My copy of Alter’s The Hebrew Bible was sitting on my doorstep this morning despite the fact that I clicked the “no-rush” button on Amazon.  When I first got interested in Alter my brother suggested I buy the entire collection instead of purchasing it piece meal. In retrospect he was completely correct.

I ended up realizing that the only way to get access to Alter’s Isaiah is through his complete version.

Besides my lovely wife and extended family, I have been spending time with some fascinating, wonderful people.  I have been reviewing Chopin’s Mazurkas and remember why I like them so much.

Also spending time with the Bach Goldberg Variations.

I am so lucky that the piano and keyboard have such a wide repertoire of fantastic literature. It feels unending to me.

I also spent some time reading Emerson and Whitman today. In fact writing about this stuff makes me want to leave the blog and go get some more reading in.

Our day to day routine in the time of Covid 19 is not too bad. This particular collection of people is just thoughtful and quirky enough that it’s working. So far.

I read Boccaio’s intro to his Decameron last night. This is good plague reading for me.

Time to go read.

Yesterday was Elizabeth’s birthday. We celebrated. Part of her day was getting away from us all by herself to grocery shop. She was careful to dress properly.

This morning I got up and made cornbread. I have been eyeing a recipe to use with my cast iron skillet.

It has to cool for ten minutes. I substituted honey for sugar but other wise followed this recipe.

In my dream last night, someone asked me how old I was when I received my bachelor’s degree. I couldn’t figure it out in the dream. This morning I decided I was thirty-five.

I had two college dreams last night. In the first I was returning to school now to get  a third degree. I think it was another masters degree and not in music. In the second I was simply starting a semester and trying to find my way around.

I listened to this podcast/YouTube still video this morning. I admire the way Arendt’s mind works. Her understandings are very helpful in the current madness of our world.

I read (re-read?) her preface to Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism this morning.

Here a couple of quotes that hit me.

Regarding the necessity of facing what is happening in the world with as much clarity as possible. Arendt (writing of understand antisemitism). says “Comprehension…. means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality—whatever it may be or might have been.”

She is careful to sort through misconceptions and I find that helpful.

“Totalitarian politics … use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality from which the ideologies originally derived their strength and their propaganda value …. have (sic) all but disappeared.”

Remind you of anyone? Ahem. I found the ideas described in the podcast very helpful as well.

What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About | The New Yorker

Jill Lepore rocks. In fact this recent issue of the New Yorker had some pretty cool stuff in it.

I liked these:

Self-Isolating: A Pandemic Special | The New Yorker

Chris Ware does a nice comic strip.

Today I finished reading a chapter in Finnegans Wake (Book I Chapter 5). Part of the way I read this book, is that I read in the corresponding section in Joseph Campbell’s commentary first.

Then I read a page in the Oxford edition whose  numbers correspond to many of the reference books I use.

Then I go to my old Viking book club edition and make notations including indicating the Oxford pagination.

I then consult the McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third edition).

I began this process a while back in the middle of the book and am now about done with one entire pass in this manner.

This sounds so much more serious than the way it feels since I find Joyce endlessly hilarious and rewarding. One of the insights I have had is realizing the true depth of meaning in words. To limit words to simple clear definitions is a bit reductive, since a glance at dictionaries and etymologies shows the resonance that already exists in them before Joyce starts to cut them up and patch them together for his own ends.

I’m also at the point in Ellmann’s bio of Joyce where Joyce has begun serious work on Finnegans Wake. This is a great biography.

I have been thinking that social distancing or even intellectual distancing is the way I live. I know no one who loves the stuff I love, like Joyce, Dante, and Shakespeare. I find Harold Bloom is practically a living, breathing teacher for me, if not a bit of a ghost companion.

Anyway for all you Joyce fans out there (sarcasm) here is a lovely, lovely interview with Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris which was a haunt of Joyce’s and also published Ulysses.

One of the commenters says that this was filmed the year she died. She is charming and this video is worth watching even if you don’t like Joyce.

The chapter I just finished in Finnegans Wake draws on Edward Sullivan’s 1920 publication of The Book of Kells. I ordered a cheapo reprint copy and it arrived just in time. I have been reading in it and seeing the relationship of Sullivan’s written commentary to Joyce’s prose about the “letter” in the trash heap which corresponds a bit to The Book of Kells. Fun stuff.

