterday for me to pick her up. Her flight unfortunately precisely coincided with a much needed eye doctor appointment that I had to take my Mom to. I was sorry to make Elizabeth wait but she was very gracious about it though she had spent many many hours getting from Beijing to Grand Rapids.

The stuff that was bothering me yesterday all was resolved with the help of some clear profession direction from my brother and the good leadership of my boss. Whew.  A thank you goes out to colleagues (Hi George and Rhonda!) who heard me out during this process.

Today the wind is blowing hard here in western Michigan. They have been predicted a terrible snow storm will move in from the southwest but so far nothing.

I finished reading Mary Oliver’s Winter Hours  this morning and resolved to read more of her. The last lengthy prose poem uncannily rhymed a bit and commented on the blowing wind. It also moved around in spaces where my head often goes especially this time of year when one is forced to confront the ideas of religion bouncing around everywhere in stores and media.

Here are a couple passages:

We hear on the forecast that it may snow, or it may rain, and there will be high wind. Certainly there is wind. The rest passes out to sea, but wind is sufficient. Clap of invisible hands and all the winds together, those breezy brothers, they are on their way.

Speaking of the ocean near where she lives, Oliver writes this beautiful clear passage:

Sometimes the surface takes on a tarnished glow, as it heaves and throws the white spume skyward. One could be standing in the same place, by the same sea, a thousand years ago. In spite of the motion and the noise, that glow releases something strangely peaceful. It is not unlike the calm that one reaches in the deepest influence of great art, where the spirit senses that purest of mysteries: power without anger, injury without malice. For nature and art are in this way twins: they are both beautiful, and dreadful, and in love with change.

Post script: I loaded this blog to find that daughter Sarah had changed the color to green (something I had asked her to do). I think it looks great! Thank you, Sarah!

I woke up disturbed by some stuff at work.

But I really can’t talk about it here. Yesterday was a long church work day and left me exhausted and a bit off balance.

I met with my boss and we planned several services. More services than we usually look at at one time since she is taking a two week trip to the Virgin Islands during her Xmas break. As a result of this meeting I spent some considerable time choosing organ music and preparing information for the bulletins for these services. It’s work I enjoy but it definitely took up a lot of the day.

I continued carefully preparing organ music with an emphasis on “Les anges” by Messiaen.

I also spent a chunk of time writing a descant for this church’s Gloria which they will sing on Xmas eve when it returns (The Gloria is omitted during Advent in liturgical churches).

I was working on it at the computer and looked up and found that it was time to walk to church and practice organ some more before the weekly communal meal and evening prayer.

The children’s “whateveritis” rehearsed last night after the meal. I say “whateverits” because it’s hardly a choir, I had two new kids under age so I had four children, one in first grade, one in second, one in third, one in fourth. They even wanted to sit this way. Also the religious ed director had sent out an email to parents encouraging them to consider having their children come early to the Xmas eve service and play any Xmas songs they have learned on their instruments. The email said that it would be good if they came last night and played through their piece to prepare for this. So that was the reason for at least one of my new last minute singers. His mom and dad brought him even though he did not play an instrument. He seemed interested in singing so I encouraged him to stay.

One family that responded to this actually came early (as invited) and shared the communal meal and prayer before

I adapted my rehearsal to this situation (mixed ages, new people, 2nd and 1st grader who I could not assume could read).  This was made easier because of the time of year.

I pulled out Xmas carols with refrains to take the group’s temp ability-wise. The 2nd grader was very sharp and read like a 3rd grader as far I could tell. My wife assisted the 1st grader as needed to help her cope with not being able to read everything quickly.

The warm-ups I do with children are very interactive so that was no problem with such a range. Then I alternated pieces that had refrains (Glo-o-o-0-oh, o-o-o-oh, o-o-o-oh oria, een eggshellcease deh oh) with pieces the two who had attend before would know.

Repetition of familiar anthems and music is basic to teaching children.

I especially had fun last night playing my Messiaen piece for the kids.

We talk each week about a composer. The past few weeks we have been talking about Handel. I did this again last night and had them “Joy to the World” (again) and notice Handel’s name on the page as a composer.

