Reading Peter Ackroyd’s little book on Ezra Pound has sent me back to looking at poems I have loved all my life and finding new ones. Pound has a reputation as an insane traitor to the USA  who embraced Mussolini’s Fascism and supported Hitler. .

He also was instrumental in promoting the talents and work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, both writers I treasure.

I have temporarily interrupted my reading of his Cantos to read Ackroyd. He describes Pound’s publication of Cathay.

It purports to be a “translation” of Chinese poets. This aspect of Pound’s work has always baffled me, since it’s not clear that he had mastery of the Chinese language. Ackroyd helped me by pointing out that Cathay “represents (a) firmness of image and hardness of outline” it “achieves a quite new thing in English poetry. Its eloquence comes from the clarity of its statements… it pins down precisely, with a kind of brutal lyricism, the nature of anxiety, loss and regret…. description rather than association…. direct images rather than analogy.”

Published in 1915 Cathay was actually an “imagist” work which “a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry” (Wikipedia)

This articulated something I have vaguely felt about some of Pound’s poems I love. Poems like

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

by Rihaku

Asian-American Group The Slants Head to Supreme Court – Rolling Stone

Rocking in the Supreme Court.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, Plays Hardball With Her Wealth – The New York Times

Yikes. Did you know there was Devos money supporting Citizen United? Good grief.

The Hazards Justices Face by Owning Individual Stocks – The New York Times

An inside look at recusing and divesting in the Judicial system.

Memphis Bookstore Not Likely to Be Saved, Says Owner

 Independent Booksellers End Year on High Note

A couple articles from Publishers Weekly. I can’t help but stay interested in bookselling even if at an extreme distance.

The secretary from the Hope College Dance Department emailed me yesterday. She offered me a sub gig for one of the accompanists beginning in late January. In the email, she told me they  were now paying accompanists $50 an hour.

I had to laugh. Last summer I was locked out of online resources at Hope. When I emailed this same secretary and asked why, she replied that only employees have access to them.

For the last few years, I have questioned the poor pay that dance accompanists received at Hope. They were slow to respond to my concerns. After a while I only took gigs from them if they paid me $50 an hour.

It has been a relief not to have the dance accompaniment on my schedule. And schedule is the reason I quit. They would only offer me days that I asked not to be scheduled on, specifically Monday morning.

Also one teacher that I had worked with for a few years reproached me for not thinking that the pay was sufficient. I distinctly remember her saying that $100 for a week’s work was quite a bit of money in her household. This was, of course, disingenuous but no matter.

I emailed the secretary back yesterday that I thought I was no longer on their payroll. I reminded her of our emails in the summer. And that I was far too busy to add dance classes to my schedule. I also told her I was glad to hear they were now paying $50 an hour.

Since no one from the department has told me about this, I have to wonder how much I had to do with the pay raise.  Sheesh.

special exits by joyce farmer

I finished reading Special Exits by Joyce Farmer. This is a sad, lovely, brutal little book. Not for people who think the elderly are gross.

I especially liked the dying father character, Lars.

His attitude towards his life is admirable. Towards the end of the book, I began to realize how good humored he really was in the face of enormous difficulty.

The book is basically the story of two elderly people living alone and coping (or not) with the disastrous infirmities of aging. Also about Lars’s daughter and her relationship with her father and step mother.  I have to agree with R. Crumb’s blurb that it is “one of the best long narrative graphic comics I’ve ever read…. right up there with Maus.”

marimba and stuff now out of the church

Yesterday afternoon, Eileen helped me move everything out of the choir area in the church. Despite both of us being tired, it wasn’t too bad. It definitely helped to have Eileen there. So now the marimba, a podium, another shelf, and percussion instruments are living in the choir room. I will need to straighten in there soon.

I need to get off my butt and make sure I can find places to practice organ soon. I left a stack of music in a pew near the organ at church, but I’m not too optimistic about being able to do much more practicing there.

what are you doing jan 20th?

because my former teacher, Craig Cramer, will be celebrating the installation of a ginormic pipe organ at Notre Dame.

jupe needs time off

Despite the fact that I need to do some work around changing next Sunday’s bulletin, I’m planning to attempt to do some relaxing today. I am physically and mentally exhausted this morning. Not surprising. I tangled with Greek verbs this morning and they basically won. Ah, tomorrow is another day.

