Since I’m not doing ballet classes during the Christmas break at Hope, I have been attempting to sleep in a bit later or at least lay in. This morning I couldn’t. My head was spinning from a long day yesterday. Eileen and I went to Resthaven and picked up stuff for Mom. Then we went to Heartland where she is currently staying. I signed papers for her admittance then left Eileen there while I trundled off to an appointment with Jodi Baron.

I spent a half hour going through possible music choices with her for her and her husband’s upcoming ordination on Dec 20. Then we were joined by Rev Jen for further discussion. We pretty much nailed it all down, thank goodness. Jen and I then spent some time alone doing our usual check in and discussion of stuff. Then back to pick up Eileen. She had spent the interim time labeling all of Mom’s clothes as per the instructions of the care facility.

From there we came home and had a late lunch. I went back to church to work on stuff for the evening choir rehearsal. This took several hours. I came home, showered and then Eileen and I returned for the choir rehearsal.

I have discovered that it helps the choir if I am able to be the most good humored person in the room. This takes tremendous energy and concentration. I pulled it off pretty well last night despite fatigue and depression in the group.

A day like that leaves this introvert’s head spinning.

Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg on Discrimination at Work – NYTimes.com

Some interesting studies and observations about persistent gender stereotypes despite research that shows that woman are often more competent than men.

https://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversity/resources/white-privilege.pdf

I haven’t read this yet but it looks good. Note that the link is to a pdf.

Wall of Sound | The New Yorker

Alex Ross writes a column in the New Yorker. He is great. This is about the organ at Disney Hall and the uncertain future of organ music.

A Sikh Principal, Too English for a Largely Muslim School – NYTimes.com

Once again someone who seems competent is let go due to stupidity.

Rage and Sorrow Flow as Student in Mexico Is Declared Dead – NYTimes.com

Heartbreaking excellent reporting.

Uruguay Accepts 6 Detainees Held at Guantánamo – NYTimes.com

America continues to let other countries set the moral compass of the world.

David Lat’s ‘Supreme Ambitions’ Is a Thriller for Lawyers – NYTimes.com

This book looks interesting. $7.99 for the Kindle Book. Weirdly there was no “look inside” feature on Amazon. But one could download a sample which I did. Escape reading.

Mark O’Connor Fans a Debate About the Suzuki Method – NYTimes.com

Suzuki method under false attack.

Reporting the News Like Black Lives Don’t Matter | Common Dreams | 

Ripping on Associated Press for its bias.

Senate report on CIA program details brutality, dishonesty – The Washington Post

This is turning into a very weird discussion. I’m sorry that the immorality of torture is taking a back seat to the criterion of whether it is effective or not. Who the fuck cares? It’s wrong. We shouldn’t do it.

The Battle Over Douglas Elmendorf — and the Inability to See Good News – NYTi

The inability or resistance to good news is largely a Republican propensity to insist on their own facts.

Unicef Calls 2014 One of Worst Years for Children – NYTimes.com

Friedman cautions us against an untoward “child focus” which he saw as a major contributor to free floating anxiety in the late 20th century. But anxiety does not obtain when talking about such brutal facts. God help us and these children.

I have finally learned the virtue and benefit of swallowing works of art whole. When I was a young man, I was perplexed to watch someone read straight through a large book of poetry. I emulated Dylan Thomas’s notion of only reading poems I like. He remarks that this means he  must read many to find them, nevertheless it was only relatively recently that I began ingesting whole volumes of works of poets and composers at a time.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I moved from volume IX to X of Longo’s edition of Scarlatti’s 555 Essercizi or Keyboard Sonatas. I purchased this 11 volume set (the final volume is called a “Supplement”) used from my old friend and former teacher Craig Cramer. Ever since then I have been working my way through them, reading them pretty carefully. My plan at this point is to immediately begin again when I finish volume XI since I find them delightful and challenging both to play and understand despite the dated editing.

Somewhere  in his copious writing, I think Ned Rorem said that performers who only perfect music for performance end up limited in the contact they have with the huge amount of  great music that is out there. Better to spend one’s time reading through tons of music. I think his comment influenced me, since I’m no great virtuoso but do love music and love playing it.

I have recently finished reading through all of Bach’s Clavierübung III for organ. Even though I have performed some of these pieces, I wanted to make sure I had read through every piece at least once this year.

I added Buxtehude to this list as well. I own many volumes of different editions of his works. It would be interesting to read through them all. Yesterday reading through a collection of his chorale preludes I was happily surprised to see how many of them I have performed over the years since I tend to date the performance for future reference.

