Last night after driving home from Grayling, I was sitting in my chair and moved a magazine and found my checkbook. I hadn’t taken it with me. It is comical that I spent a good amount of time combing through huckleberry bushes looking for it. I told Eileen if she spotted it not to move it because I wanted a picture of it (for Facebooger and possibly blog use).

It may be that I am destined to live off balance and keep myself there. Ay yi  yi.

I was very surprised at how exhausted I was from the drive home.

Admittedly I was stressed about the checkbook. I also have vacation stress believe it or not. I can only really be myself with Eileen. So living with others even ones I care deeply about takes energy.

Also Eileen and I spent a good deal of time driving around Grayling purchasing material to reglue my Mom’s rear view mirror. The guy at the auto parts store was clueless. When I asked for alcohol to clean the window, he tried  to sell me dry gas. After purchasing a kit and a tool to detach the mirror from the little metal piece that holds it on the windshield drove down to the grocery store (checked in to see if they had found a check book, ahem) and bought alcohol and paper towels.

Then when Eileen read the directions we figured out that the little kit to reglue the rear view mirror actually had a little alcohol pad in it to clean the window first.

So we prepped the window which meant carefully taping the spot where the mirror goes from the outside, removing the old glue, cleaning the area, putting one (1) drop of glue on the small part the mirror is attached to and then pressing it on the glass for a minute. Next we were to wait thirty minutes so we jumped in our cars and started driving home.

By the time we got to Lake City we pulled off and mounted the mirror.

Come to think of it, it’s not too weird that I was exhausted and depleted by the time we got home.

My emotional terrain was one of fail. My romance with failure is complicated. I know that I can be difficult and that I am perceived as maybe incompetent or eccentric to a fault, and I don’t really like being perceived that way. But at the same time, I am very satisfied with my eccentricities and am not particularly interested in adapting to be more easily classified by others.

It’s a weird space to live in. Maybe that’s what it means to be old now. Resisting having my brains washed out by stupidity and keeping the blinders on by not being informed might be just an old guy getting older and more out of touch with popular society.

I am totally at peace with that. All I can say is thank God for Eileen who can see past my weirdness and manage to love the real me.

 

Yesterday I plunged in and went huckleberrying with the crew here at the cabin. I am the only male and it did not occur to anyone to invite me on these excursions so I invited myself. They were of course surprised and did not mind if I came along.

Unfortunately, it now looks like I might have dropped my checkbook while moving around in the huckleberries. They are planning one last quick pick this morning. I will be going along again. If I find my checkbook I will probably pick berries a bit as well. it’s pretty likely I dropped it there.

Huckleberrying was not quite as strenuous as I thought it would be. Of course this is apparently a good year for huckleberries. This means that one spends all of the time picking and less time trying to find the berries.

I finished reading Titus Alone last night. This means I have read the entire Gormenghast trilogy. I don’t think the last volume is as tightly written or plotted as the first two volumes. I was curious about how Peake would move his hero from an enclosed world of Gormenghast to a different setting that would be more urban.

Unsurprisingly his description of the city Titus wanders to is much more sketchy than the vivid background of Gormenghast. Frankly the plot sort of wanders. Peake struggles to create vivid city people the way he created vivid isolated fairy tale castle people and doesn’t quite pull it off.

Published in the late fifties, Peake hints of sexual revolution, the impact of technology (especially war technology) and does come up with some startling predictions. There are flying ships, mass death rays, and drone like devices. The personalities he introduces are caricatures as were the ones in the first two books. But they don’t hold up as well with a more urban setting.

And the plot is pretty silly. It  seems to have been developed to allow Titus to finish his adolescence and at the end be a man.

I recommend the first two books of this trilogy. But Titus Alone should probably be read as a curiosity and not the piece of art that I thought the first two were.

Eileen is thinking of stopping in Whitehall to pick blackberries. She knows where some grow wild and is disturbed that they are not being harvested. She has lost her mind. I have too because I will probably go with her and help her.

I have to deal with the fact that the rear view mirror on my Mom’s car has fallen off the windshield. Eileen and I drove separately so we have Mom’s car and the Mini here. I am planning to see if I can find an auto parts store and buy a little windshield glue kit and fix it in Grayling.

Thus the vacation draws to a close. It’s been a good one and i do feel rejuvenated.

 

I managed to draw three family members into an emotional exchange on Facebooger yesterday. Damn! I found it very upsetting to read their exchange and didn’t sleep very well last night. This morning I got up and carefully composed an answer that I hope may sufficiently apologize for getting them going. Whether it does that or not, I do feel a bit better.

