Today was my first day back on the campus of Grace Episcopal Church. I walked over and picked out organ music for the next two Sundays. During this phase we are allowing people to come into the church as long as they sign in and out, sanitize their hands on arriving and leaving, and wipe down surfaces. If the are with other people they must social distance with face masks. I have emailed Jordan and Rhonda that they are now welcome to come and use the building.

I decided to ease back into organ music. I chose some 18th century pieces based on tunes my congregation might recognize rather than the tune of the one hymn we are using in the service. For example, next week I’m playing two pieces by Kauffmann, one based on “Now Thank We All Our God” and the other based on “All Glory Laud and Honor.” I’m planning on writing a little music note about Kauffmann and those two hymn tunes.

I tried to think of something that might give people a bit of pleasure and remind them of what it’s like to hear organ music at church. The time constraint is big on my mind. Less is more on the screen in my opinion.

Having said that here are two a bit longer videos I watched recently.

These were my martini music the last couple of nights. I think the alto in the first has an amazing sound. These are charming recordings in my opinion. I’m planning on listening to more of these recordings for pleasure. I’m not studying the pieces just enjoying these amazing performances.

I finished Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth. It’s not great writing particularly but it is fun and keeps my attention. I decided to up my game and bit and go back to Le Guin.

She is a superb writer.

My copy of Southall’s book, Blind Tom, The Black Pianist-Composer: Continually Enslaved came in the mail. This is volume three of Southall’s research on this composer. I am very interested in learning more about him. Thomas Wiggins (Blind Tom) lived from  1849 to 1908. He was a classical composer and pianist. I had never heard of him before reading about him in The Black History of The White House by Clarence Lusane.

Lusane says that Southall spent 23 years writing three volumes on Wiggins. I’m almost done with Lusane’s book.  I don’t have the other books on Wiggins.

My copy of Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars by Henry Louis Gates Jr. also came in the mail. I wonder what Gates and Martha Nussbaum would think of Racist Music Theory (see yesterday’s blog, Hi Jordan!).  I recently picked up Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity and discovered I had left at chapter on African American Studies. Nussbaum’s book is from 1997 and Gates’s book is from 1992. Both seem salient.

Music Theory’s White Racial Frame – Confronting Racism and Sexism in American Music Theory by Phil Ewell

So my friend, Jordan VanHemert put this link up on Facebook a while back. At the time, I glanced over it and found it confusing and not terribly coherent. Recently, I went back and tried to look at it more closely.  I still had difficulty with some of Ewell’s contentions.

I don’t disagree that there a white racist bias in hiring practices. But for me, music theory is the explanation of a musical style works.

One of the key things I’ve come to realize is how important maintaining the myth of race and gender neutrality is to music theory. In fact, once this neutrality is exposed as fallacious, the white-racial and male-gender frames—which I sometimes conflate to the “white-male” frame in this and future blog posts—of music theory will be in serious jeopardy, so it makes perfect sense that music theory’s white-male frame works relentlessly to keep in place the idea that what we do “has nothing to do with race or gender.”

Ewell

It’s hard for me to understand how Ewell is using the phrase, “music theory,” in this assertion. I’m curious how analyzing a style of music is racist. Later Ewell points out the biases of white male theorists like Schenker. Yes, these idiots were racists. But what exactly is racist about Schenderian analysis? I don’t get it.

I found what looks like a better put together article by Ewell: Music Theory and the White Racial Frame published in June of  last year. I’m hoping it will explain this stuff more clearly to me than his blog posts linked above or the video of his talk on which they are based.

It troubles me that Ewell cites Kendri whom I find eloquent and coherent about racism and antiracism. But anyway, I’m working on understanding this better.

On a not unrelated note, I decided that I wanted to have a definitive copy of Langston Hughes’ poetry. Today I ordered the three volumes of his works in which this is contained. I was surprised that I only owned a couple books by him and not one collection of his poetry.

Summit on Race and Inclusion – Lakeshore Ethnic Diversity 

Eileen and I planning on attending this virtual conference.

Love for My People by Leah Ward Sears | Poetry Magazin

This is a cool article in the June Poetry Magazine. Sears is a distinguished American jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. This article is about poems she loves.