I also have been approaching poetry this way, reading through the complete works of people like Anne Sexton and William Carlos Williams. My current project is Dylan Thomas. I began his collected poems in the middle since I have read the beginning poems so many times.

I also have a tendency to read all the novels of authors. This is something I have done for most of my adult life. The authors include C. P. Snow and Anthony Burgess. James Joyce has been hard to swallow whole. But a delight to keep trying. I am happily surprised when i turn a page in Finnegans Wake and see my notes from a previous attempt. I’m pretty sure I have read Ulysses  all the way through, but it is such a great work that I find myself returning to it over and over.

So there you have it. I am lucky that though I have few friends at this stage of life that like to discuss the books and music that interest me, I am able to continue to enjoy great minds with first hand experience of their works. Life is good.

I meant to embed this in today’s blog.

In the years before my Father’s mind became completely confused by the disease that killed him (Lewey Body Dementia), he wrote memoirs. One for himself which he called Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares …. Chronology and Memoirs.

One for this older brother Dave called Family Pacesetter: Stories of David Benjamin Jenkins

 and one for his brother Jonny called The Middler and I: Stories of Jonathon Robert Jenkins.

I obviously have copies of all of these. Dad’s is organized into sections by year. It’s easy to find stuff that way. I have come to realize that Dad is not always a reliable reporter. So it’s like listening to someone reminisce and occasionally getting dates and details confused.

The recent tragedies of killings of black men by police has brought to mind a time in my life when Dad was very concerned with this kind of behavior. At that time it was called “Police Brutality.”

He writes:

“This year (1968) I became very active in a  much needed POLICE OBSERVERS CORP, a group of Pastors keeping watch on the behavior of local police.”

He doesn’t write this, but I remember him telling me that there was a certain elevator that went from a basement police parking lot up several floors to the police offices. It was in this elevator where pastors and reporters  had determined that the most brutal beating went on. The Police Observers Corp stationed pastors in this elevator to help lower this kind of activity. It’s my understanding that Dad was one of these men (not sure if there any women).

It was around this time that Dad  became one of the first white ministers in the Church of God denomination to wear a clerical collar. He said that if he was going to be public in his protesting he wanted people (Police) to realize he was there as a minister.

So now 46 years later, the USA still systematically represses people of color. The reasons are complex but still discouraging. The mistake I keep watching white people and angry conservatives make is to think that racism is evidence of malice. While this is the case is a relatively few instances, I tend to assume that most people are not working that way in their head.

Instead, I have come to see racism and other ills in our sick society (like rampant consumerism and preoccupation with money as the source of happiness) as more subtle than individual malice. Instead, it can been seen in trends of  institutional and societal failure.

So, these trends can be seen in routine massive incarceration of people (especially men) of color for nonviolent crimes, routine stereotyping of victims of poverty and unemployment as choosing their lives, and many other subtle barriers that we as a society throw in the path of the downtrodden and less privileged people among us.

While this is discouraging, I also see and hear voices of sanity speaking truth to the nebulous power of the mob. Mob is a good simile. People get dragged in via echo chambers and their own resistance to using their brains to reason.

I believe we get the country we deserve in a democratic society. Even with gerrymandering and voter suppression, somebody has to be voting in these clowns and supporting their institutionalized madness.

Thank goodness for the voices that remain to challenge us. Here are pictures of just a few.

Eileen and I attempted to watch the DVD of “The Piano in a Factory” last night. Our big laptop didn’t seem set up to play a DVD. I could get it to play but it was clunky. I had to go into the files and then it started but when it got to the movie it didn’t have a way to turn on the subtitles.

The movie itself had such beautiful photography that I was motivated to figure out a solution. This ended up being switching to my old laptop which is on the same operating system but was an early release of it and has no touch screen. It worked much better until just about the end when the DVD started freezing and jumping around. Eileen said this was probably scratches on the library’s DVD.

Despite these difficulties the movie was mildly enjoyable. This is high praise from me since I rarely seem to enjoy a new movie these days. The composition and beauty of what was on the screen persisted throughout the rather goofy story.

I especially liked the music in this movie.

The main character is a musician. After a scene with him and his wife discussing divorce the story begins.

The musicians are  playing for a funeral. One does not know this. Instead they are pictured playing before a stone wall.

Then the camera ascends and you see two large threatening steaming nuclear plant stacks.

Very cleverly these stacks come to the viewer’s mind when we learn that the community is weirdly trying to preserve some local smoke stacks. It turns out they are not these threatening stacks.

