I ran across a little serendipity (“Sarah”ndipity) this morning. I discovered that T. S. Eliot worked for as short time in High Wycombe as a teacher. This is the same UK city where my daughter Sarah went to college.

I have made it to Friday of my first week of my Winter Schedule which is quite strenuous. It looks like Thursday will be my hump day this Winter. Coming on the heels of a long day (Wed 8:30 Class, 11:30 conference with boss, 5:45 – 9 PM at church attending a meal, playing a short prayer, doing two choir rehearsals), Thursday is another long day: two ballet classes and a string trio rehearsal. Yesterday I also needed to make a trip to the grocery store.

By the end of the day I was quite tired. We decided not to go to eat because I’m working on moderating my diet and drinking to lose a bit of weight. Instead I whipped up some food for us and we sat down to watch some silly TV online (Game of Thrones season two).

In between all this I continue to practice and exercise.

The ballet classes have had some pretty good moments of musical improv in my estimation. I do enjoy this work and it is a good outlet for my creative notions since I’m not doing much composition these days.

I am finding myself drawn a bit deeper into the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin and Lucille Clifton. LeGuin’s work seem to use form and convention to convey a cool irony and critical mind:

Soldiers

When I was young, the soldiers filled
The streets with khaki brown,
And sailors too in white and blue.
The glory of my town.

My elder brothers all had gone
To wear a uniform.
I feared for them, but never feared
They would do any harm.

I knew them brave and kind, I new
Them good, and nothing more.
How should a child conceive the wrong
That is the soul of war?

Noe of them killed, and none was killed.
And when their job was done
In hope and pride we welcomed them
And said the war was won.

When I had children of my own,
Soldiers were dressed like clowns
In camouflage, and no parades
Went thumping through the towns.

No, it was we who marched instead,
And we who beat the drum:
Women and old men, motley, wild,
All shouting, “Bring them home!”

They brought them home; some were alive,
But all had come to grief.
And silence met each one and shame
As coward or thief.

We failed them, in righteousness
Withdrawing our goodwill
From the blind courage that obeyed
The blind command to kill.

Yet in all truth they failed us,
As young men ever have,
Who take the order from old men
To dig our common grave.

So now my children’s children see
Their brothers in the mud,
And tortured prisoners, and streets
A marsh of human blood.

And it will be in years to come
As in the years before:
The innocent accept the wrong
That is the soul of war.

And soldiers still will fill the towns
In blue or khaki clad,
The brave, the good, who march to kill
What hope we ever had.

from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin

i come to read them poems,
a fancy trick i do
like juggling with balls of light.
i stand, a dark spinner,
in the grange hall,
in the library, in the
smaller conference room,
and toss and catch as if by magic,
my eyes bright, my mouth smiling,
my singed hands burnin.

from “in white america” in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

“… As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.”

T. S. Eliot “East Coker” V. , Ash Wednesday

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Freebook Sifter – A Resource for Free eBooks

My only bookmark for today (I did read the paper, just didn’t read anything worth bookmarking). Thank you to Sarah for this. Someone sifting the free ebooks on Amazon. Very helpful.

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I started my morning listening to music. Not too loud so as not to disturb my lovely wife.  I read about David T. Little (pictured above) in my new New Yorker yesterday. “Little began his musical life as a punk drummer, then earned a doctorate from Princeton..” I read in the Critics Notebook.  Hmm. Interesting. Then this sentence: “Most young composers put the influences of rock. post-minimalism, and Benjamin Britten into a cocktail shaker and hope for the best; Little channels them into a seamless flow that fosters cohesion and expressive impact.”

At that point I decided I would like to hear something he wrote.

This morning I “Spotified” him and found a CD which came up when I searched his name called “Outerborough.

Although there seems to be just one of his compositions on it (“and the sky was still there”). I’m just playing the whole album and am enjoying it quite a bit. Haven’t gotten to Little’s piece yet. The album is attributed to Tod Reynolds. I found more on Amazon:

Todd Reynolds is one of the founding fathers of the hybrid musician movement. Creating acoustic-electronica in real-time with only his 17th-century violin and a 21st-century laptop onstage, his sound mixes borrowed and home-brewed, avant and pop, jazz and classical. ‘A daredevil musician’ (The New Yorker) his evolution is marked by long-time associations with Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Bang on a Can, and ETHEL, the string quartet he co-founded in 1999.Now, comes his first solo album, ‘Outerborough’, a 2CD set that reveals him as both a composer and as one of the most sought-after interpreters of contemporary music.