For My People by Margaret Walker | Poetry Magazine

I look at the world by Langston Hughes | Poetry Magazine

NYTimes: When James Baldwin and Langston Hughes Reviewed Each Other

I finished writing this poem today. I’m living in a house with people who do not read that much poetry. So, you, dear reader, and the internet get to be the audience. Skip at will.

Untitled

My ghost is slipped inside you.
Its story does not change.
Old solid sighs, cold clotted cloth,
Tales tagged in bone and flesh.

Old voices sing inside me
They teach me who I am.
They bang my brain, beat my blood,
With wonder, words, and song.

Eileen seemed surprised I was writing a poem. I think I do write a poem once or twice a year. I usually post them here. Maybe I should have a page of them online. Maybe not.

I got a little crazy today and sent copies of Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy to a bunch of family members. I will have to let them know I mailed copies to them since there were no gift options for it on Amazon. So they will just get a book out of the blue. I already told Jen I mailed her a copy in an unrelated email (she is honorary fam). I have an appointment to chat with Mark in a bit and I will tell him then. I’ll email the others.

This book came in the mail. It goes on the to read stack. I did finish Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. There were some interesting parts, but his mind and ideas do not impress me like Gessen does. I am hopeful about Rutger Bregman (above)

NYTimes: Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views, Even in ‘Da 5 Bloods’

“White Noise,” by Emma Cline | The New Yorker

Emma Cline on Fictionalizing a #MeToo Villain | The New Yorker

This is cool.

“This song came knocking about a week ago and I had to open the door and let it in.  What can I say about what’s been happening, what has happened, and what is continuing to happen, in this country, in the world? There’s too many words and none, all at once.  So I let the music speak, as usual.  What a thing to mark this 155th anniversary of Juneteenth with that beautiful soul Yo-Yo Ma.  Honored to have it out in the world.”

Build a House

You brought me here to build your house, build your house, build your house
You brought me here to build your house and grow your garden fine

I laid the brick and built your house, built your house, built your house
I laid the brick and built your house, raised the plants so high

And when you had the house and land, the house and land, the house and land
And when you had the house and land, then you told me “go.”

I found a place to build my house, build my house, build my house
I found a place to build my house since I couldn’t go back home

You said I couldn’t build a house, build a house, build a house
You said I couldn’t build a house, so you burned it down

So then I traveled far and wide, far and wide, far and wide
And then I traveled far and wide until I found a home

I learned your words and wrote a song, wrote a song, wrote a song
I learned your words and wrote a song to put my story down

But then you came and took my song, took my song, took my song
But then you came and took my song, playing it for your own

I took my bucket, lowered it down, lowered it down, lowered it down
I took my bucket, lowered it down, the well will never run dry.

You brought me here to build a house, build a house, build a house
You brought me here to build a house. I will not be moved.

No, I will not be moved. No, I will not be, I will not be, I will not be moved

. –Rhiannon Giddens

“Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” by Haruki Murakami 

After I read this story, I had to listen to this.

“You enjoy Bruckner?”

“Yes. His Seventh Symphony. I always find the third movement particularly uplifting.”

“I often listen to his Ninth Symphony,” I chimed in. Another pretty meaningless statement.

“Yes, that’s truly lovely music,” the monkey said.

And then there’s this from 13 years ago.

Now for some poetry. Here’s a link to the poem.

I like this poet so much I just ordered the book she is reading from.

Again used on AbeBooks.

This morning’s exercise video:

I do love the Constitution Center.

I had fun today working online with Dawn Van Ark on the second variation of my cello piece. I love collaborating and don’t often get the chance to do it. She helped me quite a bit and i think we improved the piece.

Here;s a link to a pdf of the entire piece: Var 2 Westminster Abbey with changes

I will be putting up on my “free mostly original music” page.

This morning as sometimes happens I ended up deep in the rabbit hole of the internet.

I was halfway through Divya Victor’s poem, Locution/Location in the June issue of Poetry magazine and I got swept up both in the poem and in her epigraph written by Hélène Cixous.

Even before finishing Victor’s poem, I had ordered Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. 

