I finished Capital by John Lanchester yesterday. I found it a delightful and informative read. Delightful because it is deftly and cunningly put together. Informative because Lanchester draws portraits of several people living in England in the first part of the 21st century and does so convincingly. In doing so, he presents a picture of London the Capital (or the City as he puts it) as well as the capital of  high incomes of some of the people on one particular street. But it’s mostly about the City in my opinion.

I have a vested interest in this because my youngest daughter has resided in England for quite some time (since 2001?). I share with her an abiding interest in the Brits. Lanchester fills in some holes (albeit in fiction) for me about England. I find reading contemporary fiction sometimes does this. It helps me understand reality a smidge more.

Anyway, Lanchester hangs his tale on people connected somehow with one street in London named Pepys. This must be a fictionalization and a convenient one since Samuel Pepys is known for his famous diary of London life.

There is a mild conceit of a small mystery. Who is sending postcards to addresses on Pepys road of photographs of the addressed residence with the message “We Want What You Have” on it each time?

But this is not a mystery story. It’s a story of people, specific people. Like Roger Yount the ridiculous rich  financier who is described in part thusly in chapter 2:

At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six foot three, just short enough to feel no need to conceal his height by stooping—so that even his tallness appeared a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than more ordinary people. The resultant complacency seemed so well-deserved, and came with so little need to emphasise [sic] his own good fortune relative to anyone else, that it appeared like a form of charm.

And of course his complacency and charm are doomed from the start. Despite his repugnant wealthy ease I was drawn to sort of like Roger. In fact, that’s something Lanchester does with most of his characters. He paints them with warts that initially amuse and repel but then fills them up a bit with traits that one indulges much as one might indulge one’s own foibles in a mirror.

So there is the financier character plus his family and Hungarian nanny. There is the philosophical Quentina Mkfesi an immigrant who is a “warden” who spends her day issuing parking tickets. (Did you know that “sleeping policemen” is what some Brits call speed bumps? I quite like that.)

There is the widow Petunia Howe who rattles around in her house on Pepys and remembers her life. There is Smitty a Banksy like artist who is her grandson and visits her occasionally.

There is the Senagalian football (soccer) genius and his dad who have been transported to London to dazzle fans. There are the three Kamal brothers, each with a different degree of Islamic devoutness who take the reader into a Toltsoyan family that runs the convenience store on Pepys. A hulking Polish building contractor comes in contact with many of the owners of buildings on Pepys and is one of the more complex characters in the book, guilelessly sleeping with women only for sex and without bringing himself to actually reveal himself and have relationships with them. He is saving up money to return to Poland and care for his aging parents.

I can’t do justice to these characters and the way Lanchester makes them three dimensional and intertwines them into a gentle 21st century mix of Dickens and Trollope.

Recommended.

I have been easing up on the demands I make of myself as an organist for a while. When I was sick, I was dragging myself over to church to continue learning upcoming music.  I found that when added to the rest of my duties (choir director, meeting attender, de facto liturgy guy, and numerous other activities) that it might be good to schedule some easy music for awhile. Also during Lent there is no prelude this year because we are beginning with a little chant we sing over and over until the procession begins. The prelude seemed redundant. As I said to the skeptical person in the choir Sunday, “a preparation for the preparation.”

Anyhoo, this ended yesterday when I chose music for this Sunday and the next. Just the postludes.

We are closing this Sunday with a Lenten hymn, “The glory of these forty days.” It’s sung to a tune that has been around for awhile that is called Erhalt uns in German. This is the beginning of the text sometimes sung to it in the Germanic tradition.

Tunes in the North German tradition were far from uniform in their renditions in the 17th and 18th century. There were many different versions of hymnals floating around, usually without music. So which tunes were sung where becomes a point of contention.

This matters because of the many pieces composers like Bach and Walther and others based on hymn tunes.

The use of music based on hymn tunes has been useful to me. Much of my working church musician life I worked for the Roman Catholics who were trying to jump start a congregational singing practice after centuries of passivity. So organ music based on tunes made a lot of sense to reinforce the learning of melodies. This was especially true because most priests disdained the use of an entire hymn, preferring to truncate it to two stanzas.

I am convinced that the use of many stanzas of hymns in church communities also reinforces the melody in the communal mind of the congregation.

I can remember sitting on a panel in a local American Guild of Organists meeting where I was the only one on the panel that was strongly advocating the using of chorale preludes. The local mucky mucks (who are the high priests and priestesses of the reformed tradition) resisted with a smirk.

Nevertheless I think it’s pretty cool to use music based on the tunes in the organ music.

So I scheduled a little piece by Walther for this Sunday.

Walther actually uses a form of the melody which resembles the closing hymn. I have been known to alter pieces so that the listener who has just sung a melody would better recognize the piece as based on the same melody.

Whippy skippy, eh?

But I’m now committed to some practice for the postlude a week from Sunday. It’s the final movement of Sonata V by Felix Mendelssohn. I sort of fell in love with it yesterday.

Many organists (including my teacher at Notre Dame) don’t seem very enthusiastic about Mendelssohn’s organ music. This would be okay, except that I see and hear them play music more insipid stuff (to my ears) and then call it wonderful (“GLORious” is the working term I believe).

Yesterday I decided to give in and face the fact that I like Mendelssohn. I hear his music not as the product of a weak kneed romantic who is from suspect origin (Jewish ferchrissake), but as the product of a careful and classically trained mind.

I am convinced that his less than stellar reputation among academics is sorely tainted by antisemitism. Which always strikes me as almost funny since Mendelssohn was not only baptized as a child as a Lutheran but displayed a deep love of the style of the Lutheran chorale.

He even made them up so convincingly that more than one academic career has been wasted trying to find actual melodies that match Mendelssohn’s.

*****

C. Everett Koop, Forceful Surgeon General, Dies at 96 – NYTimes.com

I remember this guy vividly. He did some good and lived a long life.

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Devoted to Weight Watchers, but Workers Rebel Against Low Wages – NYTimes.com

The tupperware model of business doesn’t always work out for the sales people I guess.

