I am guardedly hopeful that I will be able to figure out a way to survive continuing to work at my job. Yesterday, our first Pastoral Staff meeting left me in a very typical state of interior mental fugue. The complexities of interaction throw me into an odd unpleasant state as I experience and process them.  I am thrown off balance as I process and contribute to conversations realizing that I am more intense than the situation may warrant.

This intensity is very much who I am and relates to my own self image as an introvert. Yesterday I was successful in not proceeding to a stage of self recrimination and then self pity at my inability to meet other people’s expectations no matter how much I disagree with these expectations.

I am intent on staying as far away from my own personal trap of self pity as possible. My family has a tendency towards this and I have it in spades. But yesterday as the day wore on (and unfortunately throughout much of last night) I felt a mild sense of depression as I processed the new situation at my work of having two new staff people and a temporary commitment to weekly meetings of them, myself; Rev Jen; Mary, the parish administrator; and Rev Jim, our assistant priest.

I think it is Jen’s intention that these meetings will take the place of our private weekly meetings for a while. I sent her an email this morning with a couple of suggestions on how these meetings might be improved. My stance is to try to be helpful but at the same time not develop ownership or frustration about things that I don’t actually care that much about. I have agreed with Jen to try to give input to her no matter how uncomfortable it is for her. This is our private understanding. Some of this was functioning in the larger group  yesterday as I found myself doing a bit of co-teaching with her and then doing some bits of challenge to everyone in the room (including Jen).

I think this is what Jen needs from me.

But I have been thinking about what I need, hence my suggestion email.

On a happier note, I have now planned hymns and anthems through the last Sunday of November. This leaves Advent for this year. I’m hoping I can continue to chip away at prep without devouring hours of my time.

I think that Toni Morrison and Vladimir Nabokov have taught me to revisit their novels that I have recently finished. I’m also doing this with James Joyce.

My interlibrary loaned copy of Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire arrived yesterday. I continue listening to videos of information about this book and Toni Morrison. I feel that I am drawing closer to deeper understandings of these books as well as James Joyce.

I keep thinking about Scott Bradfield’s primitive approach to reading. His little metaphor of “Reading in the Bathtub” seems to mean not using notes or other books to understand the books you are reading. I can’t understand how he would ignore the idea that books and ideas are in conversation with each other. In fact, I’m not sure he does ignore it only profess that one should simply throw oneself at the text. I do admire that part.

Brian Boyd’s book on Pale Fire is an exception for Bradfield but he recommends it with mixed reviews. He (Bradfield) keeps telling people to reread the book. On this I am sure he is correct. Nabokov and Boyd have a beautiful idea about reader as co-creator. As the reader is drawn into the perplexities of Pale Fire and begins to reread creatively and ponder the problems of the narrative, the satisfaction and insight of solving problems in it are like solving a chess problem elegantly.

This is not an idle metaphor. Boyd describes Nabokov’s love of concocting chess puzzles and quotes at length from Speak Memory. 

Here’s the passage in Nabokov’s own beautiful prose.

“It should be understood that competition in chess problems i not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’–delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray.”

Boyd then quotes from an interview where the interviewer asked Nabokov about this passage. Nabokov insisted that he had not written “author and the world,” but had written “author and reader.” Boyd thinks that this is his true meaning.

I buy all this. But Boyd has a bit of disdain for James Joyce along the lines of Bradfield. Both men seem to realize the beauty of Joyce’s prose (especially excluding Finnegans Wake). I am interested if I can learn about Nabokov’s attitude toward Joyce. I think that Bradfield and Boyd miss something about Joyce. Since they are academics they cannot resist rancor at what they see at Joyce’s willful obscurity. I and others I have read who love his entire opus see much more playfulness and humor in Joyce than they seem to.

Regarding Morrison, I listened to an excellent lecture by David Carrasco this morning.  He describes visiting Mexico in Morrison’s company and her amazing visit there which included meeting Marquez and seeing Frieda Kahlo’s garden and home. I like Carrasco.

He also talks about Song of Solomon which I am still processing.

I can feel my renewed post-vacation perspective beginning to ebb away every so slightly. Dang. I am resisting going in to work unless absolutely necessary. So yesterday I emailed the suggested music for upcoming Sunday as I usually do. And today I am staying away entirely.

I am also resisting over preparing for the choir this fall.  Last Wednesday I managed to plan Sundays through mid-October. That’s probably more anthems than I can get through at our first rehearsal on September 11. Jen asked me to meet with her and our two new people, Amber and Sarah tomorrow. I’m guessing that she won’t want to meet with me separately after that. I would like to use some of time at work tomorrow to continue planning. Amber and Sarah are pastoral staff. Amber is in Spiritual Formation and Sarah is in Adult and Children formation. It makes sense for me to participate in initial discussions with them to help them understand who we are and what we do in our worship.

I picked out two nice pieces by Louis Marchand for this weekend’s prelude and postlude. I am realizing that performing music is probably the main thing that piques my interest about my church work. This includes leading the congregation.

I am learning to judiciously choose organ music that either I can perform easily (the two Marchand pieces) or I can take time and learn more slowly. I have been working on a little prelude by Langlais. It’s basically a piece for manuals so I can rehearse it at home.

Jean Langlais (1907-19991)

This is true of the Marchand pieces as well.

I know I’m going to want to learn some more challenging music that will require more time at the organ. I think that will be a good thing because it is so rewarding. And I’m also continuing to alternate composed pieces on one weekend and then improvising the prelude and postlude on the next.

I am madly trying to finish Daniel Siegal’s Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human. I’m on page 244 of 330 so the end is in sight. Siegel’s a little goofy but he has some very interesting ideas and connects clearly to scientific understands of physiology, quantum physics, and other disciplines.

He constantly recommends further reading in the literature if something catches the reader’s attention. I like that but so far haven’t followed up on anything.

He is someone my therapist likes although I don’t think he has read any books by him, just listened to him lecture (on YouTube?).

For me he is a bit of a moving target. In the book I am reading he recommends going to his web site to learn more about a little exercise he comes  up with that he calls the Wheel of Awareness  before continuing.

