Canceled our cable TV and land line yesterday.

We watched News Hour on the computer. We caught the tail end of the program. Obviously we could watch the whole thing online, but we just let the stream play. At the end of the program, moderator Jeffrey Brown interviews author, Kate DiCamillo, recently appointed “U.S. Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.”

What a pompous title! I was thinking about this interview this morning as I was doing my morning reading. When confronted with Brown’s thoughtful and penetrating questions, DiCamillo talked like a politician as she gingerly “framed” her answers. Whether asking her about the relative value of recommending one children’s book as more edifying than another or the impact of technology (video games, computers) upon children, Brown listened as DiCamillo danced around giving real answers to these questions and repeating her “talking points” of about the “power of story.”

PROPAGANDA AMERICAN STYLE

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

What a sorry spectacle to my way of thinking! I suspect DiCamillo had interesting answers to Brown’s questions, but instead she pounded home her “message.” Once again, conversation around ideas is supplanted by a propaganda approach to thinking. Good grief.

Eileen has met DiCamillo. We were just talking about this program and I said to Eileen that DiCamillo seemed like an interesting person trying not to be interesting. I’m not suggesting that “story” is not important in this context. What I am saying is that the obviousness of DiCamillo’s prepared responses changed the conversation, made it less interesting to me, and needlessly limited the range of ideas in the exchange.

I guess it’s discouraging because it is the dance so many politicians and leaders make when confronted with a camera and a microphone that contributes to the blandness and hypocrisy of our public rhetoric.

Jes sayin.

So we are now Steve and Eileen are without cable and land line.

Our cable/phone/internet  bill had gradually skyrocketed to almost $200 a month (!). When I called to cancel, the operator immediately offered to lower the bill to $99 for the same services with a 12 month contract. Eileen and I talked it over and decided to only pay for what we wanted to use. Supposedly this will be around $75 a month with no contract (this is just high speed internet).

We figure we can watch TV programs we are interested in online. Last night Eileen ended the evening watching a British soap/detective show online via our Netflix subscription we have been watching: Jack Frost.

It’s dopey but it’s a dated 90s police procedural show that Eileen can stand (me too apparently). Actually I attempted to read while it was playing, but mostly dozed.

We are changing our patterns of living as we move toward Eileen’s retirement. She seems happier each day. Yesterday she not only did the grocery shopping for me, she made cookies for a party for her “literacy heroes” at the library today.

She also did all of the dishes so when I got up this morning, I didn’t do my usual routine of washing dishes while I waited for my coffee water to boil.

Things are changing!

I don’t have much on my mind this morning besides trying to get to class on time. As usual I’m not sure which studio I am assigned. But I do know the teacher (or think I do). I will easily figure it out once I get over there. As this week ends I feel that I have done the things I meant to get done. I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday preparing for the first choir rehearsal of this season. I managed to get the Marimba part of my Pentecost suite ready and dropped it off to Rhonda yesterday. Last night I met Eileen at work and suggested we have a “date night,” something we haven’t done in a while. Checked on my Mom.  Practiced organ and piano. Did some reading.

So it’s been a productive week. But I admit to feeling a bit disconnected from stuff. My view of life is filtered through my own little sense of what is important (people, music, thinking,ideas). This seems out of step with so much around me.

In my dream last night, I was playing in an ensemble. The piece I think we were preparing to record was in three movements. I was rehearsing with another keyboard player, younger than me. I couldn’t figure out where we were in the score. I wasn’t even sure I had the right score. The other player kept playing and smiling at me. When I looked closely at our music, it was actually laid out in pictures like a graphic novel. Then I saw mentions of my family in the score and I knew I was looking at the wrong music. The other player treated me with disdain. I remember thinking at this point that he saw me as a incompetent old man. And indeed I was confused in the dream. I kept asking him what page we were on. He never answered.

The difference between the dream and my morning mood is that I don’t mind that much if I’m not on other people’s page or radar.

It will probably be good for me to return to the ballet classroom, a place I find that I belong and am appreciated as much as any place.