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Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office – NYTimes.com

I learned a lot about how some businesses are allowing working away from an office in this article. It looks like Yahoo has handled this poorly. Not sure why they went so extreme. It seems like a case by case basis would have been more judicious and effective.

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In India, Missing School to Work in the Mine – NYTimes.com

Corruption at its finest. Note that the mine the reporter visits is owned by an unnamed government official. Ahem.

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Sequester Impact On States Detailed In New White House Reports

If you’re curious about what the government is actually saying about the upcoming cuts, this article has some information and links.

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I know a lot of professional type bloggers create an essay which has coherence for their bogs.

Other people use social media to talk about trivial harmless sort of stuff.

Everybody links.

I’m somewhere in the middle of this mess. I think of my blog as having you sitting in the living room with me and me expostulating about what I’m reading and thinking.

Hence, I’m not really looking to create an air tight piece of prose or coherence. More like an ongoing conversation with the cyber air.

I was feeling very grateful this morning to have this imaginary conversations in my life.

Not just with you, dear reader, but people like Chopin and Schubert (who speak to me through their music that I play or listen to); or John Lanchester (author of Capital) or numerous poets and writers that I visit daily (Poets: Michael Robbins, Gerald Stern, Louis Glück; T. S. Eliot biographers Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon). This sort of list goes on and on. But it is a very real feeling I have that I am not trapped in provincial Holland Michigan (or anywhere else for that matter) or this time but can rove with my thinking, reading, playing and imagination. Lucky me.

Having said that, here are few things on my mind.

My attitude towards politics, government and the society in which I live might be settling a bit. I have always been interested in the intrigues and manner in which representative governments govern.

I have read all of C. P. Snow’s novels about the British government stuff, some of them several times.

I have had my partisan moments in the last few years, but I am feeling more clear about the idea that society is so complex that it is reductive even to be partisan.

Take the upcoming sequester as it is being called…. you know…. on Friday many cuts to basic government budgets will take effect…. cuts designed to be stupid but now seem to be making politicians happy. On the right, government is indeed being taken into the bathtub and strangled. On the left, glee at the fact that the right will get the blame for any pain caused to the public by it.

Good grief.

The sequester? Never heard of it.

This Washington Post blog posits that the sequester is less understood and causes less concern than the fiscal debt discussion (the “cliff”) because it doesn’t have a catchy name. Oy.

Ryan Lizza: Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? : The New Yorker

This New Yorker article digs a bit deeper into the machinations of the House Republicans. More like C. P. Snow’s view.

Eileen and I recently watched a taped Jon Stewart show in which his guest was Steve Brill.

Stewart had read a article in which Brill commits journalism regarding health care costs in the USA.

Yesterday, I purchased a Kindle copy of this issue and am a third of the way into Brill’s 36 page article. It is another layer of corruption and mismanagement in our health care. Mostly ascribing insanely high mark ups of medical stuff like meds, tests and wheelchairs/canes. Also pointing out the insane wages given to heads of hospitals and teaching med departments in universities. Read it and weep.

Finally, I had an odd thought about people who are so adamant about keeping guns to protect themselves from the US government. Haven’t they thought of the fact that the government owns all these drones and if it wanted them gone, poof! they would be good and gone no matter what gun they own.

Just a thought.

It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten a new toy. The smart phone is kind of goofy, but I do keep thinking of ways I can use it (besides as a phone). Most of these ways involve accessing the internet more easily like at the grocery store or dumb doctor’s waiting rooms (dumb because like Meijers they don’t bother providing a free wifi).

Also I now am carrying a camera. This part I love.

Yesterday the postlude as I mentioned in previous posts was by a man named Matthew Locke.

Matthew Locke is also the name of my daughter Sarah’s significant other. He might even be related to the composer.

I resisted impulsively taking pictures during church yesterday.  But after church I snapped a few.

I have thought of taking pictures of the stained glassed windows in the choir area and using them on the church web site.

They’re kind of hokey. There are two of them with several (four?) panels all sort of music related.

This is the most choral one and might serve to make a picture for the music page on the church web site. It is also the scariest picture. Note that the three boys all have the same face but are slightly different colors. Rev Jen pointed this out to me yesterday as I was taking pics. I like this window for its weirdness, but not sure it’s quite the ticket to use. We’ll see. And then there’s this one.

It’s awfully Christmassy.

Anyway I love having my phone to take pictures. I added some apps yesterday (Facebook, Kindle, Google News). Discovered that the New York Times Digital subscription only seems to be compatible with the Iphone app. Texted back and forth with son in California. I am trying to figure out a routine for having a smart phone. Having a dumb one was easy. I just kept it turned off most of the time. Right now the smart phone is off, but I’m not sure how I will routinely use it yet. I used it the way I have been using the dumb one yesterday on Sunday mornings: as a clock. Smart phones, expensive clocks and flashlights.

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The Price of Public Violence – NYTimes.com

Giving our kids PTSD.

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In Nepal, Buddhists Reconstruct Tibetan Murals – NYTimes.com

Using locals to make new art for temples. I loved this little description:

an abbot used a mirror to absorb the spirits of the gods in the statues and murals before the painting began; after the project is completed, the abbot is expected to release the spirits from the mirror so they can return.

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Refrigerator Inventory: 5 Steps to a freshly frugal fridge | Squawkfox

This link posted by daughter Elizabeth on Facebookistan inspired me. I have been trying to organize the fridge lately. Maybe I’ll steal some ideas from this site.

I was listening to the radio program, “On The Media,” in bed this morning. The first report pointed out something I continue to notice, the idea that both sides of current partisan debate are equally responsible for bad government (or practically no governing at all).

I have noticed the falsity of this stance. For example on the current ridiculous manufactured crisis of the “sequestering” that will begin in earnest next Friday, the two sides in congress are offering two different solutions. One, the Democrats and Obama, leans toward some sort of combined increasing of revenues via taxes and cuts of expenditures in the budget. The other, the Republicans, are opposed to any revenue increases at all and want only cuts.