Unfortunately on his website (which of course is more up to date than the book I am reading), he says before listening to any of the embedded talks he asks you to complete part 2 of his book, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence 

Oh no!

I don’t think I will do that. I will finish this book and maybe (maybe) check out some of his lectures on YouTube.

I continue to do my daily simultaneous reading of three books on T. S. Eliot. Two biographies and a study of his references to Jews in three poems. I’m on page 306 of 335 in Peter Ackroyd’s biography and 410 of 547 in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. 

I enjoy chipping away daily at works like this. If I get inspired I read more than a couple pages but manage to almost always get in a daily minimum. This enables me to get through a ton of books even if it’s slow progress.

The third Eliot book is Patricia Sloane’s T. S. Eliot’s Bleistein Poems: Uses of Literary Allusion in “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” and “Dirge.”  Sloane, who died in 2001, intended to write two more volumes of her studies on Eliot. She writes very wittily and clearly. She apparently died before publishing any more on Eliot. She was also an artist.

The only drawback so far is I can’t get hold of a copy of “Dirge” by Eliot. It seems to have been censored out of existence (at least on the web).

Here’s a quote from Sloanethat I recently related to personally:

“When turning to Eliot, however, we may need to expand our conception of autobiography. A significant part of his life experience is that he read books, listened to music, looked at paintings.”

When I read this last sentence to Eileen, she said, “Sounds like Steve.”

Yup.

Sloane’s book is the kind of book that I suspect Scott Bradfield disdains.

You remember this dude. I have been listening to him when I exercise in the morning. He discourages his students from seeking secondary sources about works they are reading. I get that, but personally I find a dictionary (usually on my phone) indispensable to my reading and enjoy reading some secondary literature about the books and music that I come in contact with.

I have been listening to his lectures on Joyce’s Ulysses which do fascinate me. I have only listened to the first few that deal with the Stephen Daedalus stories at the beginning of the book which are relatively straight forward for Joyce.

Bradfield volunteers that he often doesn’t quite get what’s going on and disdains finding out more using secondary references. This is odd. He also hates Joyce’s puns and describes Finnegans Wake as unreadable.

I am curious what he will make of the more difficult sections of Ulysses.

Bradfield has also written a book entitled Why I Hate Toni Morrison: Several Decades of Reading Unwisely

I’m sure he has a good argument, however, I love Morrison. This morning I got a bit bored and switched to a talk Morrison gave at a 2011 Book Festival.

I haven’t given up on learning from Bradfield. I might even check his book on Morrison out. But, I think she is brilliant.

The 1619 Project – The New York Times

Why Can’t We Teach Slavery Right in American Schools? – The New York Times

America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One – The New York Times

At the Bauhaus, Music Was More Than a Hobby – The New York Times

I didn’t know that Bauhaus was anything more than an architectural movement. It’s interesting to learn about the relationship of the movement to music.

I kind of have the blahs today. I’m not sure why. I am prone to mood swings.

I picked up my copy of Mind: Journey to the Heart of Being Human by Daniel J. Siegel. I left off reading this before summer vacation. I’m in the mood to complete reading projects so I picked it up and read several pages in it today.

He gave a definition of spirituality that I like:

SPIRITUALITY – 1. being part of something larger than a personal self,  being connected to something larger and 2. having a deeper meaning than the details of every day life, something beyond survival alone

Siegel didn’t actually come up with this. He was giving a talk on spirituality and education and didn’t feel qualified to talk about spirituality since he wasn’t sure what it was. So he asked those present what it was and this was what they came up with.

I ordered some books from Politics and Prose Bookshop in D.C. about a month ago. It seemed like they were taking a long time to arrive. I went looking for a way to track the package and discovered that the day (!) I ordered them, a clerk emailed me back and asked me if I wanted Large Print or Hardback. Fuck. I sent them an email. I hope they arrive soon.

In the meantime I am developing an interest in reading more  Nabokov. I am halfheartedly re-reading Pale Fire.  I have been listening to Scott Bradfield’s lectures on it on YouTube.

He’s kind of a cranky professor type. His YouTube series is called Reading Great Books in the Bathtub.

I googled him and apparently he is a retired professor living in London. The idea (if I  have it right) of reading great books in the bathtub is to limit yourself to reading the texts and not doing too much looking at resource material to help you with it. You can tell that he has watched too many students learn to hate books by reading footnotes and essays about the books. By the way, he doesn’t do the videos from the bathtub. He seems to be in his reading room.

Anyway, he’s keeping my interest in Nabokov alive. I ordered two books by him that I don’t own.

I’ve been watching another Zappa video. This one appears to be a movie about him I had never heard of.

It was released in 1994 the year after Zappa died. But there are some very cool parts to this movie including some 1991 interviews with him in which he talks about his own compositional process.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him do that before. Here’s a link to it if for some weird reason you’re interested, dear reader.

New Podcast

On The Media put up two of three segments of a series called History of Persuasion from The Stakes in its feed recently. I listened to two of them this morning and decided to subscribe to The Stakes. Here’s a link.

The series talks about the Unabomber and the history of psychological conditioning and lots of cool stuff. I like it.

I finished Jill Lepore’s These Truths in bed this morning in the early hours. God bless ebooks.  If you are interested in American history, I think it’s a must read. If you are bewildered, confused, and upset about where we are as a country right now, I recommend reading the last chapter in this book. Lepore is brilliant as she describes and reports on the state of our nation. The title of the chapter is America, Disrupted and she cites the responsibility of both left and right factions. Very helpful to me.

So now I have finished two books I wanted to get read this summer. Lepore and Pale Fire by Nabokov. I have snail mailed two books I want to read next sort of in line with these two.

My next non-fiction, hopefully, will be Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities.

Next in line in the fiction category, is Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf. 

Lepore will be my area in November. I’m planning to attend and take some books for her to sign.

I

In October, Kevin Young will be in my area. I will want to attend this and take books for him to sign.

The whole series seems pretty interesting. (Thanks to my friend, Rhonda for pointing this series out to me!)