It does seem to help me to spend time where what I am doing matters for the moment to the people around me. Plus a brisk walk in the winter morning will be reviving.

The title to this post is a quote from a William Berry Sabbath poem I was reading this morning. It fits my mood as well.

I spent most of the day at church yesterday. I laid out the 13 anthems I had chosen the day before, put them in order by the needed assigned slot number. This took an hour or so. Then I took each singer’s folder, emptied it of the old stuff and then put in the new in order. Then I filed everything. Whew. Quite a bit of work but glad to get it done. I spent some time at the organ working on upcoming anthem accompaniments and preludes and postludes.

Unsurprisingly I only had five of about fifteen members show up last night. The trick with low commitment and poor attendance is to make sure that the people who do bother to show still enjoy the experience and find it rewarding. I let them go early last night after some intense rehearsal on the next two Sunday’s anthems.

It seems that many of the people I work with at church spread themselves thinner and thinner over several commitments, often right at church. Last night was also movie night at church. When I left there were still cars in the parking lot and I knew that at least one of my singers was at the movie night instead of rehearsal.

Some see this weird kind of behavior as endemic in our society right now. People say they will participate and then miss many of the events. I often ask myself how people can see themselves as part of something without bothering to show up. I have even had volunteers in the past become indignant when I suggested if they wanted to be in a certain music group they would need to show up.

I can’t help but suspect that part of this phenomenon is that people understand music and art less and less as a discipline and more and more as magic that comes to them at the punch of button. Or maybe I’m just missing something.

However, I felt good about having all that work done in preparation even though most of the choir opted out of rehearsal. The anthem for this Sunday sounded pretty good with only five singers as did the one for the next Sunday. But if this attendance continues I will probably have to adjust selections away from four part anthems and more to anthems like we will do the next two weeks which are cleverly written to sound good with a handful of singers.

1.Africans Continue to Protest in Israel – NYTimes.com

some celebrity chefs and cafe owners have come out in support of their striking workers, serving customers meals on paper plates

The fact that chefs and cafe owners do this strikes me as simultaneously condescending and supportive. No mean feat.

2. The Brain, in Exquisite Detail – NYTimes.com

I love it that the writer of this article uses a poem by Wallace Stevens as a kind of hinge of his article.

3. Remarks by President Clinton at One Strike Crime Symposium 1996 , President Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union Address as delivered , memo from clinton on One strike and you’re out to HUD secretary 1996

These links demonstrate that the incredible damage being done by “One Strike and You’re Out” laws and rules can be traced to good old Clinton. Michelle Alexander makes this point in her book The New American Jim Crow which is as disturbing as it is insightful.

The chair of the ballet department emailed me to be sure I knew that Hope was closed due to low temps and snow. It turns out that when an instructor showed me a list of classes she wanted to know if I would be willing to play for, our discussion was all the confirmation I was going to get as to my schedule this term. Good grief.

So I’m sitting in my house wondering what my schedule will be and even contemplating that they might not ask me back (hey, it could happen, I’m totally on a contractual basis having received no overt reassurance that I have an ongoing relationship with the ballet department). And the chair of the department thinks I’ve been lined up to accompany certain classes this term.

I replied to the chair’s disconcerting inquiry (she must not know that all people employed by Hope are on the email list of updates), and pointed out that I wasn’t sure what classes I playing for this term. She replied in a panic that there must have been a miscommunication and gave me the list.

So I will be doing three classes a day on Monday and Wednesday and one of Friday. That seems doable.

I cleared off Eileen’s car yesterday and started it for her. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal but we have been hit with weather here in Western Michigan so it was.

I then proceeded to snow blow the drive and the sidewalk. This was the first time I had used Eileen’s snowblower. It was so cold I had to keep coming in and warming up in order to feel my extremities.