These are two fundamentally different approaches. Polls I have read have indicated that most Americans would prefer some sort of mix of revenue increase and budgetary responsibility via cuts.

In the report on this morning radio show, one reporter pointed out that the media is applying an old style understanding of itself as refereeing between two sides that fundamentally even have overlap and some areas of agreement. In reality this situation no longer exists. As the report points out the most conservative Democrat in Congress is far to the left of the most Liberal Republicans. Also the Senate is broken when routine cabinet appointments are now subject to holds placed by Senators.

The result is that the reporting tends toward false equivalency of attempting to present two sides of an argument. Deborah Tannis pointed this out years ago in her book, The Argument Culture.

The example in the radio report was the Obama birth certificate silliness. It tended to be reported with corroborating evidence on one side and Trump’s doubts on the other.

It is easy to generalize about the reporting of media. The fact is that many consumers of news have not thought about their own bias and how they get their information and what sources are what.

The best example of this is the little web site literallyunbelievable.org. My son-in-law Jeremy has expressed the idea that this is now his preferred way to read the Onion. This is the current top of this web site:

When looking at a link, all one has to do is notice the URL to begin thinking about the source of the information. This doesn’t seem to be the way many approach online information. Like the media itself, many consumers are stuck in the idea that if it is in print or on their screen (or being broadcast to them) it is de facto true, especially if it happens to fall in line with their own predisposition.

In other words, we are all in our own little echo chambers, the trick is to try to notice this and factor that in.

Here are some links around this issue (and possibly the inspiration for the report on On The Media).

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False-Equivalence Watch: WaPo Edition, Chapter 3,219 – James Fallows – The Atlantic

Beltway Brain Fever: Sequester Edition — Daily Intelligencer

On another note.

Eileen has been very unhappy with the fact that we are paying TMobile for cell phone  usage and have such lousy reception with our phones, often being unable to make calls. So we finally traipsed over to Verizon with the idea of switching. Originally we thought that one of us (Eileen) should have a smart phone. We looked at very economic ways to do this (pay as you go). But in the end we decided to go with monthly plan.

As we were doing it, I heard the woman say that by using a smart phone (for Eileen) and a dumb phone (for me) we were saving $10 a month. That seemed silly, so we decided we should both get smart phones.

The cool thing is that when we were ringing it up, my Hope College I.D. gave us a discount of 15% on our basic monthly fee of $60 which almost absorbed the difference in my having a smart phone as well.

I will have more to say about learning the phone culture but in the mean time here is a picture I took with my smart phone as Eileen signs up for hers.

I have been doing a lot more lazing about in between my scheduled commitments. Mostly reading. I am practicing organ less. Upcoming music is not terrible challenging. I continue to replay my way through Schubert piano sonatas.

This morning I managed to sleep in until around 7:30 AM. This must be a recent record. Consequently I seem less verbose this morning and am putting up a “no thank you helping” of a post.

The postlude tomorrow is by Matthew Locke, namesake of my daughter Sarah’s partner in England.

I’m hoping they are related. I chose it because it’s pretty easy and sort of matches the choral anthem by Thomas Thomkins. Both British and lived with a hundred years of each other. Tenuous I know but there you are.

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Kevin Ayers, Rocker in Soft Machine, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com

I just checked and I still own three vinyls of Soft Machine. But none of them have this guitar player on them.

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Case Ends Against Five Ex-Blackwater Officials – NYTimes.com

It’s been awhile since local yokel Erik Prinz has been associated with Blackwater. Hell, it’s not even called that anymore. But still when it surfaces I am reminded of the evil floating just below the surface in places like good old Holland, Michigan.

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Syrian Television’s Most Outraged Bystander – NYTimes.com

Media manipulation being used by Syria taught to them by Iran. Same dude “spontaneously” appearing and being interviewed in multiple news reports.

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I can’t resist another quote from a poem for the title of today’s blog. I think it’s witty in a silly way. It’s from this poem:

Use Your Illusion

by Michael Robbins

It’s a gorgeous day, not a bat in the sky.
The topography’s square with the recon.
Contents may have shifted during rapture.
Let’s put the Christ back in Xbox.

This baby is disgusting. Fuck you, baby.
Get a job. You have the worst taste in art.
A real Winston Churchill, this one. Your lot’s loss?
So lose. Lose the attitude. Lose the dress.

I was saying something about a baby.
It had eleven dimensions, kind of
a dim bulb. The last of a tiny race.
Just a shadow on a milk carton now.

I saw myself in half then make myself
disappear. Maybe the other way round.
Let’s hear it for my lovely assistant.
She’s the lower half of my body, sawn.
I open the cabinet and poof she’s gone.

*********

I like this guy so much I’m reading  Aliens Vs. Predator, the library book of his poetry I have a second time.

I noticed that I am reading two books each of which relates to one of the two countries my daughters are living in.

Capital by John Lanchester is about a fictional neighborhood in London and the people who live there. It takes place in 2007 and 2008. It draws wry portraits of several recognizable Brit types (all pretty rich): the widow living alone pretty much waiting to die (she’s not rich), the unhappy financier and his horrible family, the football (soccer) star from Senegal and his dad, the spoiled young artist, the three Muslim brothers with varying degrees of devoutness who run the convenience store on the block. Everyone in the book is sketched with merciless accuracy. I am quite enjoying it. I’m about a third of the way into it.

Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan is one of several books I am interested in about China where my older daughter and her husband live. I’m over three quarters of the way through it. It is very informative in that the writer uses anecdotal stories about real people that illustrate what it’s like to live in China. There’s lots of frustration about trying to run a newspaper or report the SARS epidemic to the authorities in a country where the state controls so much. But the people are clearly and sympathetically drawn and once again I’m enjoying this one which my daughter and her husband have both read and recommended.

I have ended up buying and reading simultaneously two biographies of T. S. Eliot: one by Peter Ackroyd and one by the more scholarly Lyndall Gordon.

I fell into alternating chapters out of curiosity as they sort of began outlining similar material and I wanted to see the differences. Continuing to do so has been instructive. Ackroyd has a huge mind and knows tons of stuff. Both books are heavily documented.