Despite the purple prose above I think it’s pretty cool that he uses original 17th century instruments  and laptops at the same time. Plus a lot of the music is attractive to me. So far.

I have been including reading poets in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry in my morning poetry reading. The quality is very uneven so I’m sort of skipping around in it. The last few days I have been reading Jack Micheline’s work and am enjoying it so much I interlibrary-loaned several of his volumes.

He was a Beat poet who found Beat poets too entranced by “media hustle” (according to his memorial web site bio).

His poems are kind of long to quote in a blog.

But I find nice lines in every one.

I’m finishing this up between my Thursday ballet classes. I seem to be holding up energy wise to the new schedule.

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Obama Nominees in Step on Light Footprint – NYTimes.com

Some analysis of current cabinet members.

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Online Banking Attacks Were Work of Iran, U.S. Officials Say – NYTimes.com

Cyber wars quietly heat up.

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Tentative Deal Reported in Chinese Censorship Dispute – NYTimes.com

I’m following this story.

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This morning I read this section in Eliot’s “East Coker” from his Four Quartets.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

I admit that I ponder being the age that I have reached, sixty-one. In history this was often considered old age, near death even. But now in this century and place, I have the possibility of living many more years even as I note my increasing invisibility to people I rub shoulders with in the grocery store, church or on the streets.

I had to look up a couple of words in this passage above: hebetude – “the state of being dull or lethargic” and grimpen. The former definition from a quick google command of “define:” the second taking a bit more digging.

My beloved OED reveals an interesting history of this word. It seems the Arthur Conan Doyle may have coined the word in “The Hound of Baskervilles.” Then Eliot picks up on it and uses it in “East Coker.”

The unfamiliar words (at least unfamiliar to me) underlie this curious passage on old age. Eliot dates “East Coker” 1940 in his Collected Poems. He was 52 that year. So old age looms not too far ahead in his life as does the war which was underway in England by then. I like his critique of the dullness and lethargy of old age masquerading as serenity and its folly, fear and fear of frenzy more clear than its supposed wisdom.

I for one am glad to be the age I am. I feel extraordinarily lucky to spend my time with my beloved wife, my music and my poetry.

Yesterday I decided to schedule a Bach prelude from the Orgelbüchlein (BWV 607)based on a hymn tune we will be using a week from Sunday: Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schar. In the Hymnal 1982 this tune is paired with John Mason Neale’s translation of a 5th century text by Sedulius, “When Christ’s Appearing was Made Known.”

This inspired me to also schedule Bach’s G minor fugue, BWV 578.

I use the G Minor fugue as the prelude and the other piece as the postlude for the day.

Known as the “Little G Minor,” I probably first heard this piece in a Music Appreciation class in Middle School (Junior High we called it then) in Flint Michigan. I seem to recall a room full of sweaty boys (Music App seems to have occasionally occurred during Gymn hence it was all boys in the room) with a large fat man in a cheap black suit and tie looking at us. I recall his face clearly, paunchy, full lips, a gaze which both penetrated and concealed. He would snort a short breath and talk to us about music.

Despite this bizarre first contact, I have always loved this little fugue and have never bothered to learn it thoroughly for church or recital. It seems just right to add at this point in my mental life and organ technique.

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Deans Condemn Vaccine Ruse Used in Bin Laden Hunt – NYTimes.com

I read the New York Times pretty thoroughly while treadmillling yesterday. This article was the only one that interested me enough to bookmark.

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I spent most of my day off alternating reading Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin and playing the first eleven fugues from Czerny’s edition of Bach’s “Art of Fugue.” I am inspired by my reading of Reinventing Bach by Elie. Elie is lyrical about Bach, Schweitzer and Casals, all heroes in my mental world. I like to think I don’t murder Bach too badly when I read through him like this. Czerny (who I think of as Beethoven’s piano teacher) marks all sorts of wrong interpretation and articulation in Bach. I ignore it (as I do Longo’s marks in his edition of Scarlatti I continue to play through) but am grateful to have the “Art of Fugue” which I also own in score reduced to two staves for keyboard players.  