I now have six weeks of choral anthems and hymns chosen beginning with September 8. We have two new staff people at church and Jen wants me to meet with them and her weekly for the next few weeks. We are also working on Hispanic ministry. The assistant priest, Jim Steem, wants me to work with them some as well. I am intent on limiting my hours for this gig and the same time fulfilling all that i think it needs from a part time dude. Jen is sympathetic so it’s mostly up to me to limit myself. I probably won’t do any more planning until next Wednesday so that I can have time off between now and then.

Jen was very receptive to me taking more time off to go to China to see the fam there. That’s a relief. There’s nothing like asking for more time off your first meeting back after having most of the summer off. Like I say, it’s a good gig staffed with excellent people.

Not too much to report today. I can feel the pressure of work breathing down my neck via emails about tomorrow’s staff luncheon, choir members emailing me about upcoming absences (and hey! When does choir start?), and the November Joy Huttar Memorial Concert Artist emailing me after a long silence.

This is will all easily wait until tomorrow except I did answer the email about what I want for lunch tomorrow since the church is buying.  It’s unusual for the office administrator to email staff the day before to ask what the church should get for your lunch.

I finished reading every word of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. As with Morrison’s Song of Solomon, it will stay with me for a while as I continue to attempt to understand it. But the difference is that it’s essentially a comic novel. I couldn’t find anything helpful to me online about it. This morning, I exercised to  part of a recording of some book club or group of students discussing it on YouTube.  I didn’t really learn anything from it.

After poking around online, I decided to interlibrary loan Brian Bond’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. It sounds thorough, but I wonder about thorough, academic treatments of a comic novel. One of the commenters about this book on the Amazon page for it was filed with remorse for laughing at the poem which is part of the book. She said that Bonds thought it was a great poem but when she studied it, her friends took turns reading the poem portion of the book and laughing out loud at it.

It strikes me that Nabokov would probably like that.

Anyway one more summer read done. I’m still closing in on the end of Lepore’s These Truths. I’m not sure how much i will read in it this evening since Eileen and I are going out to eat at her favorite restaurant, El Rancho.

I played through Debussy’s Children’s Corner yesterday. Now when i play this I think I will be reminded of this summer’s Dublin trip. A copy of it was in the piano bench of the place we stayed and I played through it while we were there. I actually thinks it’s quite good. Gollywog’s Cakewalk is contemporary with the great Scott Joplin.

Uh oh. I just googled this and discovered that once again I am participating in unconscious racism. Fuck.

I have owned this work for years. I just looked and my current copy has the above cover missing. I remember it well. I admit that I did not notice how demeaning this cover is. I barely registered that the balloon coming up from Jumbo was the head of a black person.

Golliwog was apparently the name of a Minstrel doll presumably owned by Debussy’s daughter to whom the work is dedicated. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. insists that we must unearth and face these demeaning images that are so much a part of our past and present.

I was googling because I was curious what Debussy might have known about cakewalks and how that might relate to American music. I found a good article on this page and have downloaded the pdf to read.

I guess now when I play this piece which I love, I will also remember it’s racist origin.

The Historical Significance of 1619 – The Atlantic

I have been doing some interesting things with my food.

I decided to figure out how to use radish greens since radishes often come with them both at the local Farmers market and in the grocery store. After a little reading, I made radish green pesto using a couple handfuls.

My theory is that Parmesan cheese, nuts, and garlic will make most any concoction worthwhile.  The mixture was resistant to being turned into a paste in my blender. I had to keep fussing with it, but in the end it turned out pretty good.

I purchased two kinds of mushrooms at the Farmers market on Saturday. I keep eyeing this wonderful mushroom grower’s booth and finally succumbed (to the tune of $18 for two different kinds).

I forgot what the seller called them (if she called them anything at all). But I think at this point that one kind was King Oyster Mushrooms. They looked a lot like those pictured above.

I cooked up the second batch this morning. I think they were shiitake mushrooms. That’s what’s pictured above.

I also got up and steamed the rest of the radish greens. They taste somewhere between spinach and arugula.

I have discovered that if I watch stuff that interests me, my running in place for twenty minutes goes quicker. This morning I watched most of a 2000 documentary about Zappa called “The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die.” I couldn’t get YouTube to let me share a link. You can easily search there. I think it’s also here.

I liked several things about this documentary. I liked their choice of which of Zappa’s music to put in the background. I recognized a good 85% of it.

In addition, it was very interesting to listen to the late, great George Duke discuss how Zappa taught him to love or at least accept rock and roll and synthesizers.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I managed to see theses two great musicians perform together live along with Jean Luc Ponty and the rest of the Mothers of Invention.

One of my summer reads has been Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I used to own one of those cheap paperbacks of it when I was a kid. I never made it all the way through then. It purports to be an edition of a long poem with lots of apparatus. It contains an introduction by the fictional editor and acquaintance of the poet. Most of the book is extensive, over the top, footnotes in which the ostensible editor, Dr. Kinbote, makes the entire poem about him. He can pull this off because the fictional author, John Shade, is now dead.

In his introduction, Kinbote suggests that the readers skip the poem and read the notes straight through. This is what I did. I finished them this morning. Kinbote advises readers to then read the poem and then reread the notes. I’m planning to read the poem, but I don’t know about wading through the preposterous though entertaining notes.

It occurs to me that I am now at a point in two novels where what I have to read are long sections of poetry. After a fictionalized description of John Keats death in Italy, Burgess translates a bunch of hilarious slightly obscene Biblical poetry by the obscure Italian poet, Belli.

Part of the story he makes up about Keats is his casual connection to Belli.

Documentary_Frank Zappa:The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die – Frank ZaPpa neWspaPer

This link is above, but I thought I’d put it here as well. I also learned from this documentary that Zappa was a literate composer and put a lot of his music on paper before rehearsing, performing, and recording it. If his estate continues to stall access to his work, I’ll probably never be able to access much of his work in printed form. Too bad. But I do like to listen.

Switch off the phone, turn on the radio and tune into Proust

Radish Leaf Pesto Recipe | Chocolate & Zucchini

This is the recipe I used. The web site like so many food ones, is an absolute pain in the ass with pop ups and constant loading of shit. If you scroll down, there is a printable copy of the recipe. That’s what I did.