Part of demonstrating organ for children is teaching them that I play with my feet as well as hands. So I played  a bit of Sunday’s prelude which is a movement from a Handel organ concerto so the new kids could see me using my feet. Then later in the rehearsal I called them back to the organ and played the entire Messiaen piece for them stopping and commenting on how Messiaen using music to help us see angels flying. At one point the music descends in a fluttering like pattern to a low note. Dame Gillian Weir has this lovely program note which I sort of quoted to the kids:

“Les anges” (The Angels): “a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying Glory to God in the Highest!” The music explodes into a kind of ecstatic dance, as the angels exult and the sun flashes on their jewel-studded wings, beating jubilantly. They swoop lower and lower over the crib, and for an instant are still; then soar into the sky again, circling ever higher until, in a cascade of trills, they are lost to view.

 

I like these observations so much that I also will quote them in the bulletin for the late Christmas eve service.

I usually write this blog pretty early in the morning, as Adrienne Rich put it, the time of morning, one shambles  “into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual acts.”

I recently added another of these private ritual acts and began posting the daily O Antiphon to the Grace Music Ministry Facebookistan page.

Also I seem to be getting up a bit later. I don’t have three 8:30 AM ballet classes anymore so I can sleep or lay in if I’ve a mind to do so.

It seems that family matters are heating up.

Yesterday I communicated with family in England, California, and West Virginia. I’m trying to connect my Mom to her older sister who is living in West Virginia. Mom has expressed a desire to talk to her. Yesterday my cousin, Jerry, my Mom’s sister Ella’s son, emailed  me his cell phone number. I put it in my Mom’s cell phone. She immediately took it and dialed it. Yikes. Jerry didn’t pick up. I was sort of relieved because I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be a convenient time for him.

I decided yesterday to play Messiaen’s Les anges at the Christmas eve service. I was planning on playing Bach’s In Dulci Jubilo from the Orgelbüchlein as the postlude for the late service. I noticed that I played it last year. Seems like a good thing to repeat.

Playing Messiaen next Tuesday means that I will have to practice it pretty carefully between now and then. Today I have already slowly played through what Messiaen himself referred to as the “perpetual movement” of the last page.

Another private ritual I guess. Like scales in the morning.

Finishing up Mary Oliver’s Winter Hours. The title prose poem has some lovely stuff in it about morning:

“Morning for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us.”

Another later section of this prose poem caught my attention as well:

After describing how important the natural world of her seaside living is to her, how what she wants to describe in her poems is the “nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots from my heels to my head when the compass grass bends its frilled branches and draws a perfect circle on the cold sands….” she goes on: “[L]iving like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful.”

She is definitely singing my song.

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Amid the Whiz of Bullets, Seeking Comfort in Song – NYTimes.com

This is the best report on this awful incident I have seen so far.  I note that it was written not in the passion of the first coverage but yesterday after a lot of the initial bad reporting was slowing down.

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Man Pleads Guilty to Defrauding Education Department – NYTimes.com

Mind boggling corruption. Faking helping to get funds and bribing officials to speed up the process.

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Daniel Inouye, Hawaii’s Quiet Voice of Conscience in Senate, Dies at 88 – NYTimes.com

This amazing man’s life shows that it can be done: one can be a statesman in America.

Good quote:

Mr. Inouye said. “Vigilance abroad does not require us to abandon our ideals or the rule of law at home. On the contrary, without our principles and without our ideals, we have little that is special or worthy to defend.”

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This is getting up late today. My server went down.

This was my fortune in my fortune cookie in my take away meal from Mr. You’s yesterday.

A couple of days ago I read this article idly in the New York Times:

When I read articles like this, I imagine there is a story behind it that will probably go unrecorded. Seeking a better life,  from wherever to Greece (of all places with it’s current troubles.

Drowned in the Aegean Sea.

Like Shelley.

Then the next day I read a prose poem in Winter Hours by Mary Oliver called “The Boat” which begins:

“I think a great deal about Shelley’s boat, a little world sailing upon the greater world, to whose laws it must, of necessity, submit. As we know, it soon carried Shelley to his death, and his friend Edward Williams and the boy Charles Vivian as well. The details we do not know, whether it was the wind mainly or altogether, or the leafy waves, or the wind and the waves together, or a larger boat bearing down through the sudden storm. But this we do know. Before it happened, I mean when they left land and sailed away over the Aegean, in the clear summer air, on the untroubled sea, the boat must have looked like a white bird, a swan, floating so lightly and rapidly it was all but flying. And sailing in it must have seemed like entering, with justifiable exhilaration and total faith, an even larger, lovelier, statelier and steadier world than the manifest ocean. As, perhaps, it was.”