Eileen got up early, had a banana, played boggle with me, then left to go exercise at Evergreen. Now is the time for me to quit blogging and do some reading and practicing piano and electric harpsichord.

What the Chief Justice Should Have Said – The New York Times

Linda Greenhouse is excellent. I try not to miss any column she writes.

Japan Recalls Ambassador to South Korea to Protest ‘Comfort Woman’ Statue 

Art in the news.

Church in the basement

I’m writing on Sunday afternoon. We have now had our first Eucharist in the basement. I think things went pretty well. Unfortunately I messed up the gathering chant. I asked people to sing the last entire phrase over and over. This doesn’t work since the canon is at four beats.

Instead we need end by repeating on the two words “adoring bow.” Ah well. Best laid plans of mice and men.

The choir did great. The strings sounded good. However my violinist (who is volunteering her time) asked if there was any way she could skip next Sunday and attend a class she is interested in at her own church. What could I say? No, you must skip your church stuff to do ours for no pay? So next week I won’t have a violin. But I’m not worried about that right now. I will give it some thought tomorrow or the next day.

marimba and shelf

There are still things in the area where the workmen will begin tomorrow (the marimba, a shelf on wheels). Although Jen has told me that they probably won’t be in the way initially, I am thinking that they might be. The plan is to put up a temporary wall, sealing off the choir area from the church, to keep the dust and mess confined. It would seem to me that this would be one of the first things that needed to be done.

My plan is to continue practicing on the old organ as long as it’s there and I’m not in the way of workers. It’s possible that I won’t be able to do much more practicing on it. We’ll have to see.

in the mood for  frescobaldi

I have been playing a lot of Frescobaldi this week. My cellist and I have been working on pieces he wrote for a solo bass instrument. They are lovely. This inspired me to pull some of his stuff off the web. And I own a volume of his keyboard music. It’s a Kalmus edition. Hundreds of years ago when I was living in Oscoda, Kalmus was bought out by another sheet music company. They offered their entire catalog for sale and half off the list price. This volume of Frescobaldi is one I purchased along with a ton of other stuff. The editions are not great, but I have used the music in church all my working life.

He Helped Topple a Dictator. In New York, He’s Another Face in the Crowd. – The New York Times

This guy is just barely getting by in New York, but he takes time off to go receive medals for his brave work in Chad.

He Fixes the Cracked Spines of Books, Without an Understudy – The New York Times

Another feature telling the story of a person. It’s about a book mender.

I am very thankful for the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting organization. At at time when journalism is under such strain and the environment is in such flux, I consistently find them clear and correct. I know they have a bit of a bias on the left, but all I can say is thank God for that. Case in point, Schrecker’s interview in today’s podcast.

I recommend that you listen to this if you haven’t yet. I found it helpful to hear from a historian of the McCarthy era talk about then and now. it turns out that McCarthy himself jumped on the end of a bandwagon that had been going against American Communists.  Schrecker compares it to the past forty years of the right demonizing mainstream liberal notions. While she can see some resistance happening now that did not happen before, the outlook is not good. The McCarthy movement did serious damage to the country, she points out.

NYT Makes the Case for Trump Via Racialized Rural Mythology | FAIR

I like it how Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting reads and critiques reports in NYT and Washington Post.  Here’s more:

WaPo Spreading Own Falsehoods Shows Real Power of Fake News | FAIR

 baked chickpeas with pita chips and yogurt – smitten kitchen

Eileen tagged me in a link to this recipe on Facebooger.

Vegetarian – smitten kitchen

More recipes from the same site.

I’m hoping today will be a sort of day off for me. I managed to get string parts together yesterday for my afternoon rehearsal. I also went to the dentist and mistakenly answered that my insurance hadn’t change.

I guess since my old insurance lapsed they charged me the full amount for the cleaning ($129). Eileen told me I was wrong. i should have told them I had new insurance (I guess I do… Eileen is handling all this stuff for us… I think we split our insurance into two policies, one for her and one for me to expedite it). Plus I should have shown them my medicare card. Sheesh.