This was my lunch today.  It consists of sliced radishes in a circle topped with radish pesto (something one of the recipes suggested). Right behind the radish are halved cherry tomatoes. Sauteed shiitake mushrooms and diced onion sit on a bed of leaf lettuce and arugula. After taking this pic I put olive oil and balsamic vinegar on it. These last two were the only ingredients not purchased at the local Farmers market. This tasted pretty good to me. My life (and food) is good!

I want to do a quick post so that I  have some time to read before martini time. I was thinking that today was a Birky (my therapist) Friday. I figured it out early enough to allow myself the time to do today’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle before beginning my morning routine.

I have been thinking a lot about Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The three lectures which i have mentioned here have helped me understand not only much of Morrison’s beauty and intent, but also have use the book as a light into my own development of a sense of self throughout my life.

Heavy, eh? Anyway, when I was thinking today was a Birky day I wanted to organize my thoughts so I could present them to him as coherently as possibly. The reprieve will be helpful to allow me more time to do this. I finished the third lecture this morning while exercising.

I have also ran across some cool Zappa videos. I subscribe to “echidnasarf housewife” on YouTube because it posts many Zappa videos. Unfortunately they set up their videos so that they do not show musicians but only a sort of abstract pattern.

On YouTube, when I’m looking at possible videos to view from my subscription I have fallen into the habit of running the cursor over the thumbnail which then plays excerpts of the video silently. It never occurred to me until yesterday to do this with echidnasarf housewife’s pattern videos.

If you look closely at the above, you can see that the top video fourth from the left has a red line under it which indicates I have gotten that far in it. The title is “The Making of 200 Motels.” It’s in Dutch (I think) but all the main players speak English in it.

It pulled me back into remembering how much I enjoy Zappa. So I searched on YouTube and found another video about the making of 200 Motels, this time in English. These are silly little things to pass the time while I exercise and stretch.

I actually finished a book yesterday. Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. I enjoyed this book immensely. Greenblatt has an excellent bibliographic essays at the end. Last night I pulled books off my Shakespeare shelf to see what I owned that he recommended.

There were several. I decided that I will want to purchase and read more by Greenblatt, but in the meantime, I think it would be fun to read Pakr Honan’s biography. I started it this morning and like it so far.

I’m getting close to being done with Lepore’s These Truths. She does an incredible job of writing about the time since 9/11. Her organized narrative is helpful especially concerning times I have lived though. And of course I’m learning a ton.

I did not know that shock-jock Alan Jones was already broadcasting as the Twin Towers were crashing down about how the entire thing was a U.S. government conspiracy to provoke war and bring down Bush.

The madness runs deep.

Anyway, time to get back to reading.

I found a cool YouTube on Finnegans Wake and used it this morning for exercise. It’s a lecture by a man named Terence Mckenna.

McKenna (above) seems to be a hippy dippy dude who died in 2000. His lecture’s not bad, but what’s really cool is the art that David Patrick Harry (the man who posted the video) puts up in it since it’s only audio.

This is Finnegan falling off the ladder. The thunderclap word is up in the left hand corner.

I like this one because I can see so many connections to the book.

These are by John Vernon Lord (above), an eighty year old artist and, according to his Wikipedia article, not to be confused with Jon Lord of Deep Purple.

The same Wikipedia article says John Vernon Lord studied with Mervyn Peake. You know, the guy who wrote Gormenghast.

Peake died in 1968, but John Vernon Lord must have got to him before then. I do like the Gormenghast novels.

Sections from Jill Lepore’s These Truths I read aloud to poor Eileen today.

“Between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global war on terror, Americans dragged themselves,  bloody and bruised, from one political skirmish to the next. They fought over guns, abortion, religion, gay rights, and the environment. They fought in the schools, the courts, the press, and the university. They fought with words, and they fought over words. They fought by took and nail and by hook and by crook, and they believed they were fighting for the meaning of America, but, really, they were fighting for raw political power.” (691)

“The new Democratic understanding of the world was technocratic, political, and therapeutic. They believed that technology could fix political, social, and economic problems, and yet they also believed that they owed their own success to their talents and drive, and that people who achieved less were less talented and driven. They tended not to see how much of their lives had been shaped by government policies, like government-funded research, or the zoning laws and restrictive that had created high-quality schools in the all-white suburbs or the occasional swank urban pockets in which they typically lived. Not withstanding all the ways in which government assistance had made possible the conditions of their lives and work, they tended to be opposed to government assistance. Believing in individual achievement and the power of the self, they saw the different political vantages of other people, especially of people who had achieved less, as personal, psychological failings: racism, for instance, they saw not as a structural problem but as a prejudice born of ignorance.” (694)

Riffing  on that last quote I offer this link to a CounterSpin podcast I listened to today.

Here are two books mentioned in the podcast.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

Duke University Press – Captivating Technology: Abolitionist Codes for the New Jim Code edited by Benjamin

My Sunday after vacation went fine. It was good to see everyone. One of my insights I am bringing back from vacation is that my work is a primary source of my own social interaction. As I age, I am more aware of the statistics that associate living longer with rubbing shoulders with other people. I’m a bit of introvert and haven’t exactly managed to cultivate much of a social life. So,  as I return to my work at church I am thankful that it, at least, provides me with some social outlet.

Having said that, I am aware that this “rubbing” from yesterday did leave my introverted self with his head spinning a bit as usual. This is part of the work and I can handle it.

I had some time before church yesterday, so I went up to the choir room and grabbed some organ music. I managed to choose a prelude and postlude for next Sunday. I am doing reentry conscious of continuing to shape my job to fit my own life style. This means being careful what music I choose regularly to perform. The two pieces I am playing next week come out of Volume 5 England 1730-1930 Wayne Leupold book.

I have been enjoying many of the Leupold Historical Organ Techniques and Repertoire books. They have a lot of information about the music and the musical style of the composers they include.  I’m playing one voluntary by Francis Linley (1770/71-1800) and a quick section of a voluntary by Jonas Blewitt (d. 1805).  I have never heard of either person, but the music is pleasant enough

I couldn’t find a picture of Linley but I believe this is an organ book he wrote. No pictures of Blewitt either.