Doing this with two biographies has made so much sense that I am planning to do so with two bios of Mao.

I started this biography a few years ago. My son-in-law said that it didn’t have a good reputation as being scholarly. This seems weird to me because it also heavily documented. Of course the sources in this case are mostly originally in Chinese.

I cast about for something a bit more reputable and landed on Phillip Short’s book.

I read enough into it to know I wanted to own it so I purchased a copy. Both books are waiting for me to return to them. I’m thinking of reading them the way I have been reading the T. S. Eliot bios. I was surprised that Short seems to be so oriented towards understanding China’s recent history under Mao from Western sources. I think comparing the books as I read them might help me understand the story of Mao better than either one separately.

At any rate it will wait until I’m done with the Eliot books.

I notice that these two biographical subjects also represent the countries my daughters live in even though Eliot is American he is basically faux English and the bios take place mostly there.

The Red Poppy

by Louise Glück

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

*****

I read this poem yesterday morning. It struck me enough to mark it to read again this morning. It is from Glück’s collection The Wild Iris. I finished reading this book this morning in a collection of Glück’s poetry.

Michael Robbins the poet/critic says that it is the poppy speaking in this poem. And that many of the poems in this collection are from the point of view of the flowers in Glück’s garden. This makes sense. But for me, there is a voice of the poet and the voice of the poem itself. Someone speaking the way they do (whether in words or swaying like a red poppy) because they are “shattered.”

I see red poppy petals scattered but I also see shattered people sitting and lost maybe on a street in a city.

And the cheerful inanity of the first line attracts me. It captures my mixed feelings about the contemporary way to think or not think. I would be grateful if I could abandon the mental stuff sometimes. It would be a “great thing.” At the same time the next line captures the assumption that I carry into each moment that my feelings are a wave that are always present and presumably distorting things the way conceptualizing stuff with a mind can also distort things.

This poem is what we were like before we were human, before we bought into the stuff that takes away our ability  to “open.”

That’s how I see it.

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College Degree Required by Increasing Number of Companies – NYTimes.com

When I was in grad school, the chair of the music department said it was a buyer’s market for PHDs. This article talks about “degree inflation” and uses the same phrase for employer’s in general about all college degrees.

*****

Supreme Court to Hear Campaign Finance Case – NYTimes.com

Money is speech and corporations have individual rights. This stuff never fails to amaze me.

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A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry – NYTimes.com

This is a good behind the scenes look at how corporations shape legislation and subsequent law to their advantage and to the disadvantage to the society at large.

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The Memoto camera-narcissism or media for the masses? | The Media Freedom Foundation

Document your life with a little cam that takes a picture every few seconds.

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“I don’t think I could write something every day in a blog,”my younger daughter who is one of my regular readers said on the phone yesterday.  I reminded her that I have been doing this since before the term, “blog,” was in use. Originally I wanted to build a web site where I could have conversations with readers and friends. Now I have the site and blogging is a rage of many different kinds of writing but the conversation I have is most often with composers and poets I examine and listen to.

So be it.

On Monday my improvisations for ballet class left an odd taste in my mouth. I felt disconnected. Subsequently I dragged Schubert’s dances along yesterday and dropped a few in. This seemed to help even though composed music is not actually flexible enough to do the trick easily. In one combination (as the ballet people call it), I matched a little Schubert waltz to the rhythm outlined by the teacher. Then the teacher repeated the exercise at a much quicker speed. Although she had expressed approval of my use of the Schubert waltz, she suggested I might want to change the music. When I attempted the waltz at her speed, she pointed out that it was too slow. I just changed and improvised something appropriate. Much better.

Schubert has been on my mind. I am playing my way once again through his piano sonatas. I have recently played my way through Bach’s English suites for keyboard. I guess these are my conversations. Schubert glides quickly and satisfyingly (to me) into chords that surprise and melodies that stay with me. I play him even though critics have sometimes assigned his piano sonatas as so called “lesser works.” I still find them very satisfying.

From Bow To Baton: Violinist Joshua Bell Conducts Beethoven : Deceptive Cadence : NPR

I listened to a bit of this NPR interview with Joshua Bell yesterday. I found it “quaint” when Bell and the interviewer discussed his role as conductor from the first chair of the violin section.  There has a been a bit of a move to break out of the constraint of the traditional conductor vs. orchestra set up of the 19th and 20th century. I find it exciting. But Bell seems locked in the idea that one person leads an orchestra.

I was reminded that it was Bell who several years ago unsuccessfully tried to busk in a subway station.

He is a great player. But in both cases he seem to be working from a weirdly naive point of view.

I have been reading in Musicking by the late Christopher G. Small. It’s sitting on my Kindle and I read in it once in a while.

I find his ideas reinforce some notions of my own, like the idea that music is more verb than noun… i.e. “it’s something you do.”

He also spends several chapters examining the orchestra concert situation in the late 20th century. He outlines a shrewd and careful examination of the actual roles of the participants (listeners who gain access through purchase of a ticket but are not allowed any role but the one of passive consumer, expert symphony players who disdain the audience’s taste even as they willingly perform the music chosen, conductors who lead and composers who provide the notes to be played). He also mentions context as determining a large part of the meaning of the music that performers and listeners expect.

In Small observations I think he had Joshua Bell’s number. In the first case, it would seem to me that the whole celebrity conductor thing is expanding to include other ways to do music, especially when the Western tradition eases its stranglehold on how we think of music. Bell seems stuck in the past here. And as far as context, I wasn’t surprised that one of the finest players in the world was treated with indifference on the street. I continue to find that the quality of both the music being played and its interpretation is something that listeners need some guidance on otherwise they are likely to ignore it.

You know, like in church.

Heh.

I’m convinced that daily is the way to go with blogs.

When I check blogs and they haven’t a had an entry for several days I think of them as stuck somewhere no longer touching the “rolling present.”

On the other hand, writing a daily blog is a bit like sitting in a room with one way mirrors.

You’re never quite sure if you’re being watched.