In fact this morning is the first day of vacation that I actually feel a sense of well being. This has been missing since I have been so stressed by whatever is stressing me (work, age, fatigue?). I do find that not only am I slowing down physically but also emotionally (hopefully not too much mentally but that’s probably denial, heh).

I’m wondering how I’ll make it through another year of working doing all the stuff I have been doing. I do need to make adjustments to make it a workable year. But Eileen and I are counting on me bringing in my part of the money we need to live. So there’s that.

I can try to improve my physical well being through exercise and diet and get enough rest.

I will probably have to drink less in order to be better rested. Dang.

Today is the last full day of vacation here in Grayling so I’m glad that I am beginning this day with some sense of being rested. I’m not quite ready to plunge into my next phase of activity which will be planning the next year at church and pulling together the final steps of an organ purchase recommendation with that committee. But it’s beginning to look like this next phase will be possible.

I’m working on evolving an effective approach to learning classical Greek. This time I haven’t used flash cards much. Also I’m behind on the exercises and grammar sections that accompany the texts I am reading daily. But I read somewhere recently where the way to learn is largely in the doing not drilling.

I do find that in my daily reading I am asking deeper questions about the words and the grammar of myself than I did when I studied Greek before. I try to read over the new section four times. Since I’m at the cabin I do this pretty inaudibly but still try to quietly vocalize the reading since this seems to help understanding and retention.

Planning to read another fifty pages in Gardiner today (the Bach book). If I do that I will only have about a hundred pages left to read in it.

I have been wondering about where profundity of musical ideas fits in to people’s lives these days if they aren’t predisposed to listening to and thinking about music that isn’t popular music. I think that mostly it doesn’t. People need profundity but I think in popular music they are getting it more from the words than the sound of the music.

This comes home very clearly as I listen and think about Bach’s cantatas and the St. John Passion. I don’t see very much music being written these days which can achieve the depth and coherence of Bach’s music, but that is probably largely because of our fragmented context. There’s no larger common language to draw on but popular music which tends to be pretty simple. Don’t get me wrong I like the simple. But Bach is not simple and it boggles my mind what he can say and with what beauty he says it.

 

I have a couple days left before we return to Holland. It’s a good thing I purchased my updated Greek texts before vacation because I have literally used them every morning. My procedure is to read a section through four times as well as doing some written exercises each morning. I do the latter only if I have enough energy. This usually takes about 45 minutes or so. It seems to be a good way to start the day.

Yesterday I noticed that I have played half way through Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier completing the entire first volume while we  have been at the cabin.  I have played my way through it several times in the past, but as I age I find that I am much more thorough in my playing through of music for fun often repeating it four times.

Playing Bach’s wonderful keyboard music is a good complement to reading Gardiner’s book, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. I have been reading fifty pages a day in it the last three days. This is a good goal. I left off at page 350 yesterday. There are  558 pages in the book so I am making a solid dent in it.

Gardiner has done an amazing job of bringing together scholarship, musicianship, erudition and gossipy contemporary (even popular culture!) references.

For example, when he talks about the rapport he feels between his performances of the cantatas and his audiences churches, he quotes Yo Yo Ma and mentions Sting.

I have learned that when an audience and a performer know the hymn tune that is being  used in a Bach piece it creates a different sort of performance. Speaking of the familiarity of “How Brightly Shines the Morning Star” (Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern) Gardiner observes that

“enough audience familiarity with the tune” elicits “that ‘invisible circle of human effort’, as Yo Yo Ma describes it, when performers and listeners alike are engaged in a collective or communal act. It was a feeling that returned twenty-four hours later during a rock concert in the Royal Alpert Hall in which Sting exchanged snatches of familiar songs with his adoring audience in a kind of spontaneous litany.”

I find it encouraging that such a fine classical musician does not bury his head in the sand of the classical world and ignore music that is popular with the rest of us.

This is just one example of the many little cool facts and allusions that stud Gardiner’s wonderful book.

His description of Bach’s St. John Passion included an admiring quote from Robert Schuman after he had conducted it in 1851:

Bach’s St. John Passion is ‘in many ways more daring, forceful, and poetic’ than [the more popular and more often performed St. Matthew Passion] How compact and genial throughout, especially in the choruses.”

Gardiner and Schuman enticed me into listening to about half of the St. John Passion yesterday with the score and translation before me.