Today is the first day of my new schedule. I have two ballet classes on Tuesday and Thursday this semester making them my more strenuous days. I have an hour off between them which I will probably spend in the cafeteria. I am hoping to teach my laptop to access Hope’s wireless automatically today. I have my assigned password tucked away in my purse. We’ll see. Often this sort of things don’t work as easily I anticipate.

I also plan to somehow continue my Tuesday ritual of finalizing music for the Eucharist we will celebrate a week from Sunday. This means picking organ music, pointing the psalm for the day, and putting the words to the anthem I have chosen in the bulletin. Tomorrow evening we begin rehearsals for both adult and children’s choir. I will need to find time to make sure I have material ready for these rehearsals. This will involve making some (legal) photocopies and pulling anthems from the library and stuffing folders.

I also began rehearsing with a high school violist last night. This young player is now a senior and she and her family have hired me to accompany her at the annual Solo and Ensemble festival for several years. I charge them a hundred bucks and they sometimes tip me more. The violist plays learning concertos (from Suzuki books) which challenge the player to develop specific technique. There are always double stops and contrasting rhythmic figures that look to be written with incrementally improving the player’s abilities. The music itself is usually straight forward and goofy. This one has several measures of a Cb major double stop that are pretty challenging. I usually pipe up and make suggestions and comments as we rehearse. The player and her mom (who sits and listens) seem to appreciate this. I guess this will be the last year I get called on to do this sort of work, since I no longer assist with the musicals at Grand Haven High School (which was my contact for high school students there).

I have been reading in my deceased father’s King James Bible recently. It is inscribed with my full name (misspelled Steven instead of Stephen). Just under it is the name I would have received if I had been a girl: Rita Zae (Zoe?)  Jenkins.

Maybe Mom changed the spelling. She always told me that he didn’t really want to name me Steve because the only Steve she knew was Stevie the drunk (presumably in West Virginia).

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Looking for a Jump-Start in China – NYTimes.com

The 70 richest delegates to China’s National People’s Congress have a collective net worth of almost $90 billion, Bloomberg News reported. That’s more than 10 times the collective net worth of the entire American Congress.

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Chinese Newspaper, Southern Weekend, Challenges Censors – NYTimes.com

China in the news.

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The Big Fail – NYTimes.com

Krugman always teaches me something. A societal economy is not like a household one. Good to know.

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Why China and Japan Can’t Get Along – NYTimes.com

I keep reading a bookmarking China reports. This one has some interesting history of China and Japan that is still playing itself out.

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I’m blogging a little later than usual on this my last Monday off for a while. I slept in a bit and then got up leisurely, sipped coffee and did my morning reading.

I want to be sure and say something about the compliments I received yesterday. I bitch and moan so much in this space about how many of the the local musicians don’t seem to notice that I’m doing music much less respect my work.

Yesterday before church a Jazz aficionado who is a parishioner chatted me up briefly. He concluded by telling me that he thought I played Jazz well. Then during the peace (where the members of the church generally go around and greet each other), one of the several trained choir directors who are parishioners and his wife both made a point to come up to me and shake my hand. They both thanked me for my work with the choir at Grace. I was pleasantly surprised.

I was sitting in the choir area yesterday during church and thinking that when I examine the many people in the church one by one I can see that they appreciate my work there. I think my occasional sourness comes from my own extremely critical assessment of my abilities and execution combined with a few specific instances of weirdness that stick in my craw. I hope to let these silly little things go as much as possible this year.

Having said this, yesterday’s service did seem to go particularly well. I did a lot of vocaleses in the pregame. Every choir member was also present at the party the night before at my church. Their voices were tired from singing and staying up and partying. This requires some TLC in the warm-ups. Judging from the sounds in the service the warm-ups helped.

Even though the music was of modest quality yesterday, nothing earth shattering, it was all pretty well executed and musical. In addition it was one of those Sundays when everything hung together in a coherent way. The prelude and postlude were based on the opening and closing hymn. The anthem was well sung and related to the day. The hymns all were good solid choices.

I came home and treadmilled to one of Bach’s Epiphany cantatas, specifically  Cantata BWV 65 “Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen.”

I quite like this cantata and it made good treadmilling music.