This morning I read this poem in Raymond Carver’s Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

The Squall

Shortly after three p.m. today a squall
hit the calm waters of the Strait.
A black cloud moving fast,
carrying rain, driven by high winds.

The water rose up and turned white.
Then, in five minutes, was as before –
blue and most remarkable, with just
a little chop. It occurs to me
it was this kind of squall
that came upon Shelley and his friend,
Williams, in the Gulf of Spezia, on
an otherwise fine day. There they were,
running ahead of a smart breeze,
wind-jamming, crying out to each other,
I want to think, in sheer exuberance.
In Shelley’s jacket pockets, Keats’s poems,
and a volume of Sophocles!
Then something like smoke on the water.
A black cloud moving fast,
carrying rain, driven by high winds.

Black cloud
hastening along the end
of the first romantic period
in English poetry.

***************

Focus my attention, indeed.

Finally I have to add this lovely poem by Mary Oliver from this morning’s reading.

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South Africa Since Mandela – NYTimes.com

Politician as pragmatist. It could happen. Mandela negotiated with the people who jailed him.

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Miss Manners on the Best Holiday Visits – NYTimes.com

Judith Martin. My heroine.

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A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan – NYTimes.com

Fascinating look at bars, hotels and bookstores in New York.

I liked this especially:

While bookstores have been vanishing for years, stylish book-themed hotels are newly abundant in Manhattan. The Library Hotel, on Madison Avenue not far from the New York Public Library, manages to be sleek and geeky at the same time. Each of its 10 guest room floors is devoted to one of the categories of the Dewey Decimal System, and each of the 60 rooms has a set of books devoted to a topic within that category.

and

Here’s an odd factoid: Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the Chelsea Hotel.

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The third Sunday of Advent is sometimes referred to as “Gaudete” or Rejoice Sunday.

It is seen as an easing up of the somber aspect of  Advent. Advent I and II are more about  the  return of the Christ at the end of time.  Hence the pink candle in many Advent wreaths. Not sure this has much application these days.  I have watched the awareness of the historical understandings of the Christian liturgical year go from faint to irrelevant.

Nevertheless I persist in scheduling organ music, anthems and suggesting hymns to my boss that fit the theology and readings of the day.

So yesterday’s service began with an exuberant Buxtehude piece. A strong opening hymn with a descant.

A canticle based on a neat little Irish tune complete with fiddle like intro on the viola and a electric bass and piano accompaniment. A lovely sequence hymn with a descant.

Then the mood turned weirdly sober when my boss announced she was going to talk about the recent deaths in Connecticut.

She didn’t do too bad a job of connecting them to other more usual tragedies in our country (the violation of the presumed safety of the kindergarten classroom contrasted to the dangerous environment young people live and die in in Chicago).

But still it was a moment that I found a bit disturbing.

My antennae instantly went up and I began trying to see how affected the people in the room actually were by the deaths. I saw a couple of young mothers wiping tears from their eyes. I watched the weird reading out of the names of those who died during the prayers by the lector who had trouble (understandably I guess) keeping his composure.

We of course had more joyous Advent music to go. I considered improvising a more thoughtful introduction to our little Buxtehude anthem if the community was really grieving.

The moment when we greet each other, the Peace as we call it, eradicated this need.

The sound of people greeting each other was loud and relieved and it was suddenly two Sundays before Christmas again.

I found myself thinking about the falsity of getting worked up over one set of deaths in one place when one is unconnected to it.But this seemed of a piece to me of the general falseness our entire society is permeated with (including churches).

The little bits of TV coverage of the Connecticut tragedy I saw were hysterical and more about the reporter than reporting. In fact the reporting was pretty bad this time.

It’s obvious to me that when the world is so connected as a lot of it is now that when mind shattering events occur (as  they do daily) they are amplified in the manner that Rabbi Friedman used to describe.

He maintained that the media in the US was not the source of our stuckness and anxiety  Rather that it amplified it.

This effect is intensified with the immediacy of hearing about individual terrible occurrences  via the distorted medium of TV and the internet (the rumor mongering which occurs in the social networks and the lack of facts in the web site of choice).

Amplification seems a lame description. It feels more like listening in to the mind of a mental patient or a group of disturbed people who are babbling but not seeking any sort of factual understanding.

