Did you know that the etymology of Narcissus is “narcosis” or numbing?

McCluhan points this out in Extensions of Man.

It reminds me of peering into the internet as Narcissus peered into the pool and saw his own reflection.

We forget that he didn’t recognize it, only fell in love with it.

Just as one is likely not to notice the echo chamber effect of seeking information online, we look into the pool of data and see something that attracts and distracts us.

We don’t realize that we are alone in a room looking at pixels and seeing nothing more than our own projected image, falling in love with it, I guess.

Happy stuff.

After reading this in McCluhan this morning, I then I ran across this passage in T. S. Eliot’s play, “The Family Reunion.”

“You have gone through life in sleep,

Never woken to the nightmare, I tell you, life would be unendurable

If you were wide awake.”

I’m afraid I’m still a bit exhausted from my vacation. I know Eileen was still very tired all day yesterday. I played well at church.

Came home and continued playing through Beethoven piano sonatas. I do find this satisfying. Later we visited Mom.

She seems to be doing okay.

I will be able to take most of today off. All I have scheduled is my six month check up with my doctor.

It looks like next week, we will possibly begin the renovation of our first floor in earnest. We meet with the contractor a week from today.

In the meantime I will need to continue clearing away stuff from the areas where they will work. This will entail much less work than moving the books to the second floor did. I will need to clear a wall of a bookshelf and the harpsichord and empty completely the pantry in the kitchen and the bathroom. Easy stuff.

1. Your Smartphone Is Watching You – NYTimes.com

“In the surveillance state, everyone knows you’re a dog.” I am bothered by the notion I keep seeing expressed that if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. Yikes. Where are people’s brains? I understand we live in a fishbowl of surveillance, but the idea that there is no protected speech or privacy left and that the state can use all information to it’s benefit and the private citizen’s detriment erodes democracy. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s not to give the state free reign that’s for sure.

2. Progress At Work, But Mothers Still Pay a Price – NYTimes.com

“HERE’S an old riddle: a boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says “I can’t operate on this patient. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon”

More people respond that the surgeon is the dead man’s gay partner rather than his wife.

3. Peeping President Obama – NYTimes.com

The assault on privacy continues.

4. Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance | World news | guardian.co.uk

This is the article I ended up reading about this issue. It seems to be part of a series that broke the story.

I am fascinated that so many people try so hard to hide themselves from each other. At least it seems like they are trying to do this, but maybe it’s just all they can do to get up each morning and quietly try to survive another day not really aware of themselves that much.

I think of myself as someone who comes from the south. I make friends way too easy. I try not to hide myself and say what I am thinking and feeling as exactly as possible. Us lapsed southerners often seem to “wear our heart on our sleeve.”

I have been thinking of the many people I have known over the years with whom I no longer have contact. I think this might be a big part of life, simply moving on and ceasing to reach out to people. For those of us stuck with our heart on our sleeve, this can feel a bit like rejection or shunning. Of course when people die, the door slams shut a bit harder.

Yesterday Eileen and I both were pretty exhausted. I managed to do bills and then drag myself to the grocery store. I was glad I didn’t have to play the wedding at my church.

For some reason Beethoven was on the piano rack yesterday. I played through a couple of his piano sonatas and Liszt’s transcription of the first movement of the first symphony.

On the flight home, I began reading John Irving’s Prayer for Owen Meany. I continued reading in it yesterday. It’s easy reading for a tired brain.

This morning I got up and finished reading History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. I read my usual poetry plus a few pages of the beginning of Finnegans Wake.

I would have to say that life is good as usual.

1. Will D. Campbell, 88, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era – NYTimes.com

Funny how the outcasts and renegades of the past are sometimes seen as heroes and prophets after they die.

2.Harriet Tubman’s Great Raid – NYTimes.com

Excellent outline of the history of Tubman and a raid on the south to entice slaves to become soldiers. I especially like that she was singing as they went into the raid. Also that it bugged her when a white officer asked her to “sing to your people.”

3.New York Times Editorials on Obama Administration Secrecy – NYTimes.com

An article with links to news stories and editorials documenting this administrations sinking into secrecy.