Or maybe it’s like writing a daily note and putting it in a bottle. (Pace to the dozen or so readers and responders to this blog.)

The difference is I’m not stranded, but prefer large amounts of solitude. This solitude allows me to read, think and practice.

I know that it’s informed by the love and care of my wife and a few other people. Without that I’m pretty sure it would be bitter.

Actually it’s hard for me to imagine. At this point I carry the ones I love around with me. They’re thoughts (as interpreted by me) continue to inform my daily life, little conversations with ones dead or gone.

And then there’s the poetry and music itself.

Yesterday I played through the first two piano sonatas of Schubert. I do this more and more carefully, slowing down to get every note and rhythm as correct as I can.

It’s weird that my technique has improved over the years. Logically one expects it, I guess. But I see people stagnate into one place of being or another. Plus the technique I am striving for I know is not that advanced. I once read or heard the statement that the reason most organists are so bad is that so many of them didn’t have the technique to give a sophomore piano recital. Also after I quit school at one point and was sipping wine with a disgusted prof, he confided in me that most piano majors in the school couldn’t play scales in all keys. Both of these things have nagged at me in the back of my mind as I try to develop my abilities.

But I have made strides by myself in front of keyboards since leaving the care and guidance of teachers years ago.

It feels like my personality is evolving at the same time and I require myself to look harder and harder at those mirrors. Even the one way ones.

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In Korea, Changes in Society and Family Dynamics Drive Rise in Elderly Suicides – NYTimes.com

This reminds of the article I read recently about a Chinese family sacrificing so that their daughter could go to college, get a good job and take care of the parents in their old age.

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Supreme Court to Hear Alabama County’s Challenge to Voting Rights Act – NYTimes.com

Eileen and I watched an NPR special on Hubert Humphrey recently. In it, Jimmy Carter said on camera that Americans might need reminding that it wasn’t so long ago that Jim Crow was the law of the land, upheld by the Supreme Court. Racism is alive and kicking in the USA.

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I read this sentence in a poem this morning:

I’d wear those jaws like a toothy cilice…

Hmmm. Didn’t recognize the word. Neither did spell check. But it was in the OED.

Hairshirt, eh?

Here’s more from the poem:

… I’d wear those  jaws like a toothy cilice,

slip into the glitzy red gown of penance, and it would be no different
from what I do each day—voyaging the salt sharp sea of your body,
sometime mooring the ports or sighting the sextant, …

from “When the Beloved Asks, ‘What Would You Do if You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?'” by the illustrious Natalie Diaz.

Then there was another word in Louise Glück this morning.

*****

Scilla

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we-waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be the next to nothing?
Why do you look up? To hear
an echo like the voice
of god? You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
your silly lives: you go
where you are sent, like all things,
where the wind plants you,
one or another of you forever
looking down and seeing some image
of water, and hearing what? Waves,
and over waves, birds singing.

Oh yeah. That’s what it is. A flower.

Glück mentions these flowers in another poem I read this morning.

*******

April

No one’s despair is like my despair–

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.

******

not Scylla

Lastly, I ran across a word that the OED didn’t know.

And where once the crowdws were mere pent peacocks,
Twiddling half chatoyances, shimmers in the dark,

from “Aubade, Vol. 2: The Underground Sessions” by Rowan Ricardo Phillips in The Ground

Chatoyances? What the heck?

Wikipedia to the rescue.

Here’s what Wikipeda says: “In gemology, chatoyancy (pron.: /ʃəˈtɔɪ.ənsi/ shə-toy-ən-see), or chatoyance or cat’s eye effect,[1] is an optical reflectance effect seen in certain gemstones. Coined from the French “œil de chat,” meaning “cat’s eye,””

It’s worth quoting Phillip’s entire poem:

*****

Aubade, Vol. 2:

The Underground Sessions

The sun is a sequence of flash and din
In the sunken club’s slack black ceilings.
And where once the crowds were mere pent peacocks,
Twiddling half chatoyances, shimmers in the dark,
Now only dancers remain.
The DJ rubs the mood of the room as though it
Were his womb. We dance: we ripple in place.
The twin black lakes of vinyl blend
Stirred to life by the dipped needle.

No one I know knows the real ends of when. (What?)
No one I know knows the real end of when. (What?)
No one I know knows for real when to end. Again.

No one I know knows for real when to end. (What?)
No one I know knows the real end of when. (What?)
No one I know knows the real ends of when.

And when we thought we’d reached the end
It was remixed again.
No one I know knows for real when to end.

As when a drinking collared deer
Hears a noise and
Although safe by being Caesar’s
Feels a strange freedom there in that second,
Some sense in the gut, a thunder of ribs,
A surge in the blood, some cinched memory
Of not being Caesar’s,

I change in the sameness of change.
I embrace the night and get gone.

*******

The Way They Live Now by Michael Lewis | The New York Review of Books

Interlibrary loaned the book in this review.

Memorable quote from the article:

Monty Python was able to survive many things, but Goldman Sachs wasn’t one of them.

It snowed all day yesterday. Each time I got in the car I had to clear the snow off it. I notice this morning it is -4 degrees outside. Yikes.

I read Michael Robbins’ review of Louis Glück’s new collected poems.

Los Angeles Review of Books – The Constant Gardener: On Louise Glück

I had seen a copy of it on the new shelf at the library, but hadn’t bothered to check it out since I have recently read several volumes of her work. After reading Robbins I was inspired to stop by and see if it was still sitting on the new shelf. It was. I checked it out so that I could find some of the poems Robbins mentions in his entertaining review.

I think I like Robbins. I am re-reading his little book of poems Alien Vs. Predator. I like the way he studs his poems with images and references I recognize. It reminds me of my first contact with Bob Dylan’s work. Plus his meter and rhymes are sometimes as vicious and clear as his images. I now check his blog for new essays and ideas.

I read the New York Times online in a different manner yesterday as I exercised. Instead of reading headlines and deciding whether to click on the article, I decided to open the first twenty or so articles (this would be the front page and the international section) and read the first paragraph or so. It was a different way to proceed for me. I had a friend long ago who insisted he read the Sunday New York Times from beginning to end each week. This always perplexed me as an odd task.