Secondly, since my church situation forced me to think more about this unthinkable occurrence, I can’t help but ask the question of evil.

Sadly, I find it easier to believe in evil than God. It’s something I’ve thought about. Hanna Arendt has influenced me to look in odd places for evil.

Her idea of the banality of the evil that Eichmann was convicted of in Jerusalem keeps me cautious so that I see evil not only in the gun barrel of the madman shooting children but also in the banality of our response to it.

We are human and we must respond with our feelings. But we forget that the story our screens is telling us is usually off. By a lot. And once again we are being manipulated.

To take such distant tragedy and to only use it as an expression of our own fears can lead us easily to be even more disconnected from ourselves.

God forbid that such an awful event be reduced to a tragic “reality” tv show or a juicy subject for our tweets and Facebookistan stati.

This will have to be quick. I am up a bit late on Sunday morning and I have to leave soon.

I think beginning my morning reading poetry by several poets is a calming experience. It reminds me on a daily basis that feeling and thinking are part of being human. That authentic voices are waiting in the actual lines of the letters of the words of these people who lived and breathed, observed and commented on being alive.

This morning I also started reading in a second biography of T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life by Lyndall Gordon. Although, due to a prohibition by the man himself, biography on Eliot is scant, this book by Gordon actually combines her two previous volumes into one and incorporates freshly released material.

In fact, in this century the prohibitions are falling away and I look forward to more information about Eliot.

I picture myself alternating chapters between Gordon’s book and Peter Ackroyd’s book I read in yesterday. That would be a fun way to read these books. They are both unique and eccentric in their approach. Probably won’t actually do it, but it’s a thought anyway.

Eileen and I went out for breakfast yesterday then Christmas shopping.

We brought home a tree. We set it up in the living room. This actually was a bit of hassle since the tree was unevenly cut on the bottom and we had to do a lot of adjusting to get it balanced.

Then we took the silly ceramic Christmas tree I bought for my Mom over to her room. She seemed satisfied with it. She even adjusted the nativity set I brought up from her storeroom. She is more engaged in Christmas this year than she has been. We rigged up an easy way for her to turn the little Christmas tree lights  on and off.

I did manage to get over to church and practice organ and prepare for today.

I am weary of church. I still enjoy many aspects of it, but having to deal with stressed people is hard on a lifelong introvert. I mostly try to do no harm as they say. But of course I continually fail at that.

It’s difficult because people  often do not realize how much they are telling you with their words and actions about their own distress.

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Looking for America – NYTimes.com

Some salient comments on the killing this week. I long for some sensible  prohibitions on the distribution of semi-automatic weapons.

when a gunman takes out kindergartners in a bucolic Connecticut suburb, three days after a gunman shot up a mall in Oregon, in the same year as fatal mass shootings in Minneapolis, in Tulsa, in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, in a theater in Colorado, a coffee bar in Seattle and a college in California — then we’re doing this to ourselves.

Gun deaths this year. Appalling.

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Man Stabs 22 Children in China – NYTimes.com

It’s hard to compare this to the Connecticut tragedy, but they happened on the same day. No one was killed in China as far as I can tell.

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Most Governors Refuse to Set Up Health Exchanges – NYTimes.com

People don’t govern so much these days as mount battles and resist each other. See the recent coup of Republicans in my own state.

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Catch Limits Put on Menhaden, Unglamorous but Crucial Fish – NYTimes.com

I have never heard of this fish but find the ecological web that makes them important fascinating.

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Bill O’Reilly Has Had It With the Name-Calling

At least name calling from the left, anyway.

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I finally got off my butt and went and did some Christmas shopping yesterday.  I like to buy local when I can. So I spent time in the local shops. Then came home and did some research, checking on stuff via the internet. Then back to the shops to purchase or order.

Along with doing bills (ours and my Mom’s — this also means balancing both check books), this quickly ate up the day. My brother telephoned from New Hampshire. Conversations are interesting because he sometimes reads this blog. But he said he appreciate hearing me say some of the same stuff because of the tone of voice which is absent from a page of words.

Today I will probably make a video of Sunday’s prelude. I do this primarily as a way to time it. I didn’t get a chance to practice organ yesterday but I’m fairly confident that I will pull off my little Buxtehude prelude (Praeludium, Fuge und Ciacona BuxWV 137).