4. Making a Mountain Out of a Digital Molehill – NYTimes.com

This academic is out to lunch as far as I’m concerned.

5. For Homebound Students, a Robot Proxy in the Classroom – NYTimes.com

I think this is a cool use of tech.

6.Civil Disobedience on a Turkish Game Show – NYTimes.com

Courage on TV in Turkey.

7. It’s extremist Muslims, not Islamic extremism – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

America keeps getting this wrong.

8. Of Slippery Slopes – NYTimes.com

I’m with this author. It’s no surprise that the government is totally spying on everyone. When the president says “nobody is listening to your phone calls,” it’s hard not think that somebody is listening to your phone calls.

I snapped a picture of this vaguely sinister poster at the airport last night. We were getting home from our annual California pilgrimage to see the Jenkins out there.

The trip home was a bit easier than the trip out there. The former had two stopovers and ended with a long drive through urban California rush hour.  Yesterday we only had one stop over and the whole trip was considerably shorter thereby.

Edison was glad to see us. And we were glad to see him and to be home.

I have farmed out the wedding scheduled at my church for today. Thank you to Rhonda for stepping in and taking care of it. I am relieved not to have to do that today.

Eileen and I will probably take it pretty easy today. She is still asleep. It’s around 9 AM local time. I would like to hit the farmers market today. And the grocery store. Check on Mom.  Exercise. But we won’t do much today, that is for sure.

1. BBC News – Tiny Chinese Archicebus fossil is oldest primate yet found

I love shit like this.

2. Why 1998 Was the Best Year in Music for Millennials: Jay-Z, Britney Spears, More – The Daily Beast

Since Neutral Milk Hotel made the list I thought I would check out the rest. But Britney Spears? Weird.

3. PBS Segment On Economic Impact Of Immigration Reform Fails Viewers | Blog | Media Matters for America

Public radio and TV seems to be trailing after the weird American take on life these days (far right of center? on the moon?)

4. A Trip Down Memory Lane: People Warned What Would Happen When Congress Passed Bills To Enable Vast Spying | Techdirt

Just like the Iraq war, people do perceive accurately what’s ahead. They’re just drowned out in the clamor of crazies.

5. Mary Meeker’s misinformation has influence – SFGate

Weird fact free observations about frequency of cell phone usage.

I read the 15th chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses yesterday. Or at least I finished it yesterday having plunged into it sometime this week. This chapter is called the Circe chapter and draws a bit on Homer’s Circe chapter.

Circe turns Odysseus crew into pigs. He rescues them then stays a year with Circe.

Joyce’s story is about Bloom and Stephen Daedalus meeting up in a brothel.

I read a synopsis last night after finishing the chapter and an analysis this morning.

I think I’m going to have reread the Circe chapter of Homer to get more of the analogies between the two stories.

I read this chapter on my Kindle.

Yesterday we sort of laid around and didn’t do much in preparation for our flight back home this afternoon. I sat down with Nicholas and did some playing around the ideas of improvising. That was fun

My daughter-in-law Cynthia took this picture of us.

She also posed this one and had her Dad take the picture:

I put them up here for my non Facebookistan friends and readers.

1. Just in: Unknown J. S. Bach manuscript turns up

Wow. More possible Bach manuscripts surfacing. Makes sense since he was so prolific.

2. BBC News – Alice Kober: Unsung heroine who helped decode Linear B

Kober was a scholar who learned multiple ancient languages to decode the famous Linear B. She also tabulated occurrences of then unknown words in the language. She died just short of completing her work which was taken up by another scholar.

3. Filibuster Reform Has Right-Wing Media Frantically Condemning Judicial “Power Play” | Blog | Media Matters for America

I guess governing is just out of the picture these days.

4. Is Virginia for Haters? Cuccinelli vs. McAuliffe. – NYTimes.com

I often think of Rabbi Friedman’s ideas about how difficult it was to be a leader in the latter 20th century. I wonder if the good people duck the calling and then the crazies emerge. Just a thought.