Yesterday late afternoon I had an email from Rev Jen requesting the piano trio for a big funeral we have scheduled Wednesday. Due to this funeral I think I’m going to delay planning this week because even though I will get paid an extra fee for it, I still count the prep time as part of my weekly church work.

I texted the other players in the trio and checked for their responses this morning. It’s a go. I am planning to make this as easy as I can for the three of us and still meet the expectations of the community and the boss. We will get together tomorrow.

I have been watching a documentary on James Joyce on YouTube the last few mornings while I do my stretches and exercise. I have Stephen Hero and Pound’s letters to him on my daily reading stack. Today I decided to pull out Finnegans Wake and add this to the stack. When I began looking at my Joyce books, I discovered that I have quite a few source books that I purchased after I had finished reading Finnegans Wake.

A Word in Your Ear: How & Why to Read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is clearly written and is a good place for me to get back on the merry-go-round of this particular work.

At some point I purchased a nice, new, clean copy of Finnegans Wake. So far this Oxford edition is the one whose pagination ryhmes with all my nice new unread resource books.

I figure if I can spend an hour or so a day with Greek, some daily time with Finnegans Wake is doable.

I am being drawn back into Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, partly out an enduring love of their work. But also by the fact that I have to look hard for anything else that approaches the satisfaction I get from reading them over and over.

Eliot quote from today’s reading:

“Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passions; Dante the greatest altitude and depth.”

T. S. Eliot, Dante (1929) in Selected Essays, 226

I seem to still be able to play organ. Eileen and I went over to church midday. Eileen posted hymns while I prepared for tomorrow. All systems go.

I’m feeling unreasonably optimistic today. Some of it is the weather here is lovely. Plus I am in a late summer mood. I have been listening to Purcell’s Faerie Queen (link to excellent Youtube rendition).  I didn’t like what was on Spotify. I did find the missing record of my two record recording of this by the Deller consort and have been listening to side one over and over on my record player.

I didn’t realize this piece is based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Very loosely.  The liner notes (remember those?) on my record say that it was written about 100 years after Shakespeare’s play and was “updated.” It’s actually barely recognizable. However, Purcell captures the mood I’m in. This makes me want to listen to Mendellsohn’s music for the play as well. It all has a very summery feel and I’m lovin’ it.

I was talking to Eileen about something I have learned about myself on this vacation. Namely, that while music is still central to who I am, given a completely open choice I don’t always choose to do music. On this vacation, instead I have pursued a lot of poetry, history, and current event reading. Not to mention Odysseus in the original Greek.

I haven’t completely neglected music, sitting down almost every day to do some, but it’s an interesting thing to know about myself.

I can do my church job well and still not spend a great amount of time on it.  However, I often get my intellectual curiosity aroused by coming into contact with music. I am expecting this to lead me back to studying the life of Bach and other composers, not to mention hymnody and choral music.

I am already being led back to music via my other intellectual pursuits. Apparently, T. S. Eliot had the late Beethoven string quartets in mind when he was writing Four Quartets. So of course I had to play through some Beethoven piano sonatas.

Speaking of T. S. Eliot, a while back I decided I wanted to read an essay of his on Dante. Dante was very important to Eliot and he loved The Divine Comedy.

I ordered a collection of his essays this summer and I’m almost finished reading the Dante essay.

One thing I have learned is that with an interlinear translation, I am often able to understand much of Dante’s poem in the original Italian.  I don’t think Eliot read Dante only in the original. In fact, I suspect that he had little training in Italian. But he did know Greek and Latin and was very, very well educated. My mind is not in his league, but reading his essay which has a lot of the original Italian in it has convinced me that it would be fun to revisit Dante in an interlinear version.

I have interlibrary loaned one of the Paradiso to examine.

I have looked at some interlinear Dante online and think I would like to have my own copy of a real book of this sort to use. So I’m hoping that looking at real copy of the above book I will be able to determine which edition to purchase.

If today is technically the last day of my lengthy summer vacation from church work, I am in an excellent space regarding both return to work and continuing my current studies of Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, Dante, and other stuff.

I have missed very few days of exercising and have a sneaking suspicion that it is helping me. I plan to continue daily stretches and physical exercise indefinitely at this point.

I fired up my record player and listened to some records today. Right now, I’m listening to Steve Wonder’s album, Innervision. Earlier I listened to some of Varese’s music on vinyl. I am beginning to suspect that there is an added visceral aspect to listening to analog recordings. I’m not one to care too much about the varying quality of sounds since I have played some pretty shitty instruments in my time without too much discomfort. However, in both the music of Stevie Wonder and Edgar Varese, my attention was drawn involuntarily to the innate beauty of the sounds themselves as I listened. Maybe I’m imagining this, but I don’t think so.

I watched another video of a BBC special on T. S. Eliot. (link to it on YouTube).

I organized my T. S. Eliot books and discovered that I have read most but not all of two of his biographies. They are now back on the “to-read” list. Also, I have been perusing his poetry again even though I have read most of it through in the last few years. I find myself drawn back in.

Here’s a passage I went to mark and discovered I had already previously noted it in the back of the book.

… music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts

from “The Dry Salvages” in Four Quartets

Then re-reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” these lines leapt out at me.

I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when i am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

I’m enjoying my last week of vacation. Yesterday I went to Hope College and accompanied a very talented eighth-grade sax player at his lesson with my bud, Jordan VanHemert. Today I had tea with Rhonda Edgington and Kola Owolabi.

It’s flattering and fun that my bud, Rhonda, keeps reaching out to me and connecting me to other people. Kola was a delight. He teaches organ at U of M and was interested in maybe returning with his Baroque Italian Organ Music class to play the Pasi which he seems to have fallen in love with.

This morning I exercised to a BBC documentary about T. S. Eliot (YouTube Link). I have been thinking about his work on and off this summer. This documentary was interesting in that I realized that I have read his biography and remember a lot of it. I wondered what they were going to put in the documentary.There are many voice overs of T. S. Eliot and others reading his poetry. I recommend the documentary if you’re into Eliot. It’s over an hour and twenty minutes long.

