Mark, Eileen,and I jumped in the car yesterday and Mark drove us to the John K. King Bookstore in downtown Detroit.

Ostensibly, it was for Eileen’s upcoming birthday we made the trip. While Mark and I had frequented this shop many times, Eileen had never been there before. We lured her with the possibility of finding some obscure weaving books  and a birthday gift of cash from Mark and Leigh. But she goodnaturedly came along mostly just to see what the famous store was like.

There is no air conditioning in this building which apparently was historically a glove factory. Mark chose a relatively cool day for us to visit and it turned out to be pleasant in the shop.

I was very happy to find that my interest areas were well represented on the first floor. So I explored the music, art, and poetry sections and didn’t have to go up on any of the other floors.

What follows are my purchases.

1.  Sonata Forms Revised Edition by Charles Rosen.

I know this looks like another dry tome of music stuff, but Rosen was a pianist with a great style and a steel trap mind.  In his Preface to the Revised Edition he writes “Sonatas are like chimpanzees.”

He gets there from a quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

“… there are no essences, there is no such thing as ‘the chimpanzee.’ You can’t bring a few into a laboratory, make some measurements, calculate an average, and find out, thereby, what chimpness is. there are no shortcuts. individuality does more than matter; it is of the essence. You must learn to recognize individual chimps and follow them for years, recording their peculiarities, their differences, and their interactions …. When you understand why nature’s complexity can only be unraveled this way, why individuality matters so crucially, then you are in a position to understand what the sciences of history are all about.” ( from a review article “Animals Are Us” in New York Review of Books 29 June 1987

I was planning to purchase this book soon since it informs Ethan Haimo’s book on Haydn I am reading.

2. I accidentally purchased a two volume Greek interlinear edition of Plato’s Republic. I had looked at both it and a two volume edition of Homer’s Odyssey. They were close to the check out register so I didn’t add them to my stack thinking I would grab Homer just before checking out. I grabbed the wrong two, but I’m still glad to get them.

3. My eye was caught by the title of Irving Burgie’s Day-O!! The Autobiography of Irving Burgie. My copy looks like this:

There was a conventional paperback edition sitting next to it, but I was more charmed by this edition.

4. I was very excited to find a copy of Kevin Young’s first version of To Repel Ghosts. I am almost through his remix version of this book.

5. I had a copy of a collection of Basquiat in my hands minutes after we arrived. When we visited the Detroit Institute of Arts, I realized that I would like to have a copy of a collection of his works. I usually just look them up online, but it’s more fun to look at them in a book, better still in person.

6. The Church Music of William Billings by J. Murray Barbour

I perform music of Billings from time to time with my choir. This looked like a good reference book to own.

7. Mark found an excellent reference for my Greek study.

8. It was fun looking at all the books in the music section or as many as I could manage. I couldn’t resist this book made of the proceedings of the International Haydn Conference in 1975. There are transcriptions of panels that consist of people like Charles Rosen, Donald Grout, Eva Badura-Skoda, and many others as well as papers presented. Very cool.

Eileen didn’t find too much but seemed to enjoy the visit. We had lunch at the famous Traffic Jam and then drove home.

Another good day of vacation for Jupe!

Vacation is going well. My nephew, Ben; niece, Emily; and her husband spent a few days with us. Ben’s husband, Tony, only lasted from Tuesday night to midday Wednesday, his one day off from work. Understandably he went back to have some time for himself before returning to work. I wish I had known he was going so quickly, since he is a guitarist and I was hoping to do some playing with him. That was part of my motivation for stringing and tuning Leigh’s guitar (the other part, being that she asked me to).

I have been unable to resist some piano playing in the living room despite the fact that there are people in the room, chatting and working a puzzle. I feel a bit funny about playing music around my family (except, of course, Eileen). I think this might stem from some complicated stuff, but mostly I think of how nerve-wracking living with me as a boy was for my Mom and Dad. My memory (distorted no doubt) is they were constantly asking me to take a break from the piano playing. Admittedly it was probably annoying goofing off playing, not the painstaking rehearsal I am capable of now.