5. The Future is Here | Ideas & Innovations | Smithsonian Magazine

Ongoing conference. This link features a cool video of Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby singing “Science.” The lectures and information shared at the conference should be put up here before too long.

6. http://www.hope.edu/admin/hr/

employment/jobs/music_chaplain.htm

Hope college is looking for a chapel musician. I think the job description is interesting and telling.

It’s been a nice visit, but I’m starting to miss home. I miss time alone with my beautiful wife and I miss time alone.

On Tuesday, we took the kids to the books store which is part of our annual visit. We give them an amount limit and then pick out a few books for them that we want them to have. Eileen closely supervises Catherine the youngest in her choices. She consults with Savannah and Nicholas goes off and does his thing.

Last year I picked out a graphic novel version of Macbeth for Nicholas. At least that’s what I think I did. This year I picked out a nice graphic novel version of the Odyssey.

Believe it or not there were more than one version of this in graphic novels. This particular one retains some of the language of the original (“Sing O Muse…”). Nicholas has already finished reading it.

Then yesterday I purchased mp3 players for the oldest two. Catherine the youngest got a little fake laptop that seemed to satisfy her.  This all was as a result of me trying to figure out how to share music with Nicholas. I wanted to give him access to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg variations and Pablo Casals’ recording of the Bach cello suites. By the time I figured out he could access them via YouTube I had already created the expectation that I would buy him an MP3 player as well

I think a lot about how people listen to music these days. The sound of music is ubiquitous. The range of styles that one can hear is mind boggling. At the same time I get a sense that the music that interests me (whatever that happens to be) is not the music that interests many others in the vast scheme of music listeners.

This gap seems to have been true all my life but is intensifying.

In the introduction to Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African  American Music, Christopher Small writes of becoming aware that he was living in a soup of music that he hadn’t noticed (hadn’t thought of as valid or real?) until he had his music degrees and was teaching in college. I find this amazing. He calls the music in the culture he was missing: “light entertainment” or “rather intrusive noise from juke-boxes.

I on the other hand grew up as a hopeless child of my culture.

I remember hearing music in many ways including music on the radio and TV and music on records in my home.

I was fascinated when we visited a radio announcer we knew in Greeneville Tennessee. Her name was Maxine Humphries and she was a voice on the radio in the lives of the town. I have a memory of going to visit her studio early one morning. The other employees were just waking up from sleeping on the floor all night. I guess they slept there because they didn’t want to be late for the next day or were still there from the day before.

I recall listening to a trumpet player on TV as a child and asking my Dad why he was doing “that” to the sound. “That” was vibrato and Dad told me that the player was trying to make the sound more beautiful.

I remember thinking that it was more beautiful without “that.”

Then there were the records in  my life. My parents had a weird mixture of records. I remember hearing classical music on records as a kid. This is some of my first exposures to classical music and jazz I’m pretty sure. I specifically remember an anthology that had popular world classics of all genre. I have a copy of this set of records today and can clearly see how hearing pieces like Canadian Sunset and Ritual Fire Dance as a kid impressed me.

Both of my parents sang and played the piano.

Most of the music they performed was religious. But not all. My Dad would play snippets of Chopin and Rachmaninoff always tossing it off as something he sort of had in his memory from studying as a young person.

Three times a week I went to church where my Dad was the minister. Every service had music. Most of it sung by the congregation.

All of this musical soup was part of what I perceived as music. Still is.

Yesterday I loaded up Savannah’s MP3 player with tunes she likes. The Theme from Scooby Doo. Many Disney movie tunes. But I managed to find some classical music she okayed to add to the mix. Moonlight sonata by Beethoven and a Bach flute sonata movement.

I think of the vast array of musical styles as part of the fun part of life (like loving, having sex, good food, poetry, good books). Not sure just how it plays out in other peoples lives but it doesn’t hurt to throw some music I love into the mix.

I guess that sums up my approach in general.

After three hours at the first beach on Monday, we jumped into the van and drove down the coast. Eventually we stopped at Newport Beach with the idea we would walk out the pier.

Piers make good backdrops for portraits.

Portraits of one kind.