The following video of a song I like a lot uses many shots from the documentary and it’s much, much shorter.

I looked at The Wasteland and noticed that the epigraph comes from Dante’s Inferno. I knew that Dante was important to Eliot.  The documentary reinforced some of my understandings about him that I have been getting from reading Patricia Sloane’s T. S. Eliot’s Bleistein Poems. 

That Eliot had a pronounced sense of humor and enjoyed confusing his readers with both real and made up erudition.

I seem to be easing back into life in Holland. I have been practicing Sunday’s psalm at the piano.  I am enjoying studying Song of Solomon by Morrison and now I am being drawn back into thinking about T. S. Eliot.

Life is good. Eileen just came in and said it’s beautiful outside and she is going to sit in the back yard.

BBC News: Zuleika Hassan: Kenyan MP with baby ordered to leave Parliament

There’s sin everywhere.

Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism’ – The New York Times

NYTimes: Can Britain’s No. 1 Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble?

I pushed my tablet over to Eileen this morning with this article on the screen. There was a picture of the very cool book store we went to in London recently. I believe that the man in this article, Mr. Daunt, was sitting at the front desk when we walked in.

How Bill de Blasio Went From Progressive Hope to Punching Bag – The New York Times

KENNETH ALLEN TAYLOR

I have now listened to two of the three lectures on Song of Solomon presented by the Stanford Humanities Department. They were apparently given in 2010. I have gone entirely through Kenneth Taylor’s “The Narrative Construction of the Self” and copied down the slides he uses. I have listened to R. Lanier Anderson’s “The Flight of Self” and it is quite good. Both men have insights both into Morrison’s book and some concepts of “self.” It’s a tribute to the book that there are so many deep insights embedded and worked out in it.

R. LANIER ANDERSON

I’m planning on re-listening to Anderson’s lecture and type up notes. At the beginning of his lecture: this note appears:

In “The Art of Living,” a first-year introduction to the Humanities course, three members of Stanford’s faculty examine great works of philosophy and literature to explore what it might take to lead a well-lived life. 

This is evolving into a meditation on my own development. I do think about the examined life and the ideas in these lectures are focusing some stuff for me.  For example, regarding names, Anderson he comes up with the two categories of “restrictive” and “enabling.” This got me thinking once again about my nicknames in high school, both self applied: Stupid Steve and Jupiter Jenkins. Anderson goes in many directions with this, but the idea that I was seeking my self via names hit home with me.

I came up with Stupid Steve because I liked the alliteration and I liked the self ridicule. I didn’t think I was stupid particularly. But I did and do feel as though others can easily see past me. I don’t really remember how I came up with this name. I wonder how my parents used the word, “stupid.”  I have learned that self-pity is one of my demons that I have to confront. I do think that my mocking name was a bit of teasing myself about feeling sorry for myself.

It felt like putting on a clown mask to refer to myself that way. I’m a bit embarrassed at the stringent nature of it, but I did do it. I suspect that this name is a “restrictive” name in Anderson’s taxonomy or maybe just in my own interpretation of this. I’m seeing a “restrictive” as one that reflects and tension between the self and society. I think Anderson gets there later in his lecture.

At the other end of the spectrum, I came up with the name Jupiter Jenkins as part of a title of a song I wrote: “Inside the head of Jupiter Jenkins.” I think it reflected an idealized self for me, even a bit of a “cosmic” one. Anderson might classify it as a “enabling” name. Maybe this name helped me idealize myself a bit.

I don’t think that I found and owned my self until much later in my life. This self and this name ends up in the middle and is the one I own: Steve. If I understood what Anderson was getting at, we don’t name our self, but at some point we have to own our selves and our names.

Anyway, I’m stilling working on this and have one more lecture to go through.

Some new music:

Apparently Robertson did a soundtrack for Scorsese’s new movie, “The Irishman.”

“I hear you paint houses” is Mob talk for hiring a hit man. This might not be a bad movie. This is only one cut from Roberson’s upcoming new album.

And I’m not sure what this next piece is. I fear that it might be a remix of old Miles and new stuff. It’s not too bad, but I don’t necessarily approve of remixing like this although I own a nice album of remixed Django Rheinhardt that I like.

Here’s a cut from it I found on YouTube.

I find that I sometimes like things that many other listeners and musicians think are a little bogus. That’s okay. Here’s another cut that I remember.

Rheinhardt’s left hand was burned badly as a child. The story goes that his mother stopped them from amputating the entire hand. He used his limitation to come up with some wonderful solo guitar playing that was pioneering. What’s not to like?

This keeps happening to me: some author that is on my radar dies. It happened with Leonard Cohen and Ursula K. LeGuin. Now Toni Morrison has died. It may be that since I spread my interests rather thinly across several areas  the possibility of this happening is more likely. Especially since I favor living authors.

Just this morning I listened to a lecture by Kenneth Taylor (pictured above), philosophy professor at Stanford, about Song of Solomon.

I was tickled that the Wikipedia article on Song of Solomon linked in three lectures about this book.  Vimeo doesn’t indicate when this lecture took place. The title was a bit off putting. “The Narrative Construction of the Self.” But after he began to relate his philosophical understand of “Self” to the book, I was sold. I’m now typing up notes to this lecture. The other two lectures from the Wikipedia article are  “The Flight of Self” and “It’s not about you living longer. It’s about how you live and why.” It looks three profs collaborated on an interdisciplinary seminar or something. I hope the other two guys are as good as Taylor.

Before I heard that Morrison had died I was wondering what she thought of these lectures.

I think she would be okay with them. Taylor has really helped me understand the book better and is keeping me engaged in thinking about it. I had already begun to do some notes on the book itself. It really requires going back through the book if not rereading it in order to get more of what’s there.

For some reason, a new issue of Granta magazine was in my mailbox today. I don’t think I have subscribed to it. I did subscribe about a year ago to the digital version but had trouble getting their stupid app to work. I may have even reported that to them. If this is some sort of goodwill gesture, it would work better if the magazine informed me.