Then I was off to put gas in the car and pick up coffee beans. I arrived at church and then the fun began. I spent the day trying to figure out what organ music to play the next two weeks and what choral anthems to use for the next few months. For some reason I couldn’t land on stuff and It was a long frustrating day. Then I discovered that I had omitted preparing this Sunday’s psalm (this is now a weekly task for me — to choose an Anglican chant and make a version of it that indicates to the congregation how to sing it).

So at the end of my day, I had to come home and do this Sunday’s psalm.

I was surprised that running the snow blower made me sore.

It was a lot of frozen snow that I had to force it through. Maybe that’s why I was sore. Or maybe I’m just old and out of shape.

Anyway, I’m dialing it down a bit at church, choosing material for the choir that takes into account the dwindling numbers and erratic commitment of many of the singers. I don’t know if I mentioned here how stressed I was on Xmas eve. I looked at the choir and saw a combination of people that I had never seen before at one time.  I had to spend extra time teaching parts and working on balance and we started Xmas eve late. Oy.

I did eventually chose organ music by David Johnson and Andrew Clarke for this Sunday.

The prelude by Johnson is based on the opening hymn, Salzburg. The postlude by Clarke is based on the closing hymn, Deus Tuorum Militum. I like it when I can do that: connect to the immediate proximate hymns with the prelude and postlude.

I was looking at poet Michael Robbins blog yesterday. He linked in a review he has written recently of Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelism. I wouldn’t have clicked through to read it except that his link was
The Worst Thing About Conservative Evangelicals Is That They Encourage Clowns Like Richard Dawkins to which he charming appended a comment that it was “not the title I would have given the piece.”

Anyway, about halfway through he mentions that he is reading a book I am reading, The Secular Age by Charles Taylor and then quotes from it.

Cool.

I was surprised to receive a Facebooger message from Yun Kim (pictured above) yesterday thanking me for my “beautiful write-up”in TAO (“The American Organist”)  in my review of her presentation/recital. I bewilderedly picked up a copy of TAO laying around and lo and behold there it was under the Chapter News reports. How about that? I would link it in for you but The American Guild of Organists seems to be living  in the 19th century and doesn’t make it’s stuff available online. When I see organizations doing this, I figure they are hurrying themselves into irrelevance.

If one completely restricts access these days, I figure it won’t be too long until you and your ideas wither from lack of interest since there are tons of people in line to connect while you are dithering. – Jupe

I love quoting myself. Especially when I just made up the quote.

Finally, some poetry.

I was reading Wendell Berry yesterday (thank you Mark for the beautiful collection of his poetry you gave me for Xmas!). I ran across this.

If we have become a people incapable
of thought, then the brute-thought
of mere power and mere greed
will think for us.
If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us.
If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.
These are merely the laws of this world
as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton.
When we cease from human thought,
a low and effective cunning
stirs in the most inhuman minds.
-Wendell Berry, This Day:Collected and New Sabbath Poems, p. 273

and this

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young or old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds, or satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
in this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
It forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost, as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.
-Wendell Berry, This Day:Collected and New Sabbath Poems, p. 267

Then for some reason (possibly still pondering yesterday’s blog ideas) I wrote these two poems.

i.
I think of you as I wipe my ass.
You were a mess, but that’s not why.
I remember sitting on your back porch
looking over the stagnant man made lake.
You bitched. You complained about people
who use too much toilet paper.
“Why can’t they use less?”

A few years later you were at my door.
Begging for some cash
to buy your pissed off wife
a birthday present.
Pissed off with good reason.
I gave you all I had,
thought it was mostly change.

ii.
I think of you when I use my french press.
“I could never do that,” you said.
“Too messy.
I know myself too well.”

Now you are gone from life.
You got angry at me
stood up and walked away.

I still think of you
and wonder how you’re doing.

I showed them to Eileen. She reminded me she “doesn’t like poetry,” but she still smiled.

Post Blog note: Eileen had to go to work today, so I have spent the last hour digging out the car. I am cold.

I have been pondering two extreme aspects of my life lately:

barriers

and connections.

I see barriers between me and other people. The first one is death.