I went back to the dentist office later in the day to rectify this. But I arrived minutes after they had closed for the day. Ah well.

I met with my boss for the first time in a couple of weeks, although we have been communicating via email. She was okay with the way I had the choir set up in the basement for Sunday so that’s good. She thanked me for all the work i did during the post holiday season. I shepherded the bulletin for Jan 1.

I was able to report to her that the choir was shaping up to be helpful in the basement. They reacted well to being asked to stand and sit in unison, something we haven’t done in the back of the church since most eyes are pointed away from us. They also seemed to react well to my plan for the next season which is to intersperse easier anthems with good solid 16th century choral pieces and Bach chorales.

As I mentioned here before the 16th century choral pieces are being suggested to me by a collection purchased by a chorister at the thrift store. Since I am planning on singing selections from this book throughout the rest of the season, this year has shaped up to be a thrift store season. We did Christmas from an Oxford Carol collection I managed to purchase at a reduced price of fifty cents a book (from about $20 new). And now I’m drawing on another thrift store collection to find cool 4 part anthems online.

Besides going through music for Sunday with my trio, I managed to do some lovely Mozart with Amy the violinist and some incredible Frescobaldi with Dawn the cellist. Unfortunately, our trio time together was completely taken up by the music for Sunday. Having a violinist and cellist with the skills these two have will certainly dress up praying in the basement.

Work on the church begins next week. My boss told me my marimba could live in the choir room. The drums can go to the basement. And there is a shelf of music that I can wheel out of the area. She said i could wait until next week to move stuff as they wouldn’t actually be in the way at first. Thank goodness, I desperately need a day off. I’m hoping today will be that day.

This will be another short blog. I got up early to work making scores for the string players for this Sunday. We meet this afternoon. Before that I have a dentist appointment and a meeting with my boss. So I need this time this morning to work.

I have had a weird relationship to the New Yorker for most of my adult life. When I was in high school (that would be the late sixties), I had an English teacher named Mrs. Stormzand. She taught us Capote’s In Cold Blood. She told us that she had read it as a serial when it was first published in the New Yorker. She talked about waiting at the mailbox for each issue to arrive.

She also read one book a day in the summer. This is my first memory of learning about The New Yorker. Later as a young man, I sent many poems to the magazine in hopes of being published. I would write the prerequisite cover letter for these and dutifully enclose a stamped envelope. Like clockwork, the envelope would be returned with my manuscript and a charmingly designed rejection notice.

Once, in response to my pathetic pleas for comments, a reader penciled on the notice “We can’t comment, but we do read with care.”

Of course, I never was published by The New Yorker. I did get some other poems published most notably in the back pages of The Rolling Stone.

Over the years, I have had subscriptions to The New Yorker on and off. I hate their approach to online access. They use a graphic interface that is annoying and useless for jumping around in the magazine.

As I try to get myself to rest up on Wednesday afternoons for the evening choir rehearsal, I have resorted to saving the week’s New Yorker to read or should I say look at the cartoons.

I also listen to their podcasts regularly.

Last night, I listened to “Pardon Edward Snowden” by Joseph O’Neil. Here’s a link to the story. There’s also a recording of him reading it. I think it was last year that they began offering a recording of the weekly fiction piece by the author. I think this is a funny one about poets, email, Bob Dylan’s nobel prize, and professional silliness.

Yesterday I was tickled to see an article by a writer and admire and read and who writes music columns for the New Yorker: Alex Ross.

The Book of Bach

Ross writes about John Butt among other author/musicians about Bach. His description of the St. John Passion led me to fire up my Naxos subscription and listen to Butt’s fascinating recording while studying the score. It’s an amazing recording.

busy days

The week after New Year’s Day is not usually this busy. But having scheduled a choir rehearsal for this evening plus scheduling them to sing the Sunday after New Years (otherwise known as The First Sunday After Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord), I have been sneaking in extra moments to prepare over the break.