Anyway, it has seemed okay if I do some playing on piano and guitar with people around. My niece, Emily, even thanked me after I played a bunch of Irish tunes on guitar while she and others prepared one of our meals.

Leigh had the piano tuned bearing in mind that I was going to be around to play. I keep telling people how splendid the instrument is and how a good tuning reminded me of its quality.

I continue to think about how I learned about the connection between Appalachian and English folk music.

Mark is very interested in Scottish music as well as Irish music. In addition to collecting videos of recordings being made now, he owns a copy of  Wbyfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia by Fiona Richie and Doug Orr.

I was looking at the bibliography in this volume this morning and ran across a citation that rang a bell in my memory.

I think this four volume work is the one I pulled off the shelves of the Flint Library years ago. I have interlibrary loaned a copy of the first volume. Bertrand Harris Bronson has an entry in the Groves Dictionary of Music as does James Francis Child and Cecil Sharp. Bronson seems interested in emphasizing the tunes of the ballads. His book above demonstrates his interest in compiling variants of tunes and ballads. it is this variation that sticks out in my mind.

In preparing a version of “The Great Silkie” around this time, I remember looking at different versions and distilling a shorter succinct one to perform.

I’m sitting on Mark and Leigh’s porch with  my laptop and books. This morning is much cooler. So far the bugs have let me enjoy it.

Ives FOURTH OF JULY by ScoresOnDemand – issuu

For some reason, online scores of Charles Ives work are scarce. I speculate that since so much scholarship and score preparation around his opus occurred years after his death, that they are still under copyright. I like to listen to Ives around this time of year. I listened to the piece above on Wednesday, the fourth.

2018 Caine Prize Shortlist Announced — Caine Prize

I listened to a podcast of a BBC interview with Makena Onjerika who won this prize. (BBC Radio 3 – Free Thinking, What do you call a stranger? – The Caine Prize – NHS ideals.) There are links to works by all five above at the first link above. I plan to at least read Onjerika’s.

NYTimes: When It Comes to Politics, Be Afraid. But Not Too Afraid.

This is a recent book by Nussbaum. I’ll probably check both of them out. The first book above is not going to be published until Nov, the second is out now.

NYTimes: How Will We Know What a Supreme Court Nominee Really Thinks?

Linda Greenhouse always  helps me think about what’s happening with SCOTUS.

‘Tablets IV’ by DUNYA MIKHAIL

This is a poem from the new June/July issue of the Poetry mag that hit me this morning.

It consists of 24 short numbered sections. Here a few.

7

The map of Iraq looks like a mitten,
and so does the map of Michigan —
a match I made by chance.

8

If you can’t save people,
at least don’t hate them.

9

Her bubbling annoys me —
can’t understand a word she says.
So what if I toss her from the aquarium?
So what if I spill her new world
with this nasty immigrant fish!

10

The city’s innumerable lights
turning on and off remind us
we are born to arrive,
as we are born to leave.

Mark showed me this video yesterday. Actually he showed me the whole episode. This song was a bit startling to hear. Recently I talked to my daughter about the song, “The Great Silkie.”

Sarah brought the movie, “The Song of the Sea,” with her. It’s based on the Selkie legend.

When I was a young man living in Flint, Michigan, I have a physical memory of taking the Child Ballads off the shelf at the public library there. I can see the book in my mind’s eye. It is a large tome with gray covers.

This is the way I remember it looking on the page.

In it, I remember finding this ballad, numerous versions of it. I was so charmed by it that I did my own version. I remember recently running across the manuscript of it. When I get home I will look and see if I can find it.

I just ordered a print on demand version of the Child Ballads for 10 bucks on Abebooks. I’m not sure it’s the same book of course but for ten bucks I am interested in seeing what it is.

Dover prints a multi volume version of one of Child’s buy cheap valium thailand books. I’ll probably look into that after seeing what I get in the mail.