I’ll end with a poem by Lucille Clifton from this morning’s reading session. I relate to it.

the light that came to lucille clifton
came in a shift of knowing
when even her fondest sureties
faded away. it was the summer
she understood that she had not understood
and was not mistress even
of her own off eye, then
the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”

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After Years in Solitary, an Austere Life as Uruguay’s President – NYTimes.com

Some world leaders live in palaces. Some enjoy perks like having a discreet butler, a fleet of yachts or a wine cellar with vinta

ge Champagnes. Then there is José Mujica, the former guerrilla who is Uruguay’s president. He lives in a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all. His security detail: two plainclothes officers parked on a dirt road.

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Jared Diamond: what the tribes of New Guinea have to teach us | Science | The Observer

Diamond is an amazing man. If you haven’t read him, I recommend doing so.

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Barack Obama and the ’empathy deficit’ | Science | The Observer

Always interesting how the rest of the world sees Obama.

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Pro Patria Fans’ Racism Prompts A.C. Milan Walkout, and Outrage – NYTimes.com

Soccer game called due to racism. Amazing.

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China Says Reporter for The Times Was Not Expelled – NYTimes.com

Following public discussion of visas in country where two members of my family are now living.

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Escaping Slavery – NYTimes.com

“Today there are more African-American adults under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”

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Central Africa’s Wildlife Rangers Face Deadly Risks – NYTimes.com

Poachers use military expertise to slaughter the people protecting animals.

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I spent the entire day yesterday preparing for the choir party in the evening. I did manage to get the house clean and straight.

Had a chance to chat with lovely daughter Sarah while I emptied and refilled the dishwasher (Hi, Sarah! My BP is down this morning in case you were worried, heh). I went to church to prep for this morning. I also grabbed hymnals and 8 copies of an anthology of Christmas anthems I recently bought at Bibles for Mexico for 50 cents a piece.

Then stopped off at Meijers and grabbed more stuff for party. Came home and made bruschetta and little salami sandwiches. The bruschetta toast was still hot as guest began to arrive. The evening seemed to go well. After eating and drinking and talking for a while we settled down to singing hymns from the little Willcocks anthology I purchased at the thrift shop. Then we sang from the African American Hymnal, Lift Every Voice and Sing. People seemed to enjoy it. I kept dropping out from the piano and letting us sing a capella.

Yesterday I found a descant for “Brightest and Best” in the files at church. I looked at it and decided it sucked. I got up this morning and wrote a new one. I also put a descant by Erik Routley (for “As with gladness, men of old”)  into Finale and printed both up already this morning.

Off to church in a bit for Epiphany.

I am avoiding cleaning up the house for  tonight’s choir party by blogging. Soon I will have to get going on this. Also I am planning to make snacks. I will go over to the church later, practice and pick up some hymnals and choral music to provide entertainment this evening.

Yesterday I finally got my Mom over to the optician and ordered new lens and frames. This should help her with her reading.

I couldn’t get the check book to balance yesterday. Eileen then worked on it for several hours and finally figured out we had written down one transaction twice in the ledger. Thank goodness she’s there to help.

I feeling a little overwhelmed this morning.

The house is a wreck. I have no motivation to get ready for tonight so I will have to force myself to do so in a bit. I will put on music. That helps.

Eileen and I also went out looking for covers for our Kindles yesterday. She found one at Odd Lots. I found one  at Staples. There were both 5 bucks a piece. Not bad but by the time we were one looking I was pretty tired. Came home and made myself go practice.

This was good since I spent a good amount of time reading through Bach preludes and fugues. I have been reading again in Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. I am finding (and making notes of) more mistakes. Initially I found where he said that the tune for “A Mighty Fortress” was derived from a Gregorian chant. This is true of many Lutheran chorales. But I don’t think it’s true of that one. He mistakenly referred to the number of ranks in an organ as the number of pipes. Big difference. He also said that Mendelssohn was Jewish using it to make a point. Weird. Mendelssohn was a baptized Lutheran and only Jewish by heritage not faith or practice.

Anyway despite these errors I am finding the book pretty inspiring in its enthusiasm about Bach. It goes into quite some detail about Albert Schweitzer and is inspiring me to consider re-reading his book on Bach.