Eileen has been very helpful. Monday we went to church. She filed the old music from the past season. I scoured Taize books looking for an entrance chant for upcoming Sundays. I had sent off an email with recommendations for what we should do this Sunday, but I was still not convinced I had made the best recommendations.

I tried to access OneLicense.net to look at all the Taize compositions there, but our subscription had lapsed. I knew I had some Taize and Iona Community stuff laying around at church.

Of course doing this kind of thinking takes time. I did manage to come up with some ideas but by that time we had spent a good portion of our day at church. I suggested that we return on Tuesday to finish the job.

I just checked my email and Rev Jen decided to go with  my first recommendation. Here’s what I prepared yesterday before Jen had decided what she wanted to do.

The words are the third stanza of Hymn 133 in the Hymnal 1982. I have been using a lot of canons with the choir lately. It occurred to me that a repeating canon could work much like Taize type chant. When I was looking for stuff I was pleased to see that Berthier (the Taize composer) also has published canons for use in this way.

It will be interesting to see if this works.

On Tuesday, Eileen and I went over again to work. I legally made three sets of new anthems with the church’s photocopy machine. Eileen sorted and stuffed all the anthems from this Sunday until Ash Wednesday (March 1).

I have a little more work to do to prepare for this evening’s rehearsal and tomorrow’s trio rehearsal but I’m feeling more up to speed.

jupe’s tech troubles

I am now the proud owner of two tablets. And both of them are paid 4G subscriptions. The one on the left, the broken one, will no longer have a subscription in a few months. In order to replace it, I had to temporarily pay for both lines.

It doesn’t look too bad in the pic above, but here is a better shot.

Apparently you can’t bend these things if you’re pissed off at them.

I like this shot because you can see the photographer in the reflection.

While we had visitors, Eileen successfully stopped a loud hum by unplugging my good computer speakers. I had thought that the hum was coming from a humidifier upstairs. It was such a relief not to have a low buzz going on.

But unfortunately it looks like my good computer speakers are shot.

I have hooked up some smaller lousier ones so that we can watch TV on the computer, but they are not good enough for listening to music.

Ah well. When (if) our budget ever recovers, I’ll look at getting replacement listening speakers. In the meantime, I still have my record player and headphones.

hymns in the news

Hymns as they were meant to be sung, by aging politicians seated, wearing headphones, singing into mics, sitting on cushions and looking solemn.

Just getting around to blogging. It’s after 3 PM. Eileen and I had a late breakfast. Then we went over Mom’s finances so that we could reply to a query from my smarter younger brother. Things are looking good there.

Then to church. I made up the three anthems that completed the list for between now and Ash Wednesday. Eileen stuffed them in the slots.

I practiced a little organ.

I am thinking of coming up with several specific pieces to work on during the period I am not performing on organ in public. I mentioned to Eileen that I am probably the most skilled I have been at organ playing in my entire life. I hate to lose too much ground there.

My list right now is the 9/8 C major prelude and the G major trio sonata of Bach. I’d like to add at least one romantic piece to the list as well as one by a living composer. But we’ll see.

new book

My brother and his wife gave me Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Morning on the American Right, for Christmas. I’m on chapter 3.

For five years, sociologist, Hochschild, spends time rubbing shoulders with people who hate the government. She experienced them largely as Tea Party members but it’s a good bet if they voted in the last election they voted for Trump.

I like that she is trying to get inside the heads of people with whom she disagrees. She is concentrating on understanding people by examining not only their points of view but their emotional life about these points of view.

It looks like she’s going to spend a lot of time talking to people in Louisiana about environmental problems and their support for deregulation. She describes the environmental problem as a possible “keyhole” into understanding how the American right has come to its ideas about its positions on other issues.

So far, it’s an easy read and is definitely intriguing to this libtard.

church report

I got up yesterday morning with the idea I could prepare something for breakfast for everyone to eat. We were out of eggs. Unfortunately blueberry muffins required eggs and it took me forever to find the muffin pan. Eventually I realized that we have tons of food and that people could figure out something to eat.

It wasn’t too long before I walked to church. Eileen decided not to attend with me. We had  about fifty people including my colleague, Rhonda, and her entire fam (husband, two kids). Rhonda and fam had apparently just returned from an extended family Christmas in Florida. She had arranged for a substitute organist before she realized that she would be back in Holland for Sunday. She and her husband decided to attend Grace. It was nice to see them.