Then the main character stops the music in response to off camera complaints that it is too sad. It is only then we learn they are playing for a funeral.

The plot is about the struggle the main character and his friends have trying to procure a piano for his daughter so she will stay with him and not his ex.

I have to say the actress who plays the young daughter has excellent hand position on the piano.

I discovered that there is an online access to movies like this from which this movie originates:

Film Movement.com

It looks like you can stream movies from it. I haven’t quite figured it out. My library owns several of these movies so I thought I would work my way through them before purchasing something online.

While I was fussing about with getting my computer to play a DVD last night, Eileen mentioned that Krista Tippett had said something appropriate about this sort of problem. This morning I listened to her most recent show.

Seth Godin on the art of noticing and then creating

Maybe you recognize his name but I didn’t. It’s a mildly interesting show that does factor in some basic insights into the internet and how we connect these days. I’ll have to ask Eileen what hit her about this show after she gets up.

Godin has his own web site and blog which i have bookmarked. Many of his insights seem self-evident to me, but still worthwhile I guess. I do abhor seeing life as marketing but he puts a pretty healthy sheen on that idea by broadening it to how you connect with your “tribe.”

Again goofy but kind of interesting.

Dear Diary,

I got up early this morning to clean the kitchen. I left a mess from cooking up veggies that I bought at the Farmers Market a week ago: Brussels sprouts, celery root, rutabaga, parnips,  and turnips. I froze most of the Brussels sprouts and roasted what was left. I chopped up and roasted the rest of the root veggies. I found a bag of Poblano peppers on the mark down shelf at Meijer yesterday, so I roasted them as well.

While I cleaned this morning I perversely listened to the Advent I evensong from Westminster Abbey. Here’s a link but it’s not a permanent one since BBC slyly pulls it shows after a few weeks from the available archive.

Eileen and I did go and purchase a Christmas tree after I finished my blog yesterday.  Then I went grocery shopping. After that we went to the hospital to take Mom her glasses and hearing aid. I also bought some roses to take to her. She seemed in pretty good spirits. They came to take her away to test her kidneys so we left.

I took Eileen home and she proceeded to bring the tree in and set it up. I went to church and practiced. I have been reading Bach’s Clavierübung III. I have learned a lot of it, but it’s interesting to play through it and think about the various beautiful settings. I was particularly caught up in his setting of “Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebote” (These are the Ten Commandments). I also have been reading my way through all my many volumes of Buxtehude. I brought home a copy of the Clavierübung III and the Buxtehude to read through the manual only settings at home. I spent some time with both this morning.

I am finding myself very discouraged and bitter about the United States lately. It’s a combination of the Ferguson and Staten Island grand juries and the way our public institutions and “servants” (Congress and the Supreme Court especially) are functioning and don’t seem to be much interested in the common good. I feel very distant from all this madness. Thank goodness for Bach and Buxtehude and James Joyce and so on.

Once again I have to quit.

sincerely,

Jupe

I seem to be in a sort of mental tail spin. Classes at Hope are over for this year. Yesterday morning I had a 6 month check up. I worry unnecessarily about these. I mostly am ashamed that I haven’t lost weight since the last appointment. This anxiety drives up my blood pressure at the office. Dr. Fuentes told me that we were just going to accept that I have “white coat” syndrome which drives it up. Usually they take it twice and the second one is considerably lower.

After this appointment (which other than my usual “white coat” dealy went well) I came home and crashed. I had skipped morning coffee in case they wanted to draw blood (they didn’t), so I was looking forward to having some and relaxing a bit.

Somehow I managed to forget that I had a lesson scheduled at 10:30 with an organ student. I remembered it around 11:15. Eileen and I drove over to church and I apologized profusely to my student.

Last night after my first martini (I only  had one then red wine with my pizza), I had a call from Mom’s nursing home. They wanted to send her to ER because her urinary tract infection was causing her pain and she was having difficulties. By the time I got a hold of anyone Mom was already at the ER.

This morning Eileen and I drove over to check on her. She is suffering from some confusion which apparently comes along with the infection. At least we hope that it’s connected. I think she is more comfortable at the  hospital and they are aggressively treating her infection. She’ll probably go home in a few days.

Last night I dreamed about my dead cousin, Alan. Both he and my Dad were in the dream. My Dad appears pretty often in my dreams, but I haven’t dreamed of Alan for years. Later in the dream I was talking to my sister-in-law, Nancy. I was going to talk to her about my Dad, but then I remembered that she didn’t have a Dad (this was in the dream… her and Eileen’s father passed away a few years ago) and decided not to bring up my Dad.