But maybe I have just forgotten subscribing to it. I do like the magazine and have a tendency to read most of the articles and stories in a given issue. i find the writers are usually very eloquent and write with an amazing ability.

VIKI-LYNN HOLMES

I finished reading Song of Solomon last night. It is a an amazing, beautiful. complex book. Like any good book, it’s left me thinking and continuing to return to it.

Today, I resumed my Monday routine of submitting music for Grace’s bulletin. I think the vacation has helped me immensely. Right now I have more perspective than ever about my work in the church.  This will probably ebb, but it’s helpful to come to my senses occasionally. My plan is lay low this week, do a bit of prep to reassure myself I can play Sunday, and then begin planning in earnest next week. That should work.

David Ignatius: Debaters seemed eerily like America-First Democrats

Ignatius was invited by Prose and Politics to interview Elliot Akerman about his new book, Places and names. (link to YouTube of this discussion) In his introduction, Bradley Graham, co-owner of the store, refers to Ignatius’s reporting in the Washington Post as indispensable to understanding our times (not an exact quote). I Immediately put Ignatious on my Google alerts. This showed up in my box and is an interesting read.

Public Thread breathes new life into West Michigan’s discarded textiles

I think is cool.

NYTimes: Satire or Deceit? Christian Humor Site Feuds With Snopes.

I tend to “follow” stuff pretty randomly on Facebook. I follow both of these websites on Facebook. I didn’t realize that Babylon Bee was a “Christian Humor Site.” That’s a tribute to them, I think.

NYTimes: Close the Curtain on ‘Miss Saigon’

I’m feeling spoiled by all this time off. Also, by all the great food I can make with excellent summer produce. Today I made pesto with zoodles.

Then I marinated some luscious chopped tomato in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, fresh basil, garlic, salt, and pepper. Pre-heated the oven to 450 degrees. Sliced two slices of home made bread. Oiled one side. Put them oil side down on some parchment paper on a pizza pan. Topped them with soften Borsun cheese after a bit of toasting. After a couple of minutes, I took them out and topped with the marinated tomato mix. Yum for Steve and Eileen!

My daughter Sarah has been sending me links to B and Bs in our area with pianos. I hadn’t thought of looking for rooms with pianos. A couple of them look wonderful.

I was thinking of getting some time away this week. But when it came down to it, I enjoy my house and my books and my cooking so much that I don’t need to get away that much this week. I am thinking of checking out those B and Bs in the future however. One near Ann Arbor is an old converted recording studio with a baby grand by the bed. What’s not to like?

The paper came today. Last Sunday it didn’t. When it doesn’t come I remember that i’m basically subscribing to the Sunday New  York Times so that I can access the “Replica” edition which is a navigable pdf. So if the local delivery person doesn’t deliver, I just as the NYT to credit my account the ten bucks.

I am pounding away at my summer reading. I’m still over a hundred pages from the end of Jill Lepore’s wonderful These Truths: A History of the United States. I’m up to the sixties. She is an excellent read and I’m planning to read more of her work, but I sure am ready to be done with this long book (780 pages plus around 90 pages of footnotes in the back).

Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Homer and Dante take up my time daily. It’s fascinating how it all often connects. I knew but had forgotten that Pounds first Canto is basically a translation of Book 11 of the Odyssey. This means more to me than it used to. And reading Joyce’s Stephen Hero helps me understand the character,  Stephen Daedalus, since Joyce is more explicit in this earlier draft about what motivates him.

And then there’s Burgess. I am rereading ABBA ABBA.

 It’s kind of an antidote for my religiosity which i struggle with. The first bit is a fictionalization of John Keats’ last days in Rome. But the fun begins when Burgess provides page after page of very irreverent poems by the obscure Italian, Giuseppe Giochino Belli.

The Creation of the World

One day the bakers God & Son set to
And baked, to show their pasta-maker’s skill,
This loaf the world, though the odd imbecile
Swears it’s a melon, and the thing just grew.
They made a sun, a moon, a green and blue
Atlas, chucked stars like money from a till,
Set birds high, beast low, fishes lower still,
Planted their plants, then yawned: ‘Aye, that’ll do.’

No, wait. The old man baked two bits of bread
Call Folk – I quite forgot to mention it –
So he could shout: ‘Don’t bit that round ripe red
Pie-filling there.’ Of course, the buggers bit.
Though mad at them, he turned on us instead
And said: ‘Posterity, you’re in the shit.”

from Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess. His translation of Belli. The notes say that the profanity was in the original Italian but stronger. If you look, you can easily see the sonnet rhyme scheme: abba abba which is followed by cdcdcd.

Burgess put the phrase on his own tombstone.

Here’s a pertinent passage from his novel:

“Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John [Keats] knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the ryhme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. Belli and himself, for instance. Then breathing became a craft to be craftily learnt again, a matter of catcthing the gods of unbreathing off their guard.” p. 127

According to the wonderful notes in the back these Irwell editions of Burgess, pendebat means was hanging. This passage ends this way because Keats is dying from tuberculosis and is constantly throwing up blood and having trouble breathing.

So Anthony Burgess puts the phrase on his tombstone and it is his own initials but it’s also all of this and probably more.

For some reason I have been spending time with Schubert at the piano. His Fantasia “The Wanderer” and his other Fantasia, Op. 78. I have to slowly to get all the correct notes. Schubert seems to be just right for late summer.

Today, Eileen and I visited the Farmers Market here in Holland. We really have a pretty good one here and it is growing and improving. We bought trout and basil among many other things. After we got back, we spoke with Sarah and Lucy in England via Google Hangouts while I prepared the trout and made pesto using the basil. We had trout and salad for lunch. Buying local can be scrumptious.

Sarah is about three months pregnant. My grand daughter Lucy has apparently put in an order for a brother. “A boy” is what she wants. She seems to remember us from our visit. That’s nice.

I was tickled to learn recently that my grandson, Nicholas, has managed to obtain his driver’s license. This has got to make his and his family’s life better. His sister, Savannah, will be getting hers soon.