This kind of immediate access sitting out here in the woods or anywhere else for that matter never fails to delight and amaze me.

God bless the interwebs.

 

Listening to On The Media’s first show about Hispanic/Latino news coverage made me realize how challenging but possible it is to keep up with world affairs.

On The Media is the best source for accessible critique of journalism these days. You have to admire that at the end of this show they asked Julio Ricardo Varela from Latino Rebels to rate it. They got a “C.”

Varela’s criticisms included finding the entire “Breaking Bad” segment irrelevant to larger Latino concerns and interests as well as OTM’s concentration on Spanish language aspects of this story.

This was helpful to me, because I enjoyed the “Breaking Bad” segment but with a spoonful of perspective can see that it was more about popular culture than understanding Latino journalism needs and topics.

Of course it is obvious that a first venture into a huge subject will of necessity fall short of high expectations.  It will be interesting to see if there are future attempts to correct this omission in their coverage.

In the meantime, we are all just clicks away from better perspective than the best US journalism outlets can give us.

I found it enlightening that Jorge Ramos observed that US journalism is in effect very provincial.

He said that UNIVISION’s audience sees coverage of the many Latino countries as “local” coverage.

This made me realize how little I actually know about current South American and Caribbean events not to mention Africa and the Middle East.

Since I’m on vacation I have the time and inclination to seek out some current stories.

Here is some of what I found and recommend.

Latino Rebels | The Lull Before the Storm

Might as well start with a decent story from Varela’s web site. This has some great info on current USA immigration reform and it aint good news.

Contradictions Emerge in Relative Quiet of ISIS Ruled Iraqi City – SPIEGEL 

One of the best analyses of what’s happening in Iraq I have read.

what scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit

The book version of the above link was an Amazon Daily Deal for $1.99.

One of the commenters on Amazon pointed out that its entire contents was available online at Edge.org. Thank you dude.

At Zingerman’s, Pastrami and Partnership to Go – NYTimes.com

Okay this isn’t international or even all that pertinent. I just love Zingerman’s and love that it made the New York Times.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/

So, Spiegel’s English site is pretty good, but it doesn’t update as often as it’s real site:

http://www.spiegel.de/

http://www.theguardian.com/us

The Guardian is also pretty good but you might want to check their UK page.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk

EastSouthWestNorth

I have found that this site has interesting International deep links as well as English coverage of Chinese current topics (It is labeled as 1 of 3 at the top… you have to scroll down for comments and blog links). Pretty sure Elizabeth or Jeremy turned me on to this.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/

Al Jazeera used to be one of the best sources for international news coverage. But they started up Al Jazeera US TV and since then I have go a bit deeper into links to avoid stupid stupid TV news.

By Talking, Inmates and Victims Make Things ‘More Right’ – NYTimes.com

It never fails to amaze that the simple act of honest talking is not factored into dealing with injustices.  Even though I see that people in my life often are made uncomfortable by forthrightness, in some situations it can make an important difference.

North Carolina voter law challenged: ‘the worst suppression since Jim Crow’ 

This is a Guardian article. I guess they are the dam liberals of the UK. They have this one nailed.

Corporations, ‘artificial people’ and the unintended risks of Hobby Lobby 

And this one.

Fearing Lawsuits, Sheriffs Balk at U.S. Request to Hold Noncitizens for Extra Time 

Obama administration on the wrong side of this issue.

A Post-Colonial Africa, Drawn by Nature and Culture – NYTimes.com

 Nine Nations of North America, 30 Years Later – NYTimes.com

These two links redraw borders in new and helpful ways.

 

 

 

I was reading Gardiner’s Bach this morning and ran across a title of Bach’s I didn’t recognize: Generalbasslehre of 1738.  This appears to be a teaching manual in the handwriting of one of Bach’s students. The title is translated as “Notes on the Thorough Bass Lessons” by Thomas Bratz in his article, “The Problematic Origins of Generalbaßlehre of 1738″ conveniently available online here.

According to Bratz, the history of the authentication of this little book goes all the way back to Spitta’s bio of Bach (which I own but have not read). Spitta gives it a false attribution as being in the handwriting of Kellner, one of Bach’s copyists. I’m glad to read that the entire text is in Spitta so that’s one way I can take a look at it.

In 1984, the manual was re-attributed to someone near Bach and resumed it’s place in the important documents we have from Bach’s time. I missed it in school since I left ND in 1987 and no one mentioned it to me.

On the way to look this up, I found a nice list of Primary Sources many of which are linked in to online versions (the Bach thing is not).