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I read some excerpts on Amazon. I learned that “H” is pronounced “ash” in French. I did not know that. I found that information important when I returned to Victor’s poem and finished reading it.

Cixous is 83 years old. The book is translated from the French which I find fascinating. I thought that 27 bucks was more than I wanted to pay for this book since it’s the kind of book I would want to hold in my hands before paying that amount for it. Instead I found it used on AbeBooks.com. Unfortunately, it’s shipping from the U.K. and won’t be here until August.

But in the meantime I have tons of books that I am reading and want to read.

I’m also interested in Victor. She is an assistant professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State.

Here’s another example of her writing which I quite like: M is for Michael Jackson and Malcolm X

I’m almost finished with Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein. He mentions the work of
Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman regarding reformation of the Supreme Court.

They “suggest rebuilding the Supreme Court so it has fifteen justices: each party gets to appoint five, and then the ten partisan judges must unanimously appoint the remaining five. Until all fifteen are agreed upon, the court wouldn’t be able to hear cases.”

Cool, huh?

I notice that Klein only footnotes the article these two did for his organization, Vox. 

A little poking around and I found a more recent Yale Law Journal article by them online.

It’s an overcast Sunday here in west Michigan. I have been up for a while. I’ve done some Greek and read some poetry. It brings me solace to remember that there are other people who like poetry. In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, there were two letters pointing out that there was no mention of poetry in the annual Summer Reading issue. One of the letters was in free verse.

Kim Stafford

I have been working my way through books of poetry by the poets, Kim Stafford and Robert Bly. I

Robert Bly

‘m not sure why I have a book of Stafford’s poetry but I remember liking Bly since I was a twenty something or maybe even younger. I drove to Ann Arbor to hear him do a poetry reading at some point.

I lost interest in him during his Iron John phase. That seemed to be sort of an attempt to give men a sense of connection. I’ve never been that interested in the array of stuff that can be identified with masculinity.

Anyway, I’m enjoying getting back to Bly. I think his poetry is quite good, better than Donald Hall but maybe not Jane Kenyon.

I  finished a second variation for solo cello on the hymn tune Westmister Abbey yesterday. I gave myself a sort of deadline because I wanted it in the hands of the player for at least a week before she performs it. She left a message last night that it’s doable and she has a suggestion about changing a note. This is exactly the response I was hoping for: she can do it and improve it.

I’m still not entirely happy with it. But I can tell that her suggestion doesn’t address my misgivings which occur early in the piece. She told me the measure number where the note is that she suggest changing and it’s later in the piece.

I found another poem in the June issue of Poetry Magazine that I like.

Abecedarian “G” by Daniel Schonning

My copy of this book came recently. I am disappointed. None of the melodies I would like to use  in a composition are in this book. I have spent the last hour or so researching Negro Spirituals online. Surely there has been a ton of research around this topic. I already have  a good collection of resources, but I’m still poking around online. I miss being able to request a book from another library, but I have downloaded some recent articles on the topic to read and browse.

I’m on chapter 9 of Kendri’s How to Be an Anti-racist. It builds a more clear platform about the topic than his Stamped from the Beginning which I have also read. Also, he very artfully frames his ideas and tells his own life story in relation to them. Very clever.

His distinction between Behavioral Racist and Behavioral Antiracist helped me thinking about music and race.

In the past few decades there has been some serious discussion about whether people who are not African American can play Jazz (or Blues or Gospel).  This has struck me as a very weak contention from the beginning. I can easily list off many non-African American jazz musicians.

I think the question is about integrity and cultural appropriation. Since I can play and a little Jazz, blues, and gospel, I look at this as a player and composer.

I’m working on a composition that might possibly include Negro Spirituals,

Kendri is clear. Behavioral Racism is  “making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals.”

You can see how this might apply to cultural appropriation. Culture is very different from race. I think about over arching American cultural which encompasses a wide variety of behavior. Eclecticism is part of my basic understanding of American culture. Mixing up stuff is basic to many musical genres I am interested in.  It’s clear to me when I am appropriating and when I am dipping into a mix not to mention my own memory and experience.

For what it’s worth, here is Kendri’s definition of a Behavioral Antiracisit: “One who is making racial group behavior fictional and individual behavior real.”