Church stuff

It’s been a weird week for me regarding my church job. We had another Zoom staff meeting Wednesday. Rev Jen tried to draw me out a bit regarding my understanding of web sites since we are working on a Covid-19 update of it. After this meeting I began to feel over whelmed by a sense of guilt since I’m receiving a paycheck from Grace and not doing very much to earn it. I was torn by noticing that no one on staff really has the understanding and experience I have making web sites and using WordPress. I reached out to some of the people on staff who are working on it but they did not respond.

Mary Miller gave me her log on and I did enough poking around to realize that I could be helpful. I don’t really want to be the web master.

Jen and I had a meeting scheduled for Thursday with a staff meeting to follow (all on Zoom of course). I spent the morning boning up on the liturgical theology of Holy Week. In this meeting, Jen clarified for me that I would only be responsible for helping provide content for resources for our parish online and that others would be responsible for actually putting it in the web site. This was a relief.

I was able to help Jen a bit in her preparation for how to lead Grace Community through this time via screens and resources. Unsurprisingly, there are some very fine things happening online like The Episcopal Church in Colorado Resource Page and Building Faith: A Ministry of the Virginia Theological Seminary. 

There are also some cool videos on YouTube from the latter on doing the Triduum during Quarantine starting with this one.

By the time our staff meeting ended yesterday I was feeling much better about  my role in my job during this weird time.

Eileen Update

Yesterday, Eileen and I got up earlier than usual for Eileen’s 8 AM appointment with Michigan Pain Consultants. I was asked to wait outside the clinic but be around if needed. I sat in my car until around 10:40 or so. Eileen came out groggy. They gave her an injection of Miazolam, to help with a further injection of Fentanyl Citrate Soin which seems to be a steriod to treat her pain.

Finally, we have some direction on relieving her incessant pain. The injection can take up to five days to provide relief. She has the follow up appointment on April 30th.  Unfortunately, the doctor could not rule out eventual surgery. I think the process is for Eileen to continue physical therapy and massage and exercise in hopes that her condition improves.

She has been putting an ice pack directly on the spot she received the injection since it is painful.  She reports relief this morning, but now has a new pain in her knee which she thinks is related to the pinched nerve condition. Oy!

Poetry Talk

Lying on my kitchen floor, babbling to my beautiful daughter, Elizabeth, this morning, I recalled a discussion from my early teens I had with Mr. Griffith. Mr. Griffith was an English teacher at Carman High School. I never had him for a course, but I had many conversations with him and other students after school, usually about poetry.

Mr. Griffith proclaimed to his students that poetry needed to be read much more than the news. It was more important. It would shape our lives and give pleasure and beauty.

I’m sixty-seven years old and this has been mostly true for me all my life. Thank you, Mr. Griffith!

These ruminations were brought on by listening to Harold Bloom’s September 7, 2006 Yale lecture on the “Art of Reading a Poem: The Poems of Our Climate” by Wallace Stevens on YouTube (audio only).

Stevens has always been a difficult poet for me. Bloom’s lecture inspires me to return to Stevens and do some reading, if only the title poem of the lecture.

On Monday, I was also reminded of Mr. Griffith’s maxim when Garrison Keeler chose the beautiful poem,  The Only News I Know, by Emily Dicikson for his daily Writers Almanac show. 

827 The Only News I know
by Emily Dickinson

The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.

The Only Shows I see—
Tomorrow and Today—
Perchance Eternity—

The Only One I meet
Is God-The Only Street—
Existence—This traversed

If Other News there be—
Or Admirabler Show—
I’ll tell it You—

Dickinson is much on my mind as I continue to plow through Lyndall Gordon’s masterful, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Fueds.

Gordon has helpfully cross indexed her work to two of extant collections of Dickinson’s poems including one that I own. I like looking up every poem she quotes and reading it slowly. Gordon bases a lot of her story on the poems themselves, just as she did in her book on Eliot (which I admire greatly and have read).

I’m basically stuck home at this point, leaving only to get supplies. Eileen has been diagnosed as having a disc protrusion. She has an appointment with a pain clinic tomorrow.

Here’s a link to a page of discussion and explanation,  if you’re curious.

Stuck at home? Jupe loves being at home with his books and music. Like pig heaven.

I don’t mean to make light of the seriousness of what is happening in the world right now but my life is good.

We had our weekly staff meeting at church via Zoom today.