Reading the paper this way does I think bring me in contact with news stories I would skim or miss. Online journalism hasn’t quite figured out how to write headlines that both interest and inform a reader enough to click into the story. Plus godforbid there should be many pictures.

Afghan Insurgent Is Killed on an American-Led Base – NYTimes.com

Last night, Eileen and I watched the Daily Show from Feb 13 (Hey, we’re behind!). Stewart had on Fawzia Koofi an Afghan politician who has her eye on Karzai’s job.

I thought of the article linked above. It is a crazy quilt world where American soldiers shoot prisoners in the back and feminist politicians from Afghanistan teach us bravery.

Mary Beard, Classics Professor, Battles Internet Attacks – NYTimes.com

This is an article I might have missed since the original headline didn’t mention Mary Beard (The Saturday Profile: In Britain, an Authority on the Past Stares Down a Nasty Modern Storm).

She is another whose blog A Don’s Life I check regularly. I wasn’t aware she had made such stupid enemies.

Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer, Dies at 71 – NYTimes.com

Okay okay I admit it. I follow Janice Ian on Facebookistan. She announced Morton’s death and I do recognize him as a producer of her work.

This is the sort of obit I read even if I don’t recognize the deceased.

I was going to write that I didn’t do music at all yesterday. I was too tired/lazy/ill to go practice organ at church. The music I am playing tomorrow is not all that hard (despite the exposed measured pedal trills in the postlude, but what the heck!). But then there was that hour and a half at ballet class. This week my improvs seemed very strongly melody based. I usually make my improvs very coherent harmonically. That way I figure it should be pretty easy for dancers to tell where I am in the phrase. But melodies are probably even easier to follow.

But even when I emphasize an improvised melody, I usually do variations as I repeat it.

Today is a bona fide day off. I have nothing scheduled. I need to do little tasks like groceries and practice organ. But I can schedule these at leisure.

As I was sitting and reading this morning, the desktop computer bonged loudly. It bongs usually when someone is trying to contact me on Facebookistan or Electronicmail. I had two messages flashing on Facebook. One from my brother that my web site was working better for him today. Another from a young woman at church wondering why I shared a picture of her. This second one also had a link for me to click on. It didn’t pass the smell test. I didn’t respond and just closed the window. Looks like somebody got hacked to me.

Well as you can tell I actually have nothing to say today. This must come from extended periods of illness/fatigue/laziness. No links even though I persist in my daily internet news reading as I treadmill (which is where I get a lot of my links).

After playing my ballet classes yesterday, I came home and try to piece together a Valentine’s Day program from my Mom’s nursing home. I had one hour to do so. I had in mind a couple of piano pieces: The first Arabesque of Debussy and the Raindrop Prelude of Chopin. This seemed sufficiently sentimental for a Valentine’s day party.

I added to them tunes like “As Time Goes By,” “What the World needs now,” and “My Funny Valentine.”

When I arrived, there was a gentlemen who repeatedly confided in me putting up his hand to his mouth to shield his secret, “One man and ninety nine women.” Each time he said this to me, I pointed out that this was good odds.

The room slowly filled with people. There were tables set up with Valentine treats on them. Afterward one woman said to me that she had enjoyed my program so much she had not eaten her treats. High praise. She also told me a story about her sister who played the piano and had died at the age of twelve before she herself was born. Her mom had wanted her to learn piano but she had wanted to learn dance instead. Now, she said, I’m too old to dance.

But actually I had looked up and had seen her dancing while I played.

I had tunes like “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “In the Mood”also on my playlist. Two women told me that the music I had played was the music played at their high school dances.

I find it interesting that just sitting at the piano and playing out tunes is something that has meaning and appeal for these people. I suppose they are bored out of their minds and any distraction is welcome. Although they don’t really act like this. Instead they seem extremely polite and also very tired as they move their walkers slowly through the halls.

When I left the old guy bragging about the odds was wandering the room and still making the comment to no one in particular as they took down the tables.

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

Wes Anderson’s Worlds by Michael Chabon | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Chabon’s essay made me rethink if I wanted to see some of Anderson’s movies.

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How the G.O.P Can Win Black Voters – NYTimes.com

It always pleasantly surprises me to read Ishmeal Reed on the pages of the New York Times.

It’s getting boring that I talk about being ill every day so let’s just let it stand as read that I am still fighting this cold.

I noticed that the studio I usually play my Wednesday class in was dark yesterday when I arrived. This is not unusual. I am often the person who checks to see if the door is unlocked and if it is amble in and turn on lights. I usually proceed to play piano. This is the nice thing about my job. I play piano. There is a piano waiting for me to play if I want. Then after the class begins, I get to play piano. I like that.

Anyway, the students were going into a classroom, just not the one I was scheduled to play in. I followed.

In dance etiquette a student does not enter a class that is ongoing with out permission from the instructor. Similarly, this piano player (old and fat as he is) paused in the doorway sort of looking at the instructor (and seeing no other pianist) waited expectantly for her to indicate whether I should enter or not. Already lecturing, she waved me in.

My instructor had apparently asked her to combine classes. First day back from break. She was doing a pilates class. Which means I played piano to pilates exercises. Great fun.

The rest of yesterday sped by in a haze. I did what I was supposed to: meet with my boss, prep for upcoming services, get library books for my Mom, treadmilled and in the evening played (and conducted) the Ash Wednesday Service.

The little Bach organ pieces (as well as the scheduled anthem) went very well. This was despite the fact that my  head was stuffed up so I couldn’t hear and simultaneously my  head felt like a balloon dangling somewhere above my body.

Today I have two ballet classes followed by a Valentine’s Day party at my Mom’s nursing home. I was a bit concerned because I hadn’t prepared much. But looking over my usual nursing home type piano material I note that most of the pop music I usually play (from the forties, fifties and sixties) is made up of love songs. Add a dash of romantic classical music by Chopin and Debussy. Piece of cake.