Kendri rocks!

Oddly enough sitting outside early this morning, doing Greek, reading a bit of Homer and then a lot of Dante was what my poor impoverished soul needed. Ah.

I head from Chris Janowiak. That’s the name of the musician who watched me as a kid at Our Lady of the Lake and got inspired.  I was talking to Jeremy about this experience. A reaction that I didn’t initially share with Chris was that I remembered him well as a young man. I knew he was a friend of Jon Fegel and heard him play with one of Fege’s bands. I remember that he was a bit standoffish. I interpreted that to me that he wasn’t impressed enough with me to connect. It seemed a bit odd but not that big a deal.

Jeremy said that it would be good information for Chris to know that. It might help him avoid that kind of misperception about younger musicians looking up to him but being so shy and intimidated to be at ease.

Anyway, Chris reached out to me a second time, conversationally DMing me on Facebooger. I responded and included this information in my response.

What the heck.

I’m a hug fan of the National Constitution Center. Last night Eileen and I listened to this podcast before falling asleep. Albright is very cool, intelligent, perceptive, and interesting. Jes sayin.

I also think a lot of Dave Chappelle’s work. This is a good balance to the Albright video. My daughter, Elizabeth, remarked that Chappelle looked old. Hmmm.

I’m working on a new composition. It’s requiring researching dozens of Negro Spirituals. I ordered what I hope is a copy of one the earliest collections of them.

My friend, Rhonda, asked me to write a trumpet/organ piece. At first, I was researching folk songs in Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.

Then I realized that I wanted to use Negro Spirituals instead of fishing around in the 6 volume collection of Child Ballad tunes I have.

I pulled all my collections of spirituals and began considering versions of melodies I love. I even found some new ones.

At this point, I’m hoping I can sort of channel Charles Ives and switch from his Beethovian abstract treatment to something more like a neo classical concerto treatment with motives and melodies of African American Spirituals intertwined.

I hope I don’t jinx my work by blogging about it. But not very many people are stopping by these days on my blog and I don’t think it’s going to do that for me. I’m approaching this work much more systematically than anything I have written in a while.

Watching what might be a bit of awakening around racism in my country helps me see that I would like to make some art around that idea.

Plus my copy of Gates’ Stony the Road came in the mail last night. I’m more than three quarters done reading the ebook. I also had a library copy for a while and like many of Gates’ books, it is a beautiful book.

I’m using up valuable reading and practicing time so here are some links and I’m outta here.

Banjara by Rajiv Mohabir | Poetry Magazine

“George Floyd,” by Terrance Hayes | The New Yorker

“Pigeon and Hawk,” by Marilyn Nelson | The New Yorker

The History of the “Riot” Report | The New Yorker

Air Force Sergeant With Ties to Extremist Group Charged in Federal Officer’s Death

Music Theory’s White Racial Frame – Confronting Racism and Sexism in American Music Theory

I knew when I saw that Dr. Barber was giving the homily yesterday at the National Cathedral that I would check it out. It is a marvelous piece of oratory and I strongly recommend it.

I have Robert Altar’s three volume translation of the Hebrew Bible. It is, of course, an overwhelming work to read. I have been reading Genesis in three translations, his, the Norton English Study Bible, and R. Crumb’s illustrated version.

I like it that R. Crumb used Alter’s translation as an acknowledged source for most o fhis own prose.

It’s slow going reading multiple translations, but it’s also how I’m reading Dante. I was amused when this weekend the Old Testament reading was one I had just read in this manner. Just gettin’ in the to the word, like my crazy Christian friends used to say.

I find that Alter’s explanatory prose is what interests me the most, so that’s why I ordered The Art of Bible Translation. Translating is something that I think about quite a bit. I’m living with a translator right now, my son-in-law, Jeremy. He has a web site at which offers Chinese Law translations.

Plus, a lot of what I read, I read in translation: Dante, Cervantes, Homer, to mention just a few.

Michael Eric Dyson got me thinking about Martha C. Nussbaum again when he mentioned her in his NYTBR By the Book interview. I picked up my copy of Cultivating Humanity by her and was bemused to see that I left off at the chapter on African American Studies in American Universities. I read in that this morning.