I read it once straight through when I was about twenty. Since then I don’t think I’ve made it all the way through again. But have thumbed through it many times. Even though his scholarship is inevitably dated, I find his insights still pretty valuable.

Oh well, time to get cleaning.

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James Meek reviews ‘Breaking Bad’ produced by Vince Gilligan · LRB 3 January 2013

This review made me think of rewatching this series. Also the reviewer puts “Breaking Bad” in the same high quality category as “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos,” and “The Wire.” This makes me think Eileen and I might enjoy watching all the way through “The Sopranos” one series we haven’t been that attracted to.

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With Accessory, Officers Looking Sharp and Staying Safe – NYTimes.com

The history and advantages of clip-on ties for law officers.

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Is It Time to Scrap the Constitution? – NYTimes.com

Letters in response to an article I recently linked.

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A Guide to the Senate’s Freshman Class | RealClearPolitics

FWIW

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Peter Blaikie: Guns, gun culture, and madness in the United States

A conservative from Canada talks sense about this topic. Thank you for pointing this out on Facebookistan to Ken Near my friend who lives in Quebec.

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In her bio of T. S. Eliot (one of two I am concurrently reading), Lyndall Gordon points out that a title of an unpublished poem by him is the source of the first recorded usage of the word, “bullshit,” in the OED. Sure enough, there it is.

Gordon also wrote this lovely sentence a few paragraphs earlier in the book.

Who can now determine the exact ways people of the past bent their inclinations
in order to construct gender according to absurd models of masculinity and femininity?

My whole life I have had difficult fitting into models of masculinity. Gordon is writing about Eliot’s relationship to a man he knew in Paris, Jean-Jules Verdenal. She points out that his relationship to Verdenal “was devoid of the ostentatious masculinity American men felt compelled to construct” and that Eliot’s letters to him are “devoid of that bravado he went in for buddies like [Conrad] Aiken.”

Eliot apparently was struggling with his own sexuality at this stage in his life at the age of 24. He was in Gordon’s words “an inspector of vice” but not a “participant.”

This distance gave him the advantage of the poet and he poured it into “obscene” poems that remained unpublished in his lifetime.

I am warming up to Gordon’s understanding of Eliot. She resists the 20th century understanding of him as moving from darkness into the light of Christianity. She calls the 20th century a century of extremes and seeks to understand Eliot on his own terms which I suspect combine understandings previously held.

It’s helpful to read Ackroyd alongside her. He can’t help seeing it from the stuffy Brit point of view. They both seem to miss things the other picks up. I am going back and forth between them trying to roughly line them up chronologically.

I have just ordered Inventions of the March Hare: poems 1909 to 1917 which contains this previously unpublished work ($6 on Amazon including S & H).

I have also been reading straight through Eliot’s selection of  his own work he wanted to preserve (Collected Poems 1909-1962) and have just reached his final masterwork “Four Quartets” which I have read many times and am re-reading.

Eliot’s careful restriction of access to his unpublished work and his recently deceased wife’s resisting scholars use even of quoted published material makes reading about him intriguing and frustrating. There are letters written to and by him which were sealed by his wife only to be revealed in 2019. So the scholarship is evolving. Gordon seems to do a pretty convincing job of making a coherent story in the midst of this.

Ackroyd is just Ackroyd a writer I love and also find frustrating and oblique. He weirdly inserts himself into his bio of Dickens in the manner of the post-modernist (or whatever label you want) he is. I have also read some of his fiction. I like it that he knows so much more than I do and find reading him opens my head a bit. His bio of Eliot is very preoccupied with the ideas Eliot was working on as a student of philosophy as well as Eliot as poet.

After blogging yesterday I spent the entire day (10 AM – 4 PM?) picking out final choral anthem choices for the rest of the year. I had roughed in the entire year in the fall so it was a bit easier but I did take pains in choosing them. At 4 PM I went to church to look quickly at some anthems, pick out organ music for a week for Sunday (thus staying a week ahead in what I submit for the bulletin), and practice organ a bit. Back to the house to treadmill.

While I treadmilled I finished the New York Times and then read my Kindle copy of Reinventing Bach by Paul Ellie on my laptop using the Amazon cloud reader. When I got to the part about Bach visiting Buxtehude, I put Buxtehude up on Spotify. Life is good. This morning when I fired  up my Kindle and synched it the note I made on the cloud was there. Cool.