One kind or another, anyway.

I love taking pictures of people, especially ones I care about.

At the end of the pier, you can actually go down some stairs and walk around a bit underneath.

I enjoy finding patterns to take pictures of. Patterns like this.

I like taking artsy fartsy pictures that are almost abstract.

Underneath a pier there are patterns everywhere. In this picture, you can also see where one can walk right out to the edge. I guess this provides access for boats.

And then there are found obects (objet d’art).

But all good things come to an end.

Time to go shop.

1. TEDxMacatawa – Jennifer Adams – because you can

My boss made a TED video. How bout that?

2. Detroit’s treasure trove could be vulnerable to sale – USA TODAY

Best article I have read on this. Also linked it on Facebookistan.

3. Explain This: The Illusion Of Political Understanding : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

How do we decide our positions on issues? Opinions not often formed from detailed understanding.

4. Swiffer Appropriates Feminist Icon To Promote Mopping The Kitchen | ThinkProgress

Another appropriation of reality to sell products.

Yesterday we drove off to the beach.

Before long we had set up camp.

Cool rock formation.

I was quite taken with the profile of the cliffs.

Before too long we were joined by birds. One in particular was eyeing a left over sandwich on our blanket.

It doesn’t take long before he helps himself.

The beach had rocky parts as well as sand.

The pools in the rocks were full of life interesting to examine.

A sea anemone.

While Eileen was building sand castles she got swamped by a wave she didn’t see coming.

Daughter-in-law to the rescue.

Tomorrow: Newport Beach and Pier pics.

1. A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides – NYTimes.com

Packaging. Pills in individual pop out things.

2. Why Haven’t the Marines Shown Stronger Support for Women? – NYTimes.com

An admirer makes a critique.

3. Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com

Echo chambers of thought are one of my favorite concepts right now.

4. US announces bounty for African group leaders – Africa – Al Jazeera English

Slow motion drone deaths? As long as a country seeks deaths without process it is evil. Bad enough when the state kills in our name legally.

It’s 5:38 AM local time and I’m just tucking into to my first coffee of the day.

Yesterday, we all went for a nature walk.

At first we tried to access the walk via the suburb right next to it. A woman came out and politely pointed out that if we parked on the street there we would get a ticket.

So we found another place to park and access the public park.

It was a pleasant day, not too hot for California.

At first we walked on a wide smooth concrete trail.

But as we continued to walk it got less and less developed.

I loved this sign, especially the instructions on Mountain Lions.

Whenever we visit California, I immediately start admiring the mountains.

They remind me of where I was raised in East Tennessee, however California mountains are much bigger.

My understanding is that geologically the California mountains are younger.

Finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday.  Again it was a bit of a surprise since the ebook only showed that I had read 85% of the book. The remaining %15 is some notes that Wallace left about certain chapters as well as the footnotes which in usual Wallace fashion make up a hefty amount of the prose of the book.

My first impression without too much processing is that the book really is unfinished. This is disappointing because most if not all of the prose is spectacularly finished and pretty wonderful. Wallace can handle a sentence like no one else I have read who is writing now.  I have read where he has tousled with editors who did not understand that his convoluted (but always coherent) sentence structure was tightly under control and intentional.

I am reading the notes that Wallace left for himself about certain chapters now. They contain speculative plot twists that he is contemplating. So far “the pale king” of the title is only alluded to once or twice in the course of the prose. It seems to be a nickname for a high ranking IRS exec.

But this book is about a lot. Wallace is making up a story to help the reader think about America, how people interact these days, and the invisible water all we goldfish are living in (allusion to a story in one of his books about an old goldfish and a young one…. the old goldfish asks the younger one, “How’s the water?” The younger replies, “What the fuck is water?”).

1.A Freakish, Grinning Whale Is Floating Across Australia | Wired Design | Wired.com

A many-bosomed whale balloon floating across Oz.

2. Mr. Know-It-All on Whether You Own Your Kindle Books and How to Nab Free Journal Articles | Underwire | Wired.com

I was afraid of this.