Meanwhile. sign up for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March om Washington this Saturday. 

Elizabeth had this great idea. We recently received notice from the city that our yard needed mowing. We often get one of these around Tulip time. But this year, it came a bit later than that time (Tulip Time was canceled due to the Covid 19 pandemic). Elizabeth met the person when she stopped to leave her notice. Elizabeth said the person was very nice about it, almost apologetic.

It seems to be a different person each time. In the past, I have thought of it as educating these people about indigenous gardens. So far, they have always stopped short of making Eileen get rid of her raggedy (wonderful) collection of indigenous plants.

Elizabeth mowed the lawn, by the way.

Then she decided to put up signs. I think she also is registering us as an official butterfly sanctuary or garden. That’s still in process. But she did get the sign above and proceeded to label plants in the front yard. Cool.

Purple Cone Flower

Michigan Rose

Black Eyed Susan

Sweet Pea

Butterfly Weed

Tomorrow is Eileen’s and my 45th wedding anniversary. We decided to order some flowers. I like to surprise her with flowers, but surprises are harder with Covid 19 restrictions. She doesn’t mind not being surprised at all. We decided together to order daisies and roses. The daisies are because that was the flowers we had at our wedding. The roses are just cool.

So they should be delivered sometime to day.

My connection with my therapist didn’t work as well the second time. For some reason, our images and sounds were sputtering. We did most of it over the phone. I have been in an odd mental place. Racism is something I think a lot about, so the recent police riots have been very troubling to me. But, I didn’t have that much to talk to Dr. Birky about yesterday.

Despite that and the fact that we were on the phone, I noticed that my mood lifted a bit afterward. There is value in being listened to, I guess.

An Ethical Path to a Covid Vaccine | by Carl Elliott | The New York Review of Books

This came  across my Twitter feed with the fact that before the 70s we did Phase I testing on prisoners, now we do it on poor people. I haven’t read it yet but plan to look it over. I do like the New York Review of Books.

My Phone Autocorrects “Nigga” to “Night” by Karisma Price

Poem for today.

NYTimes: Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind

Bob Dylan interviews are a guilty pleasure at this point.

Autocracy: Rules for Survival | by Masha Gessen | The New York Review of Books

This is the original article written the week of Trump’s election. I guess it’s the basis for her new book.

My youngest daughter, Sarah, has been listening to Marcel Proust.

It occurs to me that even though I have read the entire In Search of Los Time twice, I have never met anyone who has read him that I know of.

I pulled out one of my copies. It interests me to see what passages I have marked out. Here’s  a nice one.

“…. even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all  around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished that it were she who showed it to me, who opened to me the gates of an unknown world, it was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I isolate artificially today as though I were cutting sections at different heights in a jet of water, iridescent but seemingly without flow or motion—in a single undeviating, irresistible outpouring of all the forces of my life.” Swanns Way, Marcel Proust, Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation

Proust would have loved Seigel’s ideas about mind not being discrete to one body. You feel his longing in this passage to truly connect to others and understand the movement of time.

I am doing less Facebook and more Twitter.

I am finding that many people I stumble across these days that interest me are using Twitter to communicate. Plus I find it an interesting way to access conversations.

I have many lists which help me use it.

I have a “conservative” list as well as “Local news” and “Local Yokels.” My most recent addition is a “current” list where I put people whom I’ve just found out about or who interest me at the moment.

I also use Google Alerts. It was one of these that “alerted” me that Jill Lepore has a podcast out. It’s called “The Lat Archive.” It looks like one of those Serial type podcasts which purports to be an unfolding murder mystery. However, when I looked it  up, it has this more interesting description:

“The Last Archive​ is a show about the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment. It’s a show about how we know what we know, and why it seems, these days, as if we don’t know anything at all anymore. The show is driven by host Jill Lepore’s work as a historian, uncovering the secrets of the past the way a detective might.”

I do admire and learn from LePore.

I just ordered this book.