Many people I have known are now dead. I think of the ones who were younger than me who died usually as a result of their own actions, drugs, lifestyle choices (as they say), accidents. Some of them I know are dead, others I presume are.

Then there are other people who seem to have deliberately cut me out of their lives. Very odd. But it takes to two to tango (as they also say). In some cases people have cut me off due to their anger or disapproval of me. I have watched a friend stomp out of my kitchen never to connect with me again. I have others in my past who were once very close who now will have nothing to do with me for whatever reason. My main reaction besides a touch of sorrow is “whippy skippy.”

Finally there are those who keep me at arm’s length emotionally. They are reluctant to connect with me honestly, again for whatever reason. I find these people sort of sad, but figure there’s not much I can do about it if I am invisible in their world.

Whew. I don’t mean all this to be as negative as it sounds.

I mention this stuff as a prelude to my amazing life now.

First there are the basics. I have an amazing life with my wife, Eileen. I am very lucky to live with someone who loves me and is patient with my passions.

I also have the amazing ability to continually connect with the rest of my fam beginning with my two daughters and son who are scattered around the world.

Though a lot of this is due to their good will, it is expedited by the Interwebs for sure.

This brings me to my insight that at this stage in my life I am living at a time in which humans connect to each other and knowledge in an increasingly exponential way.

If you read my blog regularly you know that I am constantly dabbling in the resources available to me online: Oxford English Dictionary, numerous academic journals, music scores.

Then there are the people connections. Facebooger and Twitter pop to mind.

This morning I ran across a  couple more via my reading of Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire.

First, there’s Härnu,

Härnu is apparently Swedish for “here and now.”

I’m logged in right now on it. Jerome from the Netherlands and Logan from Texas have both just said hello as they logged on. It remains to be seen just what in the world this social network will mean for me. But right now I think it’s kind of cool and will follow it for a bit.

Then there’s Quora.

Wikipedia says that “Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.”

The disconcerting thing is that it seemed to “know” who I was when I began indicating my own areas of interest.

I’m logged into it also right now. Again I’m sort of laying low as I figure out stuff. I did connect to daughter Elizabeth (and several others who seem to use this website that I already know). That’s cool.

At this point in my sixty two years, I feel like I am standing in a doorway and looking out onto a vast changing amazing world which is beckoning humans into better connections with each other.

Connections that could open up their heads and lives in ways unimaginable.

Hey. It could happen.

Eileen helped me do some of my church work yesterday morning. She stripped up three pages of the 3rd movement of the Marimba part to my  Pentecost Suite for Marimba and Organ. This means that she literally cut the Marimba part out of a score and taped it line at a time on a piece of paper to be photocopied. She also helped me collate and stuff the new anthem I have chosen for next Sunday. This saved me some time. I did my usual prep for Sundays while she was working on these tasks.

In the afternoon I discovered that Saturdays might not be the best choice to visit Meijer. It didn’t take me long to pick out my purchases, but the lines were amazing stretching back into the store’s clothes department.  Next time, earlier in the day or a different day.

I am feeling more rested today. Hopefully I can use the next two days to prepare for the second half of the choral season at church and also get some rest in.

1. Five myths about the cloud – The Washington Post

Many of the people that I envision possibly reading this blog would not be surprised by many of these myths. But it is an entertaining article.

“The cloud” is just a metaphor; nothing actually happens in the sky.

2. Emergency Visits Seen Increasing With Health Law – NYTimes.com

This seems counterintuitive until one realizes that ER visits make up a small amount of overall Medical costs and that all services are experiencing an increase due to more access: When services are made affordable, people use them more. Once again the simple rhetoric fails in the face of a little examination.

it’s very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody’s got coverage, then they’re not going to the emergency room for treatment.” President Obama, 2009

3. Indoctrinating Religious Warriors – NYTimes.com

I like Charles Blow’s article, but I especially liked this comment in the comment section, a plea for turning down the dial of intensity in the rhetoric.