I’m packing as much vacating as possible in this my last full week of vacation. I am getting deeper into the Homeric Greek study. The recent ancient book that surface in my library which has the first eight books of the Odyssey in Greek is proving invaluable via excellent footnotes.

The Greek study is tying nicely to other summer projects like reading Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Dante.

I just spent over an hour or so leisurely working on today’s four lines of the Odyssey. I’m hoping to keep at it after I get back to work but I may have to cut back to two lines a day. I’ve also been looking at my old Greek texts that I have sort neglected while I have been working on the Odyssey. I was very happy that I seem to have retained much of what I learned from them. I would love to return to that approach as well as slowly reading through the Odyssey.

Life is good.

When I received my harpsichord kit from Zuckermann way back in the late sixties, the instructions recommended purchasing three pieces of music: The Dover Edition of Bach’s harpsichord music,

The two volumes of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,

and the two volumes of Schirmer’s Early Keyboard music.

The first two of these are still impacting my musical life. In fact I have bought a second copy of the Bach. When I’m working I keep one at church and one at home.  The Schirmer was a very bad edition of the wonderful music on its pages and I’m not sure if I even still have either volume.

At the time my musical training was limited to some piano lessons from a woman whose name escapes me right now and some trumpet lessons. Most of what I knew about music at the time was self-taught.  This was  more of an accomplishment before YouTube. I remember working out how bass clef worked after asking my Dad where middle C fell in it. I knew the treble from trumpet playing. I learned my first understandings of chords by examining the music found underneath chord symbols in pop music.

It interests me that the Bach and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book both continue to be valued parts of my daily life at the piano. Oddly enough it was the Pentangle (which I was listening to at this time) which got me to take the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book more seriously. John Renbourn and Bert Jansch performed music from it. I was fascinated by how carefully they performed the written music. Their abilities to perform the music so accurately inspired but even more inspiring was the coherence and beauty that lurked in the  music.

In my sixties the music of Bach and the Renaissance continues to astound and deeply attract me. I’m grateful to the Zuckermann people for recommending them.

The Living Room Candidate – Commercials 

The Museum of the Moving Image has all of the presidential commercials made available for watching online. All  you need is an updated Adobe Flash Plug-in. Jill Lepore mentions it in These Truths: A History of the United States.

Arabic, Muslim symbols ordered taken down in China’s capital

Eileen drove me up to my 8 AM dermatologist appointment this morning. After going over my entire body (this is the procedure) he gave me a good bill of skin health. There is a spot on my back that he has asked Eileen to put the steroids on for the next three months (assuming it continues to itch a bit). If it’s still there at the next appointment he may remove it. He suspects it might be a basal cancer. That’s the more benign skin cancer. I think it’s the vestiges of that damn rash that start it all. At least that’s how it feels to me.

As I am hurtling back toward my church job, I find my time is being taken up with some very familiar non-musical passions.

My renewed interests in James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Homer, and Greek are giving me much pleasure during this time of vacation. I have been reading Joyce’s first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero. 

This text is very discontinuous, beginning abruptly in mid sentence due to the fact that is all we have of it and then weirdly continuing with a chapter marked XVI.

.

But both Joyce and his character, Stephen Daedalus are very present in this book and I am enjoying it.

I’m also learning more about Ezra Pound and reading his Pisan Cantos.  In his introduction to his edition of these, the editor, Richard Sieburth tells the painful story of Pound’s detention in Italy beginning in 1945. It is during this period, Pound continues his huge work with the Pisan Cantos (74-84). These were written when Pound was incarcerated at a detention center near Pisa, Italy, thus the name.

Pound doesn’t realize what a mess he has made by broadcasting rants supporting Mussolini during the war. He sees his own motives as pure and patriotic to the USA. But the State Department has had an eye on him and is not sure quite how to proceed. When the US forces contact them about what to do with Pound,  Washington directs them to put Pound in the Pisan detention center and not give him any special treatment.

Unfortunately, the prison keepers interpret this to me that Pound should be kept in isolation in a small cage in the open.

Pound survives three weeks there and begins working on the Pisan Cantos on a make shift desk a fellow prisoner has smuggled to him.  Pound suffers physically and mentally from this treatment and is eventually rescued by military medical staff who can clearly see that he is being harmed. He is transferred to the sick ward of the center, but the damage is done and Pound himself traces his own descent into confusion, amnesia, and mental illness from this experience.

I continue to be very entranced with Homer and the translator, Emily Wilson.

I have watched some of her lectures that she has given this year about her translation on YouTube as I do my daily morning exercising. The more I learn about her and Homer the more excited and interested I am. Apparently she is working on The Iliad now. I can’t wait to read that as well.

I have upped my daily quote of Homer from two lines a day to four.  This not only promises to get me through it twice as fast (if I live that long), it also helps me understand the poem in a less fragmented fashion.

I have also returned to the late Christopher Logue’s re-imagining of The Iliad in his unfinished work, War Music. After listening to Emily Wilson’s enthusiasm about how the Homeric poems are put together I appreciate Logue’s approach even more. He is quite good and cleverly captures  the Homeric beauty in an entirely updated and clear English. It’s not a translation, but he retells the story in startling poetry that makes me think a bit of Derek Walcott’s wonderful work in this area.

In addition to watching Emily Wilson lecture on YouTube, I have been gradually working my way through the video, The Alchemist, which is a 1974 French documentary about Glenn Gould.

I think it’s a beautiful movie. The director makes an interesting white set on which he places Gould performing and talking.

I was very excited when Gould began speaking about 16th century keyboard composers (people from my beloved Fitzwilliam Virginal book). As I have played this material it has come to my mind more than once that Gould would play the hell out of it on the piano.

After confessing that while Bach and Schoenberg were “master technicians,” Gould says that in terms of spirituality, his favorite composer is Orlando Gibbons (!).

He then proceeds to play the following piece. I think it’s amazing playing myself. I love the music and the player.

Then he describes Gibbons superiority to William Byrd (another favorite of mine). He disparages Byrd and then proceeds to sit down and play the hell out of a piece by Byrd.

I find this inspiring (even on vacation).