I did find time to play a bit of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus on piano. Lovely stuff.

Picked up a couple of bios of T. S. Eliot at the library yesterday. The one by Peter Ackroyd especially intrigues me. I have read other works by Ackroyd and admire the way his mind works and his wide ranging erudition. Read the first chapter this morning.

Eliot’s second wife recently died. This and daily reading from his poetry has me thinking about his life and my conception of it. I have lots ignorance about his life even though I have read (and even set to music) his poetry for decades.

The poem I read by him this morning struck pretty close to home:

*****

Lines for an Old Man

by TS Eliot

The tiger in the tiger-pit
Is not more irritable than I.
The whipping tail is not more still
Than when I smell the enemy
Writhing in the essential blood
Or dangling from the friendly tree.
When I lay bare the tooth of wit
The hissing over the arched tongue
Is more affectionate than hate,
More bitter than the love of youth,
And inaccessible by the young.
Reflected from my golden eye.
The dullard knows that he is mad.
Tell me if I am not glad!

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Some extra last minute reporting on On the Media’s podcast this morning regarding the misreporting in the Connecticut shooting. (Click on the pic to go their website)

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History, Who Needs It? – NYTimes.com

We do.

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Bill Boyarsky: Obamacare Begins – Bill Boyarsky’s Columns – Truthdig

Autism and Obamacare in Los Angeles.

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Bill Boyarsky: Obamacare Begins – Bill Boyarsky’s Columns – Truthdig

This injustice marches on unreported.

for too many in the mainstream media, led by the example of the editors of The New York Times, the recent military courtroom proceedings where Manning’s lawyer finally got to document the government’s attempt to destroy his client were largely a nonevent

I lost a filling on Wednesday. Front tooth. Yesterday I went to the dentist.

This lost filling was actually kind of a blessing since we are approaching the end of the year and we have only used about half of Eileen’s flex plan money. Money that we lose if we don’t use. My new crown (prepped yesterday and to be put in right after Christmas) will use up all the extra money. Lucky once again.

Eileen and I both were very tired all day yesterday. She said she didn’t sleep well. I don’t know why I was tired. I forced myself to practice and exercise as usual. My trio met and we rehearsed the first movement of Mendelssohn’s second piano trio. Good stuff.

Finished Glück’s Vita Nova this morning. I found it a bit unconvincing the way it’s tone and subject alternated from lofty to mundane. It seems to present itself as a sequence of poems that are somehow related. There is loss. There are many classical allusions some of which seem a bit forced to me. A couple good poems. What more do I want?

Bukowski on the other hand revels in the mundane.

I found these lines chilling this morning:

and the helicopter circles and cirlces
smelling for blood
search lights leering down into our
bathrooms

from “I live in a neighborhood of murder” by Bukowski.

And this entire poem:
*****
the bombing of Berlin

the Americans and English would come over, he told me,

there was nothing to stop them,

they had red and blue lights on their planes

and they took their time,

it was funny, you know,

a bomb would take out an entire block

and leave the block next to it standing,

untouched.

once after a raid, we heard a piano playing

under the rubble

and there was an old woman buy diazepam online fast delivery under there playing the piano,

the building had collapsed all around her,

buried her there and she was still playing the

piano.

after a while, when the planes came again and again

we wouldn’t bother to go underground anymore,

we just stayed wherever we were

on first and second floors and looked up

and watched

the red and blue lights and thought,

goddamn them!

well, he said, picking up his beer with a sigh,

we lost the war, and that’s all there is to

that.

*****

The image of the old woman playing piano under the rubble was one I liked.

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James Wood: The Novels of Per Petterson : The New Yorker

About half way through this article. Beginning to think I might have to read this author. Library owns three of his volumes.

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Glad tidings » The Spectator

Tony Wesley, my nephew Ben’s significant other, put this odd link up on Facebook. It points out how with a little perspective we live in a golden age.

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Officials Removing Quote From King Memorial – NYTimes.com

I didn’t know much about this controversy. I think I sort of noticed it in the background. Too bad they didn’t opt for the entire quote somewhere.

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Twenty-five Notes on the 121212 Concert : The New Yorker

Interesting review of a benefit concert for Sandy victims. A bunch of boomer stars.