I have read and listened closely to what the other side believes, and while a goodly portion of it is generated by the echo chamber of a conservative, quasi religious PR machine, there are far, far too many extremely intelligent people who maintain right wing, faith based positions despite plentiful access to contradictory information.The polarization between sides escalates as both sides demonize the other. I find myself unable to dismiss so many genuinely committed and caring people of conservative persuasion as pathological. They are completely aware of the denigrating ways progressives speak of them, and all the insults only serve to convince them even more that we are immoral, hateful, evil people who treat others with contempt. Go read the blog Red State, and hear how “intolerant” and “elitist” we progressives are. They feel the sting of the degrading ways we speak of them and many feel hopeless of ever reconciling the division. They definitely do not feel “heard” by us, never mind respected. Can we dial back the rhetoric a bit, listen instead, and see what happens?

4. Not Getting Their Money’s Worth – NYTimes.com

Cogent arguments against the scourge of privatization.

But for all the research and recommendations, nothing much is happening in Congress or the administration, in part because the status quo is lucrative for powerful corporations and big campaign donors, and is entrenched by the revolving door between government agencies and private-sector contractors.

5. Madagascar – Election Results Released – NYTimes.com

Madagascar fascinates me. Great quote:

If Mr. Rajaonarimampianina, above, is officially declared the winner, he will be the head of state with the longest family name, at 19 letters, according to a survey by the British newspaper The Guardian. His full name is Hery Martial Rakotoarimanana Rajaonarimampianina.

6. Hoping That ‘Llewyn Davis’ Sounds Like a Best Picture – NYTimes.com

I have noticed in the trailer that the music itself is interesting. Plan to listen to the soundtrack.

I had a ton of stuff I needed to do yesterday but went into a bit of a tailspin instead. For some reason this has not been a very restful break for me. Probably mostly my own doing. Although it was Xmas at church fer chrissakes. This morning I am feeling rested and balanced. But yesterday I had to force myself to do what little tasks I could muster (like finally balancing our checkbook and paying some bills).

I spent a lot of time seeking solace in Bach. I played through all of the 15 two part inventions and the first six three part inventions. I repeated the three part inventions several times which is my wont these days when rehearsing: repetition entrenches learning for me more and more.

I just checked and Hope classes begin next Tuesday. As usual they have not contacted me about what classes they need me to be pianist for. I’m hoping to limit it to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. That worked pretty well last semester. That way I wouldn’t have classes until Wednesday. This leaves me a couple more days to prepare for the winter choral season.

I did spend some time looking at anthems for this period.  I was able to see that it won’t be hard to come to final decisions about what to have the choir sing between now and Holy Week (this is the time period I am shooting for…. may plan more if I get the oomph going a bit better).

Part of my problem is I am still fighting a pretty persistent cold. Symptoms alternate daily, but the cough persists.

Eileen seems to be doing great, easing into a better schedule for herself. Only one more month of work and then she is retired. I think she is doing the right thing and hope her quality of life will improve.

It seems that my organ at church has been releathered. The technician called me yesterday to say he had completed the job and the organ was ready to use. I scheduled pieces that are mostly manuals (no pedal) so that I could prepare them at the piano. I was so down yesterday that I didn’t bother getting in the car and going over and rehearsing Sunday’s organ stuff on the organ.

Instead I drove to the library and looked for books.

I wanted to find Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the milk. 

The online card catalog said it was sitting on shelf, but I couldn’t find it. An enterprising young librarian figured out that one of the workers had taken it home and not bothered to click whatever box one needed to click to indicate that it was being reviewed by staff.

Oh well.

I did find Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson by Akira Hiramoto. I have been eying this for a while at the library. It is an indulgence read for me, but what the heck.

It is a “manga” graphic novel so one has to progress from right to left in reading it. This means that the first panel to read is always the furthest right. It took me a bit to catch on. Even though the above panel seems to be the French version of this book, you can get an idea of what it’s like.

Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work by David A. Harris was sitting on shelf as the online catalog promised, so I checked it out even though it’s kind of dated (published in 2002).