Yesterday was the last time our present old organ was scheduled to perform in public. It will soon be disassembled and removed. If we can’t get someone to take the remains after we cannibalize (recycle?) some pipes to interested parishioners (including yours truly) most of it will probably find its way into a dumpster somewhere.

I anthropomorphize stuff in my life.  The crappy organ at church is no exception. Although I’ve never been attracted to it for its sounds, I have enjoyed playing organ at Grace quite a bit. Sometimes I imagine that the old organ also enjoys the chance to  play the excellent music I practice, learn and perform.

All my life, I have, for the most part, performed on inferior organs. I haven’t chaffed against this too much. I needed to make a living and the Roman Catholic church offered the most possibilities of a living wage for me. It is a rare Roman Catholic church with a fine pipe organ. Hell, it’s a relatively rare church with one in the USA. But hopefully our little Episcopal church in Holland will become one this year.

piano trio postlude and relationship to closing hymn

Since my piano trio has agreed to help out with Sunday Eucharists in the basement, I had the idea that maybe I could find a piece for this Sunday that would be in the same key as the closing hymn and share some motivic material with the hymn.

You may or may not recall that I had already chosen a Scarlatti sonata that fit the bill. By googling for Bb major baroque violin sonatas, I was able to find something. A baroque violin sonata would also include cello on the bass. We routinely play these as a trio for fun.

“O love, how deep, how broad” is our closing hymn. It wasn’t too difficult to find a relatively easy Vivaldi corrente that began in a very similar way to the hymn.

You can see here how the two relate. First the hymn tune.

Then Vivaldi.

And you can hear it, I think. And as you would expect, like most Baroque composers Vivaldi spins this little motive out through the entire dance movement, including logically using the exact same little melody in the logical different key of F major in the second section of the piece.

I emailed Dawn the cellist and Amy the violinist with pdfs of this music. I haven’t heard back from them, but I am hopeful that Amy won’t be too averse to working this up for Sunday.

Ganymede – Harping On

This is a blog post that I found comforting. The author is Parker Ramsey, a grad student at Julliard who is also a working church musician. He is also madly planning the next semester of choral music. I haven’t finished the article but plan to peruse it for stuff to steal for my semester.

Propaganda With a Millennial Twist Pops Up in China – The New York Times

Surreal. Cartoons of the great leader plus well groomed Hip hop propangda.

Facing the music: Joshua Bell | Music | The Guardian

Bell likes Genesis. Who knew?

I think I’m going to quit using GoodReads. I try to report what I’m reading there when I finish a book. It seems like it would be simple for this service to report back what I read in 2016. However when I went to their little Books-You-Have-Read-in-2016 section, there were tons of books missing that I reported. Sheesh.

I can’t quit figure out why when I count the books I have read in 2016 I come up with at least 30 books. This is fifteen more than they have in their section. They seem to arbitrarily omit graphic novels and maybe even some poetry books.

More importantly for me, I have been thinking about trying to keep better track of books I would like to read. I am constantly running across books and promising myself I will look more closely at them, maybe read them when I get a chance.

I have a habit of starting too many books. I do like to read several simultaneously. I often choose to read more assiduously the books that have to back to the library. But books often fall off my radar even before I get a chance to look at them in person.

It would seem like Goodreads would be a good way to keep track of what I would like to read. Unfortunately, when I looked at their section of books one wants to read, it was full of weird titles. I guess I haven’t been that consistent in how I classify books on their site.

So screw it. This morning I started a few docs on Google docs: “Books finished in 2016,” “possible reads,” plus an entire folder called “Book lists” under a folder called “Reading Notes” which I have kept up for a while. This is probably the best way for me to keep track of my reading.

I used to keep written journals. In the back of them I would record what books I had finished and when. I stopped doing this when I stopped journaling on paper and began using online things like Google Docs and this blog.

I do love to read.

And I like to keep different kinds of books going at the same time: fiction, poetry, non-fiction in different areas. So many books, so little time.