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Drones, Kill Lists and Machiavelli – NYTimes.com

Letters to the editor on the current topic including one from Desmond Tutu.

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

Paul Tanner, Musician With ‘Good Vibrations,’ Dies at 95 – NYTimes.com

This guy invented a sort of cheater theramin.

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

Zhuang Zedong, Winner In China Foreign Relations And Ping-Pong, Dies at 72 – NYTimes.com

I’m just beginning to get a feel for the weird lives of the Chinese. People fall in and out of favor with the current government. Then huge chunks of their lives are spent in rehabilitation and hard labor. This guy was no exception. When Mao banned Ping-Pong as bourgeois  there were players who killed themselves.

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

Donald Byrd, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 80 – NYTimes.com

Gleaned some great music to Spotify from this obit.

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

Hong Kong TV Drama Plays Out Uneasy Ties With China – NYTimes.com

TV marches on. Unreality continues to kick reality in the butt.

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

$95 and several weeks later I have my laptop back. It’s unrepaired but seems to be working as well as it was other than now it has now way to connect to audio.

Today is Ash Wednesday and I’m starting the day fatigued.

Having been ill, I guess it’s too much to think I would wake refreshed today ready for the tasks ahead. I don’t think I pushed myself too hard yesterday. Before lunch, I retrieved the laptop. The geek squad dude was amused when I exclaimed, “Praise Jesus!” when he told me there was no further charge. Then I drove to the church to do my prep for upcoming services. Came home for some lunch. Decided to put off getting my Mom more reading material. Eileen visited her on Monday and she said she still has books to read. My friend Rhonda dropped by kids and visiting friend Katerina from Germany in tow. She was picking up music I had set aside for her and dropping off some other music I had loaned her. I think her kids might have been curious to see Miss Eileen’s digs and were a bit disappointed Eileen wasn’t here.

After they left I treadmilled and made supper for Eileen and me.

I don’t feel like I pushed it yesterday but I’m still a bit tired and shaky today. I have the usual 8:30 AM ballet class, meet with the boss around 11:30 and have the usual service this evening. I remarked to Eileen that doing a service is much less work than doing the weekly rehearsals.

On Facebookistan I notice that my young and strong niece Emily takes afternoon naps. This is something I should cultivate. I have noticed that if I’m sitting in my chair in the afternoon I do manage to doze off for a moment, but only a moment.

I read about a third of Obama’s State of the Union this morning. Politics depresses me when I’m this under the weather I think.

This evening the prelude and postlude are standard Bach pieces I can pretty  much play at the drop of the hat for funerals: “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I Call On Thee, Lord Jesus Christ) BWV 639″ for the prelude and O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross (O mankind, mourn your great sins) BWV 622” for the postlude.

I’m pretty sure I can make it through today. Maybe I’ll work in that nap this afternoon.

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

I am feeling better this morning. Maybe this dread illness is finally going away.  Last night I was not as exhausted as I have been when it came time to go to bed.  All signs to the good.

Yesterday I spent the entire day resting. For me this meant alternating between reading and playing piano. I guess that’s what I usually do with time off anyway. At least if I’m not working on composing some music or something.

I dipped into my Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov), Reinventing Bach, Musicking (by Christopher Small), Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Diarmaid MacCuloch), and “Six Months, Three days” a short story from Some of the Best from Tor.com 2011.

The short story was pretty weak but I don’t mind a sci-fi short story once in a while. I spent most of the time however doing escape reading in A Feast for Crows (Book 4 of Games of Thrones).

In between I snuck bits of Bach English Suites and Mendelssohn piano pieces in on the piano.

Today I have no scheduled tasks, other than prepping for upcoming stuff. I usually turn in music on Tuesdays for the bulletin a week from Sunday. In this case that would be Lent II. I am thinking of scheduling simpler organ music for this Sunday (Eileen’s suggestion as she watches me sweat bullets over preludes and postludes). I also am playing at my Mom’s nursing home on Thursday for Valentines day.

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

‘The Endgame’ and ‘My Share of the Task’ – NYTimes.com

In this book review Bacevich takes propaganda volumes by players in the Iraq war to brilliantly shreds.

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

The Ignorance Caucus – NYTimes.com

One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

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

Amazon.com: Morimur: Hilliard Ensemble, Christoph Poppen, Johann Sebastian Bach: Music

This interesting recording is mentioned by Paul Elie in Reinventing Bach. It illustrates a theory that Bach was quoting certain chorales in the unaccompanied violin sonatas. The Hilliard Ensemble sings snippets of them (including a cappella bits from the cantatas) and they are interleaved with the violin piece. I do love the Hilliard Ensemble. I bought the MP3 album since it’s not on Spotify.

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

One of the tenors remarked yesterday that I still looked like I was ill. I told him that it was kicking my butt. Indeed it is.

I sailed through the service yesterday basically hitting all the right notes and leading the congregation and the choir as well as I usually do.

But on the inside I was sort of floating. It’s too early to tell today whether this silly thing is abating or not.

I finally found a poem on page 19 in Michael Robbins’ Alient Vs. Predator that helped me understand him more as a poet.

*********

My New Asshole

By Michael Robbins

My new asshole’s official candy
is cola-flavored, fish-shaped.
I sexually harass it.
It puckers with distaste.

My new asshole could be your friend,
if you had any friends. My new asshole
is making a name for itself.
It is a way of looking at the world.

It tilts at megabucks.
It tithes its chocolate tenth.
It moons over my hammy.
It sings a song of sapience.

Now it wants a puppy.
It wants to open a Red Lobster.
Where did it get that strawberry?
My new asshole has discovered boys.

My new asshole says so much.
My new asshole is being bullied.
It occurs to me I am my new asshole.
I am talking about myself again.

********

I liked this so much it made me want to hurry up and finish reading the volume and then re-read it.

The wind is blowing in western Michigan. The snow and ice has not quite melted and they are predicting more snow and lower temps for today.

I have two days to get well.