Such Sweet Thunder: Views on Black American Music edited by Mark Baszak was waiting for me on the interlibrary loan shelf.

My copy of Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman arrived in the mail as well. This is one of those paperbackswap books. I read several chapters yesterday. Unsurprisingly Schulman’s prose and ideas are just as interesting in her fiction as they were in Gentrification of the Mind. Speaking of this last title, I gave it as a gift to several people I know this Christmas. So far no one has said anything to me about besides thank you. I am wondering how these people will react to a good strong dose of Queer Theory especially as applied to the AIDS plague. I think Schulman’s great otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen to give her book as a gift.

Comcast was down for several hours this morning. I sat and read. I made a list of things to look up later.

This book was mentioned in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Even though it was published some years ago, I thought it sounded interesting. I just interlibrary-loaned a copy to look at.

Another Alexander book. It’s sitting on the shelf at the local library. I’ll probably go check it out later today.

Correspondances, poem by Charles Baudelaire

Charles Taylor mentioned this poem by Baudelaire  in his A Secular Age. I have a copy of the poem, but only in French. The link is to both the French and a translation.

Then I ran across this word in Taylor:

Néant

It means “nothingness.” But I waited until the interweb returned before looking it up. It is the word that Sarte uses in the original French title of Being and Nothingness =  L’Être et le néant : Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique.

This is another book in Charles Taylor footnotes. It’s sitting over at Hope College. Maybe I’ll stop over and get it, if the college library is open today.

All this adds up to me feeling very dependent on the interwebs.

Yikes. I am pretty exhausted this morning. Yesterday Eileen and I took Mark’s car to him. He had left it here Tuesday to be repaired. We drove it over and traded it for Mom’s car which he had borrowed. We had clear roads between here and Lansing despite the snow storms that hit the east side of the state.

My organ at church is still not up and running yet. I went over yesterday and there were no workers working on it. It wouldn’t start up.  I rehearsed with my piano trio before picking up Mark’s car to return to him. By the end of the evening I was pretty tired as I am now.

I was hoping to feel more rested at the end of the Xmas break before resuming my schedule. I began working on the list of choral anthems for the next season yesterday. I have a working list of pieces that takes me up to Holy Week now. I will be refining that in the next few days. That’s an important task.

I wish I wasn’t quite so exhausted as I face a resumption of my usual schedule.

1. Old Rivalries Reignited a Fuse in South Sudan – NYTimes.com

Still a mess in S. Sudan.

2. Drawn Back Into Iraq – NYTimes.com

Letter writer, Stuart Gottlieb, sees President Obama’s failure to negotiate a presence to ensure peace in Iraq as a fatal flaw in his presidency.

3. The Obamacare We Deserve – NYTimes.com

Wow. Micheal Moore CAN make sense.

4. Florida Law on Drug Tests for Welfare Is Struck Down – NYTimes.com

Compulsory testing for all on welfare, that is.

5. Old Rivalries Reignited a Fuse in South Sudan – NYTimes.com

Still about oil.

6. Consumers Start Using Coverage Under Health Law – NYTimes.com

The Republicans seem to have lost this battle. Hard to call it back once it’s going.

7. Kate DiCamillo to Be Ambassador of Young People’s Literature – NYTimes.com

Cool beans. Author to be spokesperson.

8. 2014/1975 Marvel Desktop Wallpaper Calendar | Andertoons Cartoon Blog

What goes around comes around. Recommended for Marvel fans.

I truly had a day off yesterday. Eileen said I still seemed stressed.

But I attempted to spend the day relaxing, reading and practicing. It was Schubert and Louis Couperin I played for fun. My sister-in-law, Leigh, an accomplished musician, was talking about a Schubert piano sonata movement that was the theme song for Wings.  We looked at it together while she was here. It turns out to be a sonata by Schubert I don’t know very well (A major, composed in 1828, D. 959), although my markings indicate that I have played through the entire sonata before.

So I spent the day with this sonata yesterday. I especially like the slow second movement. I alternated reading the Groves online Schubert entry and doing Words with Friends (Scrabble with people online) on Facebooger.