Yesterday I emailed the chair of the ballet department that I could do the scheduled she had offered me. Emailed music ministers to remind them of Saturday’s Twelfth Night party at Casa Jenkins.

Finished The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett.

Here are a couple poems from it I liked:

******

Chorus

We didn’t believe an elephant could squeeze into church
so we went to church and waited while the priest
kept saying listen and forgive and the animals all around us
listened, or didn’t listen, some strained against leashes,
some wore disguises that made them look like people we knew,
people we should forgive or be forgiven by,
we didn’t know which, even the elephant
looked like someone we knew, flooding the doorway
like a curtain of light, swaying from side to side.
Her hide was cracked down to her feet and her eyes,
they shone like glass before it breaks. She looked
like she might fly but only walked down the aisle
in a dirty gown of wrinkles, so wrinkled and slow
and vast and silvery, the whole galaxy shivering.

*********

The Right Hemisphere

Late at night the mind quiets, or
when listening to Mozart. All the studies
say so, they show maps of the brain
when you’re having chills listening
to something beautiful the way a man’s cry
is beautiful to me I’m ashamed to say.
The part of the brain where music gets processed
is close to my memories of a few men
in flagrante, or whatever that is
when they open their mouths and cry out
and for a moment the brain lights up.
“Present,” I might have said
though for most of those nights I wasn’t,
not really. I wanted to be.
I don’t like to think about the past,
I was afraid to say “here”
though there I was listening.

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Huizenga Moves Out – 1450 WHTC Holland’s Hometown Station

My Congressman says having a local office in Holland  is not as important as it used to be  “most of his constituent work is now done online or via the phone, as opposed to person-to-person in past years.” Wow. I wonder what “redrawn district” means in this article.

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  I may have gotten a bit of TV religion last night. Eileen and I watched three episodes of “Game of Thrones” on my new laptop. Ever  since I saw this huge self contained monitor/computer at Best Buy Ihave been wondering whether we might be better off watching TV online and getting rid of Cable. It’s on sale for about $500. It has a 20″ screen and would make a good TV for Eileen and me. I found the program on http://www.cucirca.com/ along with tons of others. Since we just spent a ton of money on my tooth and Christmas, I think we will delay purchasing something like this for a while. In the meantime, we will continue to see what we can do with just accessing TV programs with the laptop. Finished a volume of Mary Oliver poems this morning. I think I like this poet quite a bit and will continue to read her. Have begun volumes of poetry by Ursula K. Leguin and Lucille Clifton. These are two interesting poets to read simultaneously. Clifton died last year. My brother was familiar with her work, but I had never heard of her till I picked up her book last week at the library. Le Guin is a long time favorite writer of mine. I have read many of her novels but little of her poetry. Both books are collections which are sort of an overview of these two poets’ work. I think they proceed chronologically through each poet’s opus. I have to say that Clifton seems so far (about 80 pages in) to have one basic voice and that Le Guin is more literary and wide ranging in her poetry writing than Clifton. It’s probably comparing apples and oranges. Yesterday (and today so far) was a Bach/Shostakovich day at the piano. I have playing from both of their collections of preludes and fugues. Shostakovich  obviously has Bach in his head as he writes his collection of preludes and fugues. I think Shostakovich does a good job coming up with beautiful and interesting music in this genre. And of course playing Bach is always an unbelievable experience. Yesterday I played the Prelude and Fugue in Eb from Book II of the Well Tempered Clavier over and over. Each repetition revealed something new to me in the music. That’s how I experience Bach. I move deeper and deeper into his music and find more and more in it even after an initial dizzying experience the first time through. *********************************************************************************************************************

Mike Auldridge Dies at 73 – Lent Dobro Fresh Elegance – NYTimes.com

As I was reading the New York Times yesterday and treadmilling I utilized my laptop to look up music on Spotify as I read about it in the obituaries. Marva Whitney, 68, Singer in the James Brown Revue – NYTimes.com       The result was a whimsical playlist

Ray Collins of the Mothers of Invention Dies – NYTimes.com

I read in the obituary of Ray Collins that one of the first records Zappa released was Hey Nelda.