It was my first use of this App. My laptop’s camera did not cooperate, so I ended up listening to device and using another to connect.

Some of the staff seek a bit rattled by what is happening to us. However, the major feeling of the group is good humor with a dash of disappointment as we watch programs and services get canceled.

This next Sunday, Rev Jen will probably do something similar to what she did last Sunday. (link to video)

This “video” is only audio. I’m only about half way through it, but I seem to be on a sort of Harold Bloom kick. In this video, he vindicates himself a bit to me by talking intelligently about Jazz and Ralph Ellison.

Apparently he knew Ellison. He thinks very highly of The Invisible Man, as do I. He mentioned that Ellison was very of his full name: Ralph Waldo Ellison. Cool.

Bloom also speaks highly of another favorite of mine in this video, Flannery O’Connor.

I also love his reading of three sonnets by Shakespeare. Did you know “hell” was Elizabethan slang for “vagina”?  See Sonnet 129 and Sonnet 144

I note with amusement that traffic here has reduced to a trickle of readers. This makes sense. I have been very unreliable at putting stuff up here. Eileen and I chatted with Sarah yesterday and she told me she checks my web site  regularly. That’s enough to motivate me to post more often. Plus now I have more free time since my church has canceled most activities including services.

I had a dream last night that I barely remember. It seemed to be a brilliant insight when I woke in the night. In the dream, somehow I and some others were given pieces of a sculpture as mementos. In my case I remember holding some fingers that seemed to have been broken off of it and given to me. In the dream and afterwards in my drowsy wakefulness, I remember that there was a strong contrast between the triviality of getting a souvenir and the importance of art.

Now more completely awake, I think about the number of times I have put forward what I think of as art, only to observe how trivial it is to so many. Inevitable, probably. It think this is probably not only true of music but of great books.

This leads me to embed this video again now that I have watched all of it.

I find Bloom inspiring. I’m still reading his chapter on Dante in his Western Canon which he mentions in the video above.

I like how he sees Dante. I think he is describing his own predilection when he uses the phrase “preferring poetry over doctrine.”  He is using it in regard to understanding Dante’s fierce original vision. Theologians struggle with it more than people who “prefer poetry over doctrine.”

I have requested the two translations that Bloom prefers: one in terza rima by Laurence Binyon and one in prose by John D. Sinclair. Bloom quotes this marvelous statement from Sinclair’s prose translation: “You were not born to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” Cool.

I have been thinking a lot lately about my relationship to music and literature. I think that I have spent my life loving music, poetry, novels, and beautiful prose. I’m not a musical virtuoso by any means, but I am definitely a lover of music and poetry and prose.

I picture Bach as having the talented amateur (lover) of music in mind when several times in dedications he says his pieces were “composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirit.”

This is kin to Bloom’s feelings about the joys of reading and thinking.

Both music and literature continue to refresh my spirit.

Yesterday, my boss followed the advice of her bishop and canceled church for the next three Sundays. I met with her for about an hour and we talked about what to do instead. Tomorrow she is planning to do a live stream intro via Facebook to a stream from the National Cathedral (presumably Eucharist).

I suggested to her that the next two Sundays after that we could do a sort of hodge podge live stream that would include parts of the Eucharist that people listen to. This would include the readings, the homily, and maybe a choral anthem and a sung hymn. We are  meeting Monday to further think about and probably decide.

Our local bishop is doing a live stream of Morning Prayer tomorrow which was also Jen’s first impulse. But she liked my idea of a Liturgy of the Word stream because it can keep us connected to the church year. We had some other fun ideas as well like a drive-in Eucharist and treating the entire parish like shut-ins and taking communion to them.

I did some research about copyrights and streaming yesterday. It appears that my previous notion that when you stream it’s like a live performance and not subject to the same sort of copyright as a video distribution was basically erroneous. I guess Facebook (and other platforms like Twitch and Zoom) will take flag and/or take down stuff they determine to be an unlicensed use of copyright material. This extends even to inadvertent inclusion of copyrighted music in the background.

On the other hand, I remembered that part of our licensing through St. James Press does give us permission to stream any of their choral arrangements. In addition, the licensing web site, One.License, whose copyright permission for publishing in our bulletin we already subscribe to  is providing a streaming license free for the next few weeks. Finally, anything that is public domain is okay to stream. This could mean streaming older versions of hymns that are out of copyright instead of versions available in the highly copyrighted Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church.