This last little bit is amusing to me, because it reflects some behavior I have developed at this stage of my life, namely keeping my fucking mouth shut once in a while especially when I deem my insights unhelpful.

Eileen and stopped over at Mom’s nursing home and grabbed her hearing aids and glasses. We will deliver them this afternoon. The nurse thought that Mom’s lack of hearing and seeing might have caused her to underestimate Mom’s cognition. I’m not hopeful about that, but will drop off the stuff along with a couple of books Mom might want to read. She doesn’t usually read in the hospital. It is a traumatic event in her life and leaves her pretty exhausted.  But I will take her some books just in case.

After getting Mom’s stuff, we came home and had breakfast and I emailed the fam about Mom. Jupe continues to tailspin.

Eileen wants to go buy a Christmas tree, so I’m off. No pics today.

I can remember years ago before many of you were born or at least before you had become young adults, I was exposed to a piece of software that demonstrated the possibilities of hyperlinking a text.  It took the poem, Ulysses, by Wordsworth and interwove it with many kinds of hyperlinks from definitions, discussions of meaning to a video of Ted Kennedy movingly reading (reciting from memory?) the poem.

The experience blew me away.  I immediately saw how hyperlinking helped expand the nonlinear way of approaching thinking. It seems to me now many years later ironic that this technology suits the works of James Joyces, especially Finnegans Wake. The ability to access layers of meaning in this text is greatly enhanced by links and windows.

I have two sites bookmarked for this: FWEET (above) and FINWAKE.COM (below)

And these are just two old bookmarks. I  didn’t bother to search this morning for new ones. I’m pretty sure there are more out there. The irony comes from the fact that hypertexting (enabling nonlinear approaches to ideas) and these Finnegans Wake sites are all available at a time when accessing ideas and reading texts thoughtfully is out of fashion.

So I begin my days reading poetry by Dylan Thomas and then reading helpful and informative essays by his buddy William Tindall. Then turning from them to Finnegans Wake by James Joyce since Tindall constantly refers to Joyce’s work and piques my curiosity once again about it.

In doing so I feel like a hermit in a cave who trembling turns over pages by candlelight and is truly caught in the small light of the solitude of ideas and thinking.

It helps that all of these books are in tatters.

I have found myself lately having a visceral attraction to old books I own. I enjoy picking them up even though they are falling apart and their pages are sometimes yellow with age.

Readers of this blog know that I am enamored with ebooks, so this is not a luddite moment. Rather I just notice the pleasure and quietly enjoy it.

Tuesdays the New York Times publishes a Science section. Here are some links from this Tuesday I thought were interesting.

Avi Loeb Ponders the Early Universe, Nature and Life – NYTimes.co

Interview with a fascinating scientist including his ideas on how to spot extraterrestrial life (look for smog).

A Robot Exhibit at MoMath Aims to Bring Math to Life – NYTimes.com

Crazy robots under your feet.

Snowflake Symmetry – NYTimes.com

Answers the question how one arm of a snowflake buy valium 5 mg online knows how to grow like the others (answer: they are all responding to similar environmental changes).

A Vulture’s Gut Is Simple but Seems Effective – NYTimes.com

And also mysterious.

The Ants of Manhattan – NYTimes.com

When Everyday Noise Is Unbearable – NYTimes.com

Hoping for a Good Death – NYTimes.com

It turns out that even people who specialize in helping with death can easily screw up.

I had a restful day yesterday. Today is my last day of classes so it will be the last long Wednesday for a while. I decided yesterday to perform Bach’s great chorale prelude on “Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland” for a prelude a week from this Sunday.

There is something about chorale preludes like this that attracts me deeply. I enjoy playing them. I’m going to pair it up with a flashy little piece by Pachelbel on the same tune for the postlude.

My present community doesn’t sing this hymn as much as some of my past ones, but no matter. It’s great music.

I need to get going and prep the psalm so I can work on it between classes this morning.

An Art Form Rises: Audio Without the Book – NYTimes.com

Not sure what I think about this. I sometimes find the dramatizations a bit annoying. But I’m probably spoiled by the quality of books I tend to read.

A Missouri Thanksgiving | The Academic Angle

I was very surprised when the provost of Hope college wrote this blog post about Ferguson. I experience Hope as fixed in the arrogant theology of Calvinism, that is the idea that God has preordained sinners and elect (look it up if you don’t believe me). This colors their approach to contemporary American living and seeps into the way they group people into us and them.