I love the way online resources continue to flourish, especially ones that are not behind firewalls of some sort. This kind of scholarly stuff wants to be free!

I only had 10 hits on the blog yesterday.

Mark said that was because he couldn’t get on (we had internet problems possibly due to increased Saturday after fourth of July traffic).

Nice quotes from Titus Alone:

describing an air born device that resembles a drone:

“What did it do but act like any other petty snooper, prying upon man and child, sucking information as a bat sucks blood; amoral; mindless; sent out on empty missions, acting as its maker would act, its narrow-headed maker — so that its beauty was a thing on its own, beautiful only because its function shapes it so; and having no heart it becomes fatuous — a fatuous reflection of a fatuous concept — so that it is incongruous, or gobbles incongruity to such an outlandish degree that laughter is the only way out.”

This volume was published in 1959.  Peake (the author) died in 1968 and was already suffering ill effects of declining health as he completed it.

Finally I love these two quotes spoken by a new character in this volume, Muzzlehatch.

“My voice, strident to others, is music to me.”

and

“There must be something wrong with my brain.”

I relate.

 

The ancient Greeks seem to have referred to themselves as “Hellenes.” It has long puzzled me where the term “Greek” came from. This morning I decided it would be pretty easy to run it down. And so it was.

The short answer to this question is that “Greek” comes from one name for many of the tribes in the area and predates the adoption of the term, “Hellenes.”

So when the Romans ran into the Greeks who were colonizing southern Italy, they, the Romans, used their word, “Graeci,” to name them. This term was pretty much the root term for subsequent European words to name them.

In the meantime, there was a famous and important leader named Hellen (a guy and NOT Helen of Troy) whose name became the one that the Greeks used for themselves.

There you are.

I was reading an article this morning online and was puzzled by the verb subject agreement in it:

Some of his finest fiction—including the stories “The South,” “The Dead Man,” and “The Intruder,” to name just a few—was kindled by the dagger.

With a little poking around, I found a reasonable explanation.

Some indefinite pronouns — such as all, some — are singular or plural depending on what they’re referring to. (Is the thing referred to countable or not?) Be careful choosing a verb to accompany such pronouns from Subject-Verb Agreement

Kellers’ cancer writing shows how broken journalism has become – Salon.com

Broken because facts are not checked.

American Independence Myths: Lies May Comfort, But Facts Matter | New Republic

Speaking of facts.

The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of

This is a fascinating article about Borges.

Retracing Mao Zedong’s Long March—by Motorcycle – Adam Century – The Atlantic

Reaction of Chinese people that that this author runs into are one of the best parts of this interesting story.

SPIEGEL Interview with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Wow. Some observations from a player in Iraq. Not necessarily reliable, but still interesting.

 

Mark’s adult kids and their significant others and animals arrived yesterday. It was Leigh’s birthday.  She takes great delight in her kids, so I think she had a good birthday having them here in Grayling.

I have been spending a good amount of time with Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier volume I.

 

Leigh made a huge casserole for the group last night. She made a corner of it for me without meat. That was nice.

Finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson yesterday. Good read.

It’s basically a sci fi story. I liked this quote.

“What it means to be human… is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsible, who now the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside.”

Well, I’m on vacation and not having enough thoughts for a blog post. That’s good.

 

 

After three entire days of relaxing I am beginning to feel more calm. I admit to spending a lot of time thinking about the same things that fill my brain at other times. Things like wondering about how music fits into people’s lives.

But in this calm, my usual answers of how important music is to me seem stronger. My need for others to understand this about me diminishes as I spend time reading about, thinking about, listening to and playing music.

God bless the interwebs.

I have been reading in Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. He often sends me scurrying to find books, music scores and recordings. Yesterday I read the passage where he points out that Handel and Bach both created interesting compositions at the age of twenty-two. I had listened to the Bach composition, Christ lag in todesbanden, the day before yesterday. Then I was able to listen to Handel’s Dixit Dominus. With both pieces I kept the score in front of me as I listened.

Gardiner can hear the future of both composer’s style in these two pieces.

“… even at this stage there are pointers to the divergent future preoccupations of these two giants: love, fury, loyalty and power (Handel); life, death, God and eternity (Bach).”

While Bach was in Germany (where he spent his entire life), Handel was in Rome.

Calling Handel a dramatist in the making, Gardiner says:

“Where Bach is yoked to Luther, Handel, decidedly more of a man of the world even at this stage, shows us why he was so drawn to Italy, responding, like Dürer and Schütz before him, and Goethe later on, to her landscape, her art in all its vitality and vivid colors, and of course, her music.”