Today is Leigh’s birthday. I changed the strings on her guitar as per her request yesterday. I have been continually tuning it to see if it can be kept up to pitch. It usually takes a guitar a bit of time to settle down with new strings. Leigh’s guitar was missing the three lower strings which relieved stress on the neck (which is not a good thing), but that shouldn’t affect how well it holds tune.

Mark got me on a bit of an Irish kick yesterday and I pulled down some tunes off of IMSLP. I found a good collection.

They are fun to play on guitar even though my guitar chops are still pretty rusty.

I searched on YouTube for some of these. I found people playing pieces with some of these titles, however none of them were exactly what is notated above. Some were even completely different. I guess that makes sense.

Francis J. Child Ballads

 The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry (Roud 197; Child 113)

These are a couple of links I bookmarked while poking around.

On the eighth day of my vacation I wake up realizing that I had two dreams last night about worship commission meetings at my job. The dreams bore no resemblance to reality but they still were about church stuff.

Yesterday was a day of rest for the most part for me. In the afternoon I accompanied Mark on a grocery run. My feet were tired and my right ankle was swollen. The walking around probably was both good and bad for me: good because I need the exercise and bad because my feet are in bad shape.

I spent time with my old prof’s book on Haydn yesterday (Haydn’s Symphonic Forms: Essays in Compositional Logic). That was fun.

I also played through an excellent piano transcription of the G Major Brandenburg Concerto (No. 3) by T. A. Johnson. I asked Leigh where she ran across it and she figured she probably bought it used someplace.

So one week of my six week hiatus is over. My BP seems to be settling down. I am enjoying goofing off and having access to the internet and Leigh’s wonderful piano. And of course it’s fun chatting with Mark, Leigh, and Eileen. Eileen brought a loom with her and has been weaving.

This seems to be working, but I’m going to need more time to turn into a human again.

I wondered how walking around the Star Wars costume exhibit would affect my body. I think I have mostly healed from the stretched Achilles tendon I suffered a while back. But, probably due to this injury and lapsing on exercise, my gait is still not what it was. The arthritic like aching I experience in my hips seems to be appearing more often. Also, I have had problems with both of my feet all my life.

So the upside is that wandering around the exhibit, I got some badly needed exercise and survived. The downside is the usual aches and pains of an old guy after some semi strenuous movement.

We went to a neat little restaurant afterward called La Fiera.

It was much too hot to sit outside. The inside is small and couldn’t seat our entire 8 person party in one place. But we ordered drinks and stood around until some tables came free. Eileen and I sat with my nephew Ben and his husband Tony. Mark and Leigh sat with Emily and the birthday boy Jeremy. The museum and restaurant visit were a birthday gift to Jeremy from Mark and Leigh. He seemed to have a ball walking around the exhibit. Not only were lots of famous costumes on display, there was an emphasis on design with many, many examples of very cool sketches by the creators of the costumes.

Eileen and Emily seemed quite taken with the fabrics and design of the costumes.

After the meal, we drove home and had a few more drinks and watched the Netflix special, Nanette. This was the second time Eileen and I watched this. It’s the international debut of a witty Australian comedian named Hannah Gadsby.

It was even better the second time. She is acerbic and cerebral and as some of the critics have said does the magic trick of critiquing comedy by teaching how it works and at the same time demonstrating it. I recommend her highly. I’m also very curious to see where she goes after this since one of the themes of her hour is destructive nature of much comedy and how she is quitting it.

In the language of the English Jenkinses, she’s brilliant.

On another note, during the drive Mark talked to me about Shakespeare use of the concept of plague to tie together Romeo and Juliet. It’s a very clever observation and this morning I found a doctoral dissertation which talks a lot about it. Here’s a link to the PDF if you’re curious.

Basically the idea is that when Mercutio dies, he says the phrase, “A plague upon both your houses,” three times. Consequently, the deaths of Romeo and Juliet are expedited by Brother John’s delay in a household quarantined for the plague. Mark was much more eloquent and thorough in his explication, but you get the idea.

On a final note, I was disappointed to learn that the DIA doesn’t own any Basquiat. Sheesh.