Eileen had an MRI on Thursday and then we went out to eat. She is suffering terribly and I wish there was something I could do to help. She ordered a bed frame for our new mattress and it came yesterday. Normally she enjoys assembling things like that. This time I had her direct me and I did most of the grunt work while she was the brains. I don’t think that worked too badly. Now our bed is a bit higher and easier for both of us to get in and out of.

Yesterday, a young woman rang our doorbell and introduced herself as the grand daughter of the man who used to own our house. It was fun for Eileen and me to take her around the house and show her what was original. She doesn’t have a memory of the man, but is very interested in her own family right now.

Finally, I thought it might be fun to embed a few videos I have watching.

This is one Eileen and I watched together. Good stuff.

I like to listen to a jazz video with my evening martini. This was last night’s and I think it’s quite good.

This is kind of long, but I loved it. Duchamp rocks!

I haven’t finished this one yet. I do enjoy Bloom and am reading his chapter on Dante in his Western Canon tome.

Traffic on this site is predictably plummeting. When I first started posting in the late 90s, I promised myself I would do so daily. Until recently this has been the case. However, I am finding myself more interested in my own reading, thinking, and practicing than writing stuff here.

I feel connected to my “tribe” (fam and friends). Previously I was trying to start conversations online about stuff that interested me. Boy, was I naive! Then with my two daughters, and their significant others living abroad and my son and his family in California, it seemed like a good way for them to check in on me without having to deal with me.

Eileen is still suffering from pain. This is definitely no fun for her.

Off to read.

China Just Outlawed Clickbait and Sensationalist Headlines 

Another article from March 4th that mentions my son in law.

Detroit Archives: On Hello

Led Zeppelin did not steal Stairway To Heaven riff, appeals court rules

I drove Eileen to her physical therapist appointment yesterday.  She was hoping that she would meet with her originally assigned person whom she found helpful. Previously, this person had not been able to make her appointment and had a sub meet with Eileen. And yesterday she also had a third person meeting with her since the first person was out ill. Apparently this wasn’t too bad as the third person is a permanent sub and was sensitive to the difficulty of meeting with someone who didn’t know the history of your problem as well.

This morning Eileen is at her wits end with pain. She has emailed her physical therapist about re-consulting with Dr. Fuentes who made this referral. She talked to her medical masseuse and he recommends an MRI. She is waiting to talk in person with her physical therapist tomorrow since today is her day off and she apparently doesn’t respond to emails. This doesn’t seem to be getting better and is seriously impeding the quality of Eileen’s life. Bah.

I have finished Dorothy L. Sayers’ intro to her translation of Dante’s Inferno. Yesterday I began reading her intro to her translation of the Purgatorio while waiting for Eileen at the physical therapist. It has a dedication “To The Dead Master of The Affirmations Charles Williams.” I decided to find out more about him and looked at this Wikipedia entry. It describes him as “a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian, literary critic, and member of the Inklings.”

My reading online suggests that Sayers’ use of the phrase “Master of Affirmations” has something to do with Charles Williams work on Dante.

His novels look interesting and I have requested Descent Into Hell  via inter-library loan.

I have never head of Charles Williams but he according to the Wikipedia article he was well thought of by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and C. S. Lewis. He knew Lewis personally (both were Inklings).

I glanced through the bibliography and found that Charles Huttar who sings in my choir co-edited what looks like a festschrift on Williams, The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams.

I think that’s cool. I also looked at Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wikipedia article and learned some new stuff about her including that she support herself for a while working for an advertising agency.

Not only is she credited with coming up with the phrase, “It pays to advertise” in her novel, Murder Must  Advertise, in real life she did wrote the following ad.

I have found reading Sayers’s translation of Dante and her notes and essays has reminded me how much I like her writing, she goes back on the front burner of people I plan to read soon.

Jeremy played this chilling video for me yesterday. He thinks it was released as an attempt to embarrass Trump into not pardoning Stone. I hope that’s what happens.

China cracks down on ‘sexual innuendo’ and ‘celebrity gossip’ in new censorship rules | World news | The Guardian

Speaking of Jeremy, he was quoted recently in this article:

NYTimes: Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism

NYTimes: ‘This Land Is Your Land’ Is Still Private Property, Court Rules

Listen: The Sound Of The Hagia Sophia, More Than 500 Years Ago : NPR