3. E-Book Antitrust Trial of Apple to Begin – NYTimes.com

Don’t be evil. Oh wait. That was Google.

I managed to sleep an hour longer this morning and slept until 3:30 AM local time. Maybe I will adjust to the time change. After all, it’s only a difference of three hours. I still lay in bed until 5 AM local time and listened to the audiobook Eileen had put on her Blackberry via Herrick library’s free online audio book  page.

We have been listening to City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin. This book was published in 1955. The current copyright according to the audiobook is for 1967 and had been renewed as an audio book in 2007. Wow. That means it was written over fifty years ago. The author to the best of my knowledge is still alive. I wonder if she signed away her rights in the fifties or if her contract had some sort of time limit to her rights.

I have been enjoying it so much that I thought I might go and actually read it. While I was convalescing recently from eye surgery and not doing any actual reading, I discovered that listening to a book can be almost as good as reading it. By that I mean that I was able to think about the book and work on understanding and retain ideas from it by sitting and concentrating on listening the way I would if reading it with my eyes.

But usually when Eileen and/or I play a book at night it is to lull us to sleep, thereby almost by definition we end up not paying close attention to all of it.

I finished Musicking by Christopher Small yesterday. I found that there were chunks of his thinking with which I didn’t agree. These were more than offset by my agreement with what I perceive to be his basic thesis: that music is best understood as a very complex human activity instead of reified into a thing, whether that thing is notes on a page, ideas in a musician’s or musicologist’s brain or waves in a recording.

I disagreed with his notion that beauty is also only a subjective performance activity and does not in and of itself exist other than as a human response. This is a harder pill for me to swallow since my experience of beauty is that it is a deep emotion and conviction that feels bigger than my own response and understanding. Easier for me to believe there is no such thing as God than to believe (in Small’s words), there’s no such thing as beauty only one’s subjective pleasure in perception.

Small may well be right. However, I don’t find his observations any more helpful in this area than I do the fact that he insists that ultimately, the western classical tradition in performance goes “counter” to the way “human relationships should” function. This is a weird place for him to end up. Just as weird as his admission to loving this tradition and playing it himself on the piano.

I will continue to read and think about Christopher Small’s ideas. I have his Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music sitting on my Kindle to read next. I am drawn to his take on African American Music. In Musicking he mentions that he has written an entire book on the relationship of African American music to the white Western classical music tradition. My interest is piqued, but I am not planning to plunge into his next book on vacation. But soon.

1. The Limits of Big Data in the Big City – NYTimes.com

Higher tech is not always essential tech

2. The Price of Rebellion – NYTimes.com

“My grandfather was not a hero. Unlike Mr. Campbell, he did not plan to put his life on the line. He set out as a privileged person expecting to be heard, and ended as a privileged person surprised by backlash. But he did speak up. He was then used as an example of what could happen even to a white man of standing if he stepped out of line. And, in his own way, he spent his life paying for it.”

3. China’s Ethnic Song and Dance – NYTimes.com

China’s own version of American Minstrel Shows and just as disturbing.

4. China’s Economic Empire – NYTimes.com

China is moving in monetary ways to influence the world and it’s not all good.

5. Grief and Political Reverberations After British Soldier’s Killing – NYTimes.com

Terrible murder on the streets of London and its aftermath.

6. The Right Way to Do the Hillary Step – NYTimes.com

Edmund Hillary not Hillary Clinton. You know. The Mount Everest guy.

7. The Banality of Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ – NYTimes.com

I found this article so informative that I put it up on Facebookistan as well. Say hello to the new boss.

Well the time change is a bit of a problem. I woke up at around 2 AM local time and waited almost three hours before finally sneaking downstairs and fixing myself some coffee.

You’d think I could sleep longer since I was pretty exhausted after a long day of traveling. The worst part was probably the drive from the airport to the Casa Jenkins. We arrived at just about rush hour on a Friday evening. So it took us almost two hours to drive twenty miles. Ah, California. Land of no Mass Transit and plans to put in more highways, toll roads at that.

It was good to see my son, his wife, my grandkids: Nicholas, Savannah and Catherine in person and give hugs. It’s been a year since our last visit so everyone is doing new stuff. Fun to catch up.