This blog draws on Bejanmin Watson’s Facebook post about Ferguson which apparently has gone viral. The moderate conservative, David Brooks, also quoted this blog in his NYT column yesterday.

Though I do approve of this stuff, I cynically remarked to Eileen yesterday, “What could be better? A white guy talks about Thanskgivings from years past complete with B & W pics, then quotes a black sports start who is a Christian. it’s all very palatable for white people.”

What America’s police departments don’t want you to know – The Washington Post

Once again suppression of data helps  pull the wool over our eyes.

Chief Justice Samples Eminem in Online Threats Case – NYTimes.com

So the Chief Justice listens to Eminem. That makes sense.

Lessons From an Ancient Time When Recyclers Walked the Earth – NYTimes.com

Ancient antecedents of common sense.

Finished reading For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki last night. I am still pondering and digesting it. I found it clever and skillful in a way few contemporary works of art manage to pull off. On the face of it, it is the alternating narrative of the dairy of Nao (pronounced “now”) and the day to day life of a character named Ruth. They both live on islands. Nao lives in Japan and Ruth in Vancouver Island. Ruth has found Nao’s diary washed up on the beach with a bunch of other stuff in plastic bags. She is a writer who is experiencing writer’s block living on this island with her husband, Oliver. She decides to read the diary slowly, letting it unfold over the course of the entire novel.

Nao’s story is the story of a young girl who is out of place in Japan since she was raised in California before her father lost his job in a silicon valley gig and comes home broke and broken to Japan. On the ensuing connection between these two lives hangs a magical tale of brutality and beauty.

Ozeki has placed several appendices in the novel which are footnoted in the text. My one recommendation is that you read these appendices as they are footnoted since they (like everything) are part of the evolving narrative.

Ultimately I think Ozeki is a bit hard on her character Ruth. Ruth gets annoyed quickly by her charmingly methodical autodidact of a husband, Oliver. She is unreasonable and impatient sometimes exploding into weird rage at herself which she directs at others. Sometimes the reader might surmise the brutality around this character is a bitter mirror for the author.

There is more even brutality around the characters Nao, her father (Haruki #2) and her long dead great-uncle (Haruki #1). Nao and Haruki #1 are the victims of ijime which apparently is Japanese for very skillful and prolonged “bullying.” But the cultural expression of this is much more deeply rooted and defined as described here. Nao is systematically tortured by her her fellow Japanese students. Haruki #1’s letters and “Secret French Diary” reveal his own experience of this torture as he is selected to be a kamikazi pilot at the very end of WWII.

The plot hangs on the story of Nao and her grandmother Jiko, the Zen Buddhist nun. Jiko is a fictional character that will stay in my brain for a long time. She is a hundred and four years old and living in a Buddhist temple. Nao ends up there in the course of the story. Jiko insight into Nao and the way she envelopes and heals her through her also helps Ruth to heal herself is at the heart of the novel.

Before she is done, Ozeki blends Zen Buddhism, Japanese manga culture, Proust, origami, botany, Schrodinger’s cat,  quantum physics, multiple wolds of possibilities and old fashioned magic into this fine-tuned fuck of a novel. Recommended.

Bernhard Misof – NYTimes.coms

A profile of a scientist in the Sunday paper. I was impressed with his comment about listening to great music (the Bach Cello suites for example) brings back his faith in the genius of mankind. Me, too.

Just Plane Ugly – NYTimes.com

Air travel as a metaphor for what’s wrong with America.

African Books for Western Eyes – NYTimes.com

A Nigerian writer explains how getting published equates largely with writing what Westerners expect to read.

How ‘Star Wars’ Saved Marvel From Financial Ruin – NYTimes.com

There are a couple of details in the Marvel-“Star Wars” deal that seem quaint, if not downright insane, in 2014. First, Marvel paid zero in licensing fees. Second, the Lucas camp wanted the comic book out before the movie’s release.

Dead Composers Stage a Comeback – NYTimes.com

I admire both Jeremy Denk and the late Charles Rosen. This looks like fun.

Inspired by Charles Rosen’s “Classical Style,” a textbook from the 1970s, Mr. Denk has created characters that include not only Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn (who have read a newspaper article declaring the death of classical music), but the Tonic and Dominant Chords.

Is Our Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times? – NYTimes.com

we are in the midst of hard times now, and it feels as if art is failing us.

The Discussion on this topic