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

Eileen and I listen to online audio books at night to lull us to sleep. Last night I put on Orwell’s Keep The Aspidista Flying. It begins with this lovely inscription:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And
though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries,
and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money
suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not
itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her
own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now
abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these
is money.

I Corinthians xiii (adapted)

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Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter? – NYTimes.com

I gave money for my niece’s husband’s worthy project. But then he and I seemed to disagree about Amanda Palmer’s use of Kickstarter. I understand that she used it to finance an extravagant and fancy venture that I quite liked. But to my way of thinking someone as connected and personality driven as she is doesn’t really need a kickstart.

I still feel that way. But what the heck.

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

Rick Perry Visits California, and Incurs Jerry Brown’s Wrath – NYTimes.com

Perry seems to have out danced Brown by utilizing the news amplification of his original small investment in an ad.

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German Education Chief Quits in Scandal Reflecting Fascination With Titles – NYTimes.com

This hilarious little story has the lovely phrase, “title arousal,” in it.

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Dutch Put Electric Cars to the Test – NYTimes.com

I bookmarked this one for my wife who is very interested in this kind of thing. We would probably own a Prius if she thought she could afford it. I still think the Mini is nice for her.

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Original Sin by Sam Tanenhaus| New Republic

How the Republicans went from the party of abolition to racism.

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Bella Bathurst – Sound advice

Insightful essay on listening in general and hearing loss in particular.

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A giant radio telescope, a small school and a Wi-Fi problem – Network World

Unlike airplanes, radio telescopes are actually befuddled by wifi.

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Farmer’s use of genetically modified soybeans grows into Supreme Court case – The Washington Post

So this farmer used feed as seed. Put the fucker in jail.

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Thang Dinh Tran loves maps and Vietnam. That may put him in the eye of a storm. – CSMonitor.com

I love stories of obsessions that turn into sources of information and activism. Very cool.

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U.S. Use of Mexican Battery Recyclers Is Faulted – NYTimes.com

I was hoping for a couple days of rest since my Friday ballet class was canceled and I had nothing else scheduled for Saturday. Unfortunately I have been ill. Yesterday I did manage to do my tasks like practice and bills but I basically was dragging myself through the day again. Today all I have to is survive church. I’m still ill.

In the meantime, I have been doing escape reading and have finished a couple more books.

Super Sad True Love Story  is a novel that my son-in-law Jeremy put on my laptop for me to read.  Its charm is the way it satirizes a bunch of stuff about being alive right now. The internet has gone bonkers in this book and people can monitor themselves and others constantly. They monitor their fuckability, their perceived age, their credit ratings from minute to minute. In some cases these ratings seem to be flashing above them in the rooms they are pursuing their social lives.

The main character is a misfit of course. He works for a company that will give one eternal life via technology (something I’ve actually read about recently in the news). He doesn’t make enough to subscribe to this service himself. It’s incredibly expensive. But he is high up in the hierarchy of the company.

The story revolves around his weird and hopeless relationship with a beautiful young Korean woman and the breakdown of a society that is already haywire.

Happy stuff. I enjoyed the shit out of it. Very good escape reading.

Speaking of escape reading I just finished volume 3 of A Game of Thrones, A Storm of Swords.  I don’t think it’s all that good. But the author can write and plot okay. The point of the book seems to be to tell a long fantasy story in which the reader cannot anticipate plot twists. It’s sort of a soap opera in that it has kept me interested because I wonder what’s going to happen to the characters.

I read volume 3 on my Kindle. I have volume 4 in a paperback I bought a while ago and started it yesterday.

My head is fuzzy. I keep thinking uncharitable thoughts about stuff and am hoping it’s just the illness.

I did read through the first few English suites of Bach at the piano yesterday. It seems to calm my fevered soul (I don’t really have a fever, just a cold).

Before going to practice I stopped by the library to pick up a couple more books of poetry I had inter-library loaned.

I started them this morning. Neither poet seems quite as good as Natalie Diaz but what the heck.

According to Paul Elie the same day that Pablo Casals recorded his first complete Bach cellos suite (the one in C major), Robert Johnson was also recording his blues.

 It was indeed a “good day for recorded music” when both Johnson and Casals were making historic recordings, recordings I adore.

Elie’s book is a bit of a guilty pleasure. He gets a lot of musical facts wrong, historical and otherwise, but his basic insight that the advent of recording was more good for music than bad is one I’m interested in. In the first part of the highlighting above he makes the point that that recorded music is intrinsically not like live music. This seems obvious, but the intimacy of listening to a recording is so different from being in the room with a live musician. As we listen we “with” the music, we are “holding on” to it and the recorded artists, the music and the player are “carrying us.”

There is some truth to this and it has been true in my life. Recordings have allowed me so much more access to music even though I am musician capable (since I play keyboards) of recreating a lot of music at the keyboard. For this I am delighted and grateful.

Another juxtaposition Elie points out is the recording that Casals made of the Dvorak cello concerto in E minor right after the terrible slaughter of Guernica.

Casals was devastated by the carnage his countrymen wreaked on helpless civilians as was Picasso.

Guernica can be seen as a harbinger of the many terrible ways governments kill civilians in the course of war in the 20th and 21st century.

In the wake of the tragedy Casals was scheduled to perform with the Czech Symphony Orchestra with Georg Szell and then record.

We have the evidence of this incredible moment in music and history in those recordings.

I think this is pretty amazing.

A final comment. I am pretty sick these days. Yesterday I dragged myself around to do stuff like practicing organ and do some grocery shopping even though I don’t feel that well. This cold/flu thing is hanging on with a vengeance. Even now I’m weak. But I was thinking of what good health is. I have heard it said that good health is the absence of illness. That it’s a sort of negative presence. One does not feel bad. As I get older I find it more of a positive than a negative. I guess feeling ill as I write exacerbates and reinforces that.

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The Questions Brennan Can’t Dodge – NYTimes.com

“Secret law” is an oxymoron.

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Reg Presley, Lead Singer of Troggs, Dies at 71 – NYTimes.com

Great pics in this video. “Little nostalgia for the old folks.”

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