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Ravi Shankar, Who Brought Sitar Music to the West, Dies – NYTimes.com

This obit helped me realize how much Shankar pointed me to world music. He’s not the only source of this interest but he is an enduring one. I love his life long connection both to classical Indian improvisation and experimentalism.

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http://www.tunewiki.com/

Daughter Elizabeth pointed this one out. It’s a spotify app that scrolls lyrics while the music plays on spotify. Very very cool.

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How much time in the last thirty or so years have I spent staring at a computer screen waiting for some engineer’s nightmare of a scheme to load up?

Back in the day of modems, I used to grab the paper and sit at the computer and wait for the processes to complete.

For a while this seemed to improve, but now I’m back to watching a screen do nothing.

I hear it from operators on the phone as well. After I have made my way through some damn phone tree of options and finally make it to a human being, they take the information and there is the usual pause.

“Waiting for it to load.”

Good grief.

I made it through Wednesday.

Wednesday is usually my hardest and longest day.

Yesterday was up and at helping Eileen prepare brownies for a good by treat for a worker at her job.

In fact they weren’t done baking when it was time for her to leave for work so I finished them up and cooled them and brought them to her.

Then to staff a church.

Church.

sigh

My daughter Sarah put up some photos on Facebook yesterday (Hi Sarah!).

One of them captured my mood about this time of year:

It’s complicated. And a trap. I think it’s a fake trap.

Over a christmas tree.

Hmmmmm.

After staff meeting I came home and grabbed something to eat, then went back to practice and prepare for the evening rehearsals.

I’m learning Les anges by Messiaen. I think I’ve mentioned that here before. My friend and colleague Rhonda Edgington performed this particular piece Sunday at her Advent recital.

I’ve been trying to understand what mode Messiaen used in this piece.

In the little introduction to all nine movements of the Nativity suite (of which Les anges is one) Messiaen lays out in quite some detail a synopsis of his modes and even mentions some of the movements as examples.

Curiously he doesn’t mention Les anges.

During the Wednesday church dinner as I waited for Eileen to get off work I figured out which mode of Messiaen’s it begins in.

Mode four.

I also noticed that it uses a bit of his mode 1 as well. The rest of us know this as the whole tone scale.

Not sure how important this sort of thing is to performers. But since this piece is largely scalar throughout and he neglected to mention it in his introduction I was curious.

Still cracking the code.

I think these sort of compositional self imposed limitations serve a couple of functions. First I think they assist with underlying subtle coherence that contributes to their beauty. Secondly I think they provide a strict parameter for the composer which allows him or her a certain freedom as well as a kind of distraction from the creating process.

I am reminded of these words about Gerard Manly Hopkins I read this morning.

The truth of the matter is that the poems do not require half the explanation Hopkins gave them, and to tell a further truth, he elaborates in such detail that it becomes finally obstacle rather assistance.

Mary Oliver, “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins” in Winter Hours

That’s the trick really. When does information and technique cease to be helpful and become obstacle?

Weirdly, I turned from this essay to read a poem by my beloved Adrienne Rich. And there was Hopkins in the middle of it.

*****

IF/AS THOUGH

You’d spin out on your pirate platter
chords I’d received on my crystal set
blues purpling burgundy goblets
Lorca’s piano spuming up champagne flutes
could drop over any night at will
with that bottle of Oregon Pinot to watch Alexander Nevsky
if no curfews no blackouts no
no-fly lists no profiling racial genital mental
If all necessary illicits blew in
like time-release capsules or spores in the mulch
uprising as morels, creviced and wild delicious   If
Gerard Manley Hopkins were here to make welsh rarebit
reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland to Hart Crane in his high tenor
guessing him captive audience to sprung rhythm   as we in lóst lóve
sequences hearing it
skim uncurfewed, uncowled
pelicans over spindrift beating agnostic wings

for Ed Pavlic

2006

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 Chris Bliss Gets Bill of Rights Monument Built in Phoenix – NYTimes.com

If you’re wondering what Dick Gregory and Tom Smothers have been up to lately.

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IPhone Leads Drivers to Middle of Nowhere in Australia – NYTimes.com

I’ve been told this can happen right here in the good old USA.

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U.S. Will Recognize Syrian Rebels, Obama Says – NYTimes.com

With every step to correct earlier mistakes, he said, “they make a bigger mess.”

Maybe every December I go into this funk. I don’t know.