I didn’t bring my blood pressure gauge. I usually get up and weigh and take my blood pressure and record the results. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a hiatus this week. That way I didn’t have to find a place in stuffed suitcase for the blood pressure gauge. I have a six month check up scheduled the Monday after we get back. Trying to be healthy as I age is not easy. I  have been putting on a few pounds since before my eye operation. But for the most part my blood pressure is not too  high. Plus I’m hoping to do a lot of relaxing, reading and goofing off for this week. Not exactly high stress.

I am looking forward to more reading. Besides the fiction that I was reading on the trip here I also spent some time with Christopher Small’s Musicking. I don’t see eye to eye with him about everything (He seems to think you have to be religious to like Bach’s religious works. Ridiculous.) But I think he gets a long more right than wrong.

For example he takes a wide view of what music is and what it is for and how it works. By examining the many ways humans do music, he puts Western music in a nice perspective.  It is helpful to read a musician trained in the Western tradition who recognizes the fact that all humans are basically musicians and that making  music (“musicking” as he likes to say) is something everyone can do.

When discussing the prevalence of people in the West who insist they are “tone-deaf,” he points out that this cannot be near as prevalent as the number of people who do not make music or grow up making music.

Pitch recognition is part of living especially if you are a native Chinese or Vietnamese speaker since the very language itself relies on pitch recognition to differentiate one word from another.

No, we in the West have been trained into ignorance, cut off from group music making that is so important in so many human cultures past and present.

He points out that received musical wisdom in the colleges and academic classical music is as much a function of social phenomena and judgments as it is cerebral aesthetic ones .

This is something I have been grappling with in the last decade of my life. After schooling I was able to make coherent observations on how well constructed music was, how it conformed to my understandings of aesthetic judgments. All my life these judgments have been a bit broader than the ones evidenced by my academic brothers and sisters in music.

But in my fifties I began to wonder just what kind of music did I personally enjoy?

A different question and a much more interesting one to me.

Christopher Small helps me wonder if I was starting to become more aware of my own social connection to music. I feel lucky that despite the fact that I have arrived at a place musically which is as anachronistic and eccentric as my entire intellectual take on life is, I still have ways to connect with other humans socially in the music I make. Whether this is listening to my grandson play the piano, noticing (as I did at the airport yesterday) kids who provide an aural musical accompaniment to the hand held video games they are playing, playing music with my piano trio, conducting my choir, playing organ at church and piano at home, or leading a group of people in singing (congregationally), in all these cases there is a concrete social aspect to what I am doing that supplements my romantic notion that when I play historical music I am in conversation with the composer and previous performers.

1. Losing My Father at War, One Letter at a Time – NYTimes.com

Very poignant writing about family, war and alzheimers.

(It turns out that the New York Times has just developed an app that recognizes Windows phones. So when I accessed it yesterday on the trip, I had to suddenly relog myself into my paid subscription and was bumped into a different url. The upshot is that in order to book mark interesting articles with my phone, I have to email them to myself (as I was doing before) but now the link is to a mobile app link which is not the same as the usual web site link. So I have to search on the stupid site to get a link to put here. This is probably not the only way to do it. It makes me crazy when people change things and make them more cumbersome.)

2. Detroit’s Davos – NYTimes.com

Davos is the city in Switzerland where the World Economic Forum meets (ah google). In Michigan there is a summit on Mackinac Island each year that is sort of a mini-state Davos. This year’s is just getting over.

3. Pro-Fracking Spin on Public Radio — FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

Bought and paid for.

4. Obama to Pick James B. Comey to Lead F.B.I. – NYTimes.com

I hope this guy is a bit more moderate than most Republicans.

5. William C. Thompson Jr. Takes Moderate Stand on Police Stops – NYTimes.com

Speaking of “moderate”  this NY city mayoral candidate is endorsed by unions but still strikes me as not all that moderate. But then I think the NYT itself is far right of any center in US politics which has to my thinking disintegrated into a country controlled by people and their corporations with the most money. Jes sayin’