I was amused to see Handel at a young age already using the same climbing long soprano lines that one associates with the Hallelujah chorus.

Gardiner thinks that both Bach and Luther looked death in the eye. 

“Precociously, he [Bach] seems to have learnt how the colossal force of faith embodied and enacted in music could deprive death of its powers to terrify, as though concurring with Montaigne (whom he certainly never read), ‘Let us banish the strangeness of death: let us practice it, accustom ourselves to it, never having anything so often present in our minds than death: let us always keep the image of death in our imagination—and even in full view.”

Gardiner is writing about the great Actus Tragidus (BWV 106 – Gottes Zeit ist der allerbeste Zeite – God’s time is the best time). I got up this morning and listened to this masterwork. I had never done so before. I recommend it as a work of genius but won’t belabor you with a discussion of Gardiner’s thoughts or my reactions to its structure and compositional accomplishments.

Gardiner speculates that Bach may have been thinking of the people in his life who were dead at this point. That would include his parents (buried in the cemetery next to the church where Bach was baptized – Georgenkirche in Eisenstadt), and also the sister of a friend of his (Susanne Tilesius, sister of Pastor Eilmar).

 

I can’t resist pointing out the clever construction of this piece with movements that correspond to each other in clever and symmetrical ways. And in the center of this comes a rest with a fermata over it.

 

Gardiner says “… it is up to us how we interpret …. [this] silence…. ” One interpretation would see it as an indication that death is a full stop. Another is that death is a midpoint and “the beginning of what comes after.”

Very cool.

 

Yesterday was one of those rare days when I didn’t put my hands on a musical instrument all day. I guess I needed a vacation even from that.

I did do a lot of reading. I finished the second volume of Gormenghast.

In the afternoon, Eileen, Mark and I made a trip to Grayling and bought groceries.

We are expecting more family members to arrive tomorrow.  Adult kids of Mark and Leigh and their significant others.

1. PDF Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener” by John Butt

I read this yesterday. It’s kind of dry but is a topic I’m interested in. I did listen to the opening of the Bruckner symphony Butt mentions.

2. Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater – NYTimes.com

Cowboys.

3. A Disregarded Request From a Beloved Senator Shakes Up Hawaii’s Primary – NYT

Who has more influence, a dead senator or a sitting president?

4. The lost promise of the Internet: Meet the man who almost invented cyberspace – Salon

Thank you to Brother Mark for pointing me to this one.

 

I took advantage of the leisure of vacation to listen all the way through to Bach’s cantata, “Christ lag in todesbanden” yesterday. On Easter 2000 John Eliot Gardiner performed this cantata at Georgenkirche in Eisenach. He writes about the performance and the piece in his Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.

I thought I knew this early Bach cantata pretty well, but I found that listening closely to Gardiner’s performance on Spotify continually surprised and delighted me with  the freshness of the interpretation which lays bare Bach’s ideas.

Gardiner points out that Georgenkirche in Eisenach was not only the church of Bach’s youth, but two hundred years earlier it was also the church of Martin Luther’s youth. Both men were educated in the school which was part of the church complex.

Gardiner speculates that Bach heard and sang Luther’s great Easter hymn in this building as a child as well.

Gardiner’s erudition is on display throughout this book both as a performer/scholar and as a widely read thinker.

His comments and footnotes have led me to check out a wide range of other books and ideas. Yesterday I was running down the writer Charles Williams whom I did not know.

Gardiner sees the cosmic battle which Luther puts in his hymn and Bach brings out in his music as related to Milton’s vision in Paradise Lost.

This leads him to link the cantata to the writings of H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Charles Williams whom he describes as a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

My brother pointed out that Williams was one of the Inklings a literary group from Oxford which included Tolkien and Lewis.

Williams wrote fantasy like the others. His books are available online here and here. I now have them on my kindle.

In addition to Bach, I have been thinking about and playing Debussy and Rameau.

Debussy wrote a lovely Hommage to Rameau which I have been meticulously trying to parse out. Debussy’s chords can be a handful and that certainly is the case in this one.

I photocopied it before heading out to California and also several of my favorite pieces by Rameau. There I was able to use the Jenkins California piano. Here in the woods I have my silly electric piano.

It helps me to let music like this (Bach, Debussy, Rameau) to sort of rattle around in my brain and fingers. Kind of a musical osmosis as well as learning process.