I do know that I’m easing out of my burnout since the end of my ballet class duties. Yesterday, my Mom was practically chipper as she went to her doctor’s appointment. She didn’t realize she was seeing her psychologist. His name is Dr. Thomas. She had confused it with her former pain doctor: Dr. Davis.

He thought she was doing well.

I told him I thought she had a period of depression after my daughters’ visit. He said that was pretty typical. I did say she had rallied in the last couple of days.

I brought up a fake scrawny Xmas tree and a wreath from her storage area to her room. She doesn’t remember that I gave her the fake tree one Xmas when she was deep in depression and wanted nothing to do with anybody or Xmas or anything. This year she thinks the tree is too scrawny looking. She asked for her ceramic tree which I had to tell her was discarded.

I promised her I would go to Bibles for Mexico and get her a new ceramic one. God knows they have them there.

Also she missed the red bow on her fake wreath. Again I assured her I would attend to this.

This is all to say that she is more interested in Xmas than she has been for several years.

Good signs.

Yesterday sitting in my Mom’s psychologist’s waiting room I read this paragraph in A. M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven.

There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we “friend” each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to—we fuck strangers.

We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version—it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.

I think this is a shrewd take on the online and offline world right now.

This disassociation must contribute to people’s anger and reactivity which dominates so much public discussion.

Mary Oliver’s little book, Winter Hours, contains four essays on four poets: Poe, Frost, Hopkins and Whitman.

At the end of the essay on Robert Frost which I finished this morning she quoted this lovely poem:

*****
My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walked the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost

*****
Even thought we are almost half way through December, this poem fits my mood.

I’ll close with one more A. M. Homes quote. I had Eileen read this this morning. It shows how much of this book actually reads.

Brad is an employee from a pet store. Harold Silver has set up a free kitten stand right in front of the store. Brad comes out “wearing a tag that reads ‘Brad—Assistant Manager.”

*****

“What are you doing?” Brad asks.

“Giving away kittens,” I say, even though it’s obvious.

“”We sell kittens,” he says.

I say nothing.

“You’re going to have to move your pop-up shop,” Brad says.

“Sorry.”

“You’re competing with our interest.”

“But the ASPCA has a pet adoption stand right here every weekend.”

“Are you a non-profit?” Brad wants to know.

“I’m giving them away.”
“You’re small potatoes,” Brad says.

“I beg to differ,” I say,”Whoever takes these kittens is going to need supplies. How about just thinking of these five as a loss leader?”

“Loss leader?”

“The things a store is willing to lose money on in order to get people who will buy other things in the store. Milk, for example, is a common loss leader,” I say.

“Move,” Brad says. “Take your act over to the A&P. I’ll help you….” He picks up the edge of the table, and the carrier starts to slide.

I grab the carrier. “Take your hands off my table or I will call the police, and then corporate pet whatever, and have your dumb ass fired.”
“I’m a witness,” an old woman says. “I will testify.”

“It was an accident,” Brad says, and I sort of believe him.

“Tell it to the judge,” the old woman says as she helps me carry the table closer to the A&P.

“Do you want a kitten?” I ask her.

“Absolutely not,” she says. “I dislike pets almost as much as I dislike people. My husband says I should only shop online—that the world is a better place with me safe at home. He thinks I’m bad.” She shrugs. “I think he’s worse.”

“How long have  you been married?” I ask, laying out my flyers and supplies.

“Since the beginning of time,” she says and heads off.

from May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

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Edith Windsor Revels in Gay Marriage Case Before Supreme Court – NYTimes.com

I found this woman’s story inspirational. She even built a harpsichord.

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Strauss-Kahn and Hotel Housekeeper Settle Suit Over Alleged Attack – NYTimes.com

So difficult to ascertain what happens behind headlines. But here’s a final chapter in last year’s scandal.

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The God Glut – NYTimes.com

Blake Page: Why I Don’t Want to Be a West Point Graduate

Atheist soldier-to-be breaks ranks with evangelical military types.

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Taking Aim at Michigan’s Middle Class – NYTimes.com

Michigan makes the NYT editorial page. Nice.

This sums it up:

Concern for the rights of individual workers, of course, is not the real reason business is pushing so hard for these laws. Gutting unions is the fastest way to achieve lower wages and higher profits.

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Charles Rosen, Pianist, Polymath and Author, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com

Although I didn’t always agree with this writer/musician, I always admired the way his mind worked.  Have read several of his books.

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