I also returned to my beloved Louis Couperin or “Uncle” Louie as Ray Ferguson used to call him. ”

Uncle” because his nephew. François is much better known.

I learned to play both men’s works on the harpsichord. Now my harpsichord is not working and I sorely miss the literature.

Yesterday I told myself  that Glen Gould says the piano is a perfect medium for the Baroque.

Gould concentrated on Bach the German Baroque, of course. But why not the French Baroque as well? It’s probably a rationalization to allow me some time with music I love and miss.

Last night after I took my shower, I was looking for my Kindle. I realized that I had left it in the car and opted to use the Kindle Cloud Reader.

This morning I got up and started my morning reading with the Cloud Reader as well not wanting to venture out into the cold quite yet.

I am trying to finish up some of the books on my Kindle and have been trying to read each morning from Rewire by Zuckerman, New American Jim Crow by Alexander and Christianity by McCulloch. This morning I finished a section in Zuckerman and tried to find the other two in my online cloud reader. They weren’t there. Oh, that’s right. My brother gave me copies of them so they are not Amazon legal. Shoot. Oh well, I have plenty other things to read on this cold 2014 morning.

It looks like today is a day with no scheduled events or responsibilities. Ahhhhh. I know that I have been up too close to my work and jobs lately. Today will be a welcome day off.

I stumbled onto an extraordinary mind on C Span last night. Paul Chappell is amazing.

He is a West Point grad and an Iraqi veteran who has a brilliant take on how humans relate to violence and war. He is writing a seven book series on the topic. He is lucid and informative. Bingo. On the list of books to read go his titles. From what I heard on C Span, he has insights about how the brain works, trauma, and the unnaturalness of violence and its deleterious effects not only on the victims of war, but on the perpetrators.  Mindblowing stuff.

I played a New Year’s eve party at a nursing home yesterday. I was exhausted but found it revitalizing to have contact with about twenty people in wheelchairs. They started out very quiet, but after some cajoling, thawed and became much more animated. Before the hour was up, I had shook hands with all of them and teased them about New Year’s resolutions and whether or not they could recognize the tunes I played for them.

One lady called out that she recognized every one so far. So I challenged her to identify the next one I played which was “Harlem Nocturne.”

She told met he melody was familiar but she didn’t know the name of it. When I told her, she said, “Well, no wonder.” Not sure what to make of her response.

I did play some hymns and Christmas carols. Finished up with Auld Lang Syne. One of the listeners was a man whose hands were badly twisted (arthritis?). He talked loudly for the whole hour expressing opinions and making requests. He said he used to play the piano but now can only play harmonica.

Yesterday, I looked up Bach’s cantatas for New Year’s (BWV 190, 41, 16, 171, 143,248/4, 134a). The feast in his liturgical cycle was “The Circumcision of Christ.” I listened to several of them yesterday and will probably put more on today.

1. The Lives They Lived 2013 – NYTimes.com

Annual magazine of stories about people who died the past year. Memorable for telling stories that don’t make the obits. Glimpses of extraordinary people.

2. Writers Desperately Seeking Readers – NYTimes.com

Letters on a recent article. I loved this quote from Mark Slouka:

Art is a supremely individual expression. It doesn’t ask permission; it doesn’t take an exit poll and adjust accordingly. Artists say what they know, paint what they see — they have no choice in the matter — and it’s our privilege to be brought into their world, so distinct from our own, and to be altered by that experience.

Once artists start asking how many “likes” they’ve garnered, or listening to customer-satisfaction surveys to increase their sales, they’re no longer making art; they’re moving product.

3. Laws Deserve More Than Those Cute Names – NYTimes.com

Liptak demonstrates how reductive names for laws contribute to reductive understandings of them even by judges. Another excellent quote in this article from George Orwell:

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell saw where things were heading. “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

4. Haunted by a Disappearance – NYTimes.com

Jennifer Finney Boylan is an amazing writer and person. This article is worth reading just for its quality.