Ned and Nelda were Zappa and Collins. And there it was on Spotify to add to my whimsical list. Joy by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books Then there was this essay by Zadie Smith which mentioned all kinds of music I didn’t recognize. I especially liked “Can I Kick It?” by a Tribe Called Quest and music by Q-Tip and The Streets. Man do I feel spoiled to be able to so quickly access the music I read and am curious about. *******************************************************************************************************

Times Reporter in China Is Forced to Leave Over Visa Issue – NYTimes.com

Elizabeth mentioned this to me. Also that Philip Pan, the NYT bureau chief whose wife she recently had lunch with and whose book In Out of Mao’s Shadow she has read and which I am reading, is also in danger of not having his visa renewed. ********************************************************************************************************

Protester Wounded by Gunmen in Egypt – NYTimes.com

Government thugs in other countries have been background noise in the news ever since I have been paying attention. *********************************************************************************************************

California Man Held in Burning of Homeless Woman – NYTimes.com

This kind of violence on the helpless and unwanted seems to me to be an action on the evil extremes of humanity. ********************************************************************************************************

Another year begins. I have been avoiding the end of year perspectives that so many of my sources lapse into at this time of year. It may be my own jadedness but I hear and read so many banal discourses empty of insights that I don’t feel like picking through the retrospectives for the gems.

Yesterday my daughter and Elizabeth and my son-in-law (no longer quasi as he used to refer to himself) borrowed one of our cars and drove off to Chicago. They both have flights home to China today. Jeremy’s leaves from Chicago, Elizabeth’s from Grand Rapids. She will drop him off and drive up to Holland (or Grand Rapids). It has been a lot of fun to have them around for an extended time.

Besides sheer companionship and joy in their presence, I have benefited by their guidance (mostly Jeremy) into purchases that have increased the quality of my life a bit.

My old netbook computers were never loud enough to actually use them to listen to music to.

But as I write this blog on my new fancy laptop I am listening to Rubenstein play Chopin at the same time on my new fancy laptop.

Earlier this morning I put some more books on my new Kindle Paperwhite. Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time reading on it. I like its feel and use and especially the convenience of its portability.

As I treadmilled the last couple of days I have used my laptop to both read the paper and listen to music. Very cool.

When I go out to run errands and require something to read, the Kindle Paperwhite is nice to slip into my pocket and have something to read available.

I am reading Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel  by Gary Shteyngart on my Kindle. He had a blurb on the back cover of Homes’s May We Be Forgiven which I have recently read. Both Elizabeth and Jeremy have read it and recommended it. My Kindle tells me I have read 36% of it so far.

Jeremy was talking about Charles Stross’s collection of short stories, Accelerando. I had previously downloaded it (it’s available online free) but didn’t remember reading it. It’s now on my Kindle and I have read the first chapter.

I skipped organ practice (Sunday’s music is not as hard as last Sunday’s). I will do church things tomorrow when Eileen is at work. I have to pick the rest of the anthems for the year and let the Sunday School teachers know when I am planning to have the Kids’ Choir sing. This will be pretty easy since I have already sketched in anthem choices for all choirs for the rest of the year. Now I just need to nail them down.

I was in an odd musical mood yesterday. It took me away from Beethoven,  Haydn, Scarlatti (the guys I have been playing) and toward the French: Debussy and interestingly Fauré. For some reason Fauré was drawing me in. I have printed up many of his pieces from online sources because my one student Rudy seems to be intent on learning all of his piano music. But yesterday I was drawn to their elegant beauty and spent time with with several barcarolles.

I am glad to be alive for another year.

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Embodied Cognition: Our Inner Imaginings of the World Around Us Make Us Who We Are [Excerpt]: Scientific American

How our brains make meaning, not only with language but also with experience.

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Japan’s New Premier Backs More Nuclear Plants – NYTimes.com

It seems that more and more democracies are moving rightward in their leaders. This guy wants to roll back recent reluctance about nuclear plants and rescind apologies. Sheesh.

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Let’s Give Up on the Constitution – NYTimes.com

Some surprising musings on just exactly what our country needs.

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F.A.A. Rules Make Electronic Devices on Planes Hazardous – NYTimes.com

This article points out that the real hazard is bodily harm from other passengers who feel unnecessarily threatened by your Kindle.

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