Michael Erik Dyson said this about it:

“Thelonious Monk,” by Robin D. G. Kelley, the biography of a musical genius written by a certified polymath. Kelley is a world-famous historian who reads and writes across several disciplines as he cooks his family gourmet meals, does doting daddy duty, grades pitiful undergraduate papers, directs the dissertations of an army of emerging scholars across the nation and plays a mean jazz piano, all while cranking out groundbreaking books. Truly disgusting, um, I’m sorry, I meant demoralizing, yet somehow inspiring.”

Sounds good to me. The rest of his NYTBR By the Book interview is here.

He also speaks incredibly highly of Martha Nussbaum (someone I too admire):

“I know Nussbaum is highly regarded, but if she were a man, she’d take her rightful place as one of the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the last half-century. She’s impossibly erudite, remarkably prolific, effortlessly fluid in an astonishing array of subjects, and a lovely, lucid writer.”

I have to remember these online versions of the By The Book interviews are always the expanded version.

Here’s a poem I like from the current issue of Poetry Magazine: Photo of a Girl 1992: Gremlins by Faylita Hicks

Enough.

.

My BP is trending lower. I hope I don’t jinx it by mentioning it, but for over a week and a half it has been 139/95 or lower. My weight on the other hand is creeping up probably due to all the good eating I have been doing.

Eileen has still not heard from her referral to the guy in Muskegon. I don’t think her pain is any better.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work | The New Yorker

The new issue of the .New Yorker has some cool stuff in it. The picture above intrigued me enough that I read the linked article.

I am going to have to check this writer out. I wonder how I missed her.

I keep on the lookout for good podcasts. I listened to the current Amicus this morning. Lithwick is predictably annoying but the topic interests me and she had two interesting guests (link to this podcast on Slate website)

Angela Onwuachi-Willig (pictured above) is the current dean of the Boston University School of Law. She recently wrote an open letter to her students which she discussed on the podcast.

She entitled her letter, “The Fire This Time” but as far as I can see and remember she did not reference the book above (which i have read), only James Baldwin original (which I have also read).

Onwuachi-Willig and Lithwick both weirdly discuss the current stuff from the point of view of law profs and lawyers. I like what they are thinking but wonder about the narrowness of their outlook.

That’s something I wonder about a lot as my own private ruminations supplant the narrowness of people I read and hear on podcasts. I recently turned off a Pod Save the World (or America…. not sure which one), when the moderator bemoaned current mistreatment of protesters and referred to the Kent State killings without mentioning the killing of two black students with eleven days later at Jackson State University. The speaker on the podcast was obviously unaware and thinking in narrow terms about it.

The other person on the Amicus podcast was Vanita Gupta (predicted above).  She is President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Former head of USDOJ Civil Rights Division.

She recently wrote What a just Justice Department would do about George Floyd’s death – The Washington Post

So even though the news is deeply troubling, I am finding people like Masha Gessen, Ta-Nehis Coats, and Ibram X. Kendi helpful. Gessen’s book apparently is an expansion of an article she wrote in 2016 right after the election. She mentions that she was described by the NYT in unfavorable terms due to her understandings (which I think are spot on).

Anti-Racist Reading Lists: What Are They For?

I was disappointed in this article. I was hoping the author would address the fact that people don’t read books, when in fact I’m pretty sure he hasn’t read all the book titles he mentions. Sheesh. But despite this article I love reading lists.

Here’s a couple of reading lists that showed up in my email inbox this morning. Woohoo!

The Brew’s Black Lives Matter Syllabus

Column: 12 novels from black voices to read now in light of George Floyd Protests

I borrowed my daughter’s copy of How To Be An  Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I gave it to her for her birthday, but it was my only copy. It was one of a few books in pristine shape that I owned that I wanted her to have. I have ordered my own copy. I know Kendi most from his excellent, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. I think it’s an important read if you are interested in American history.

FACTOID “The title …. comes from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC ‘This government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,’ but ‘by white men for white men,’ Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The ‘inequality of the white and black races’ was ‘stamped from the beginning.’ ” p. 3

Ta-Nehisi Coates on George Floyd, police protests, and hope

I prefer the original title of this podcast: “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful.” I haven’t read the transcript but have listened to it.

“. People forget that day that King got stoned in Cicero. They pretend that when King was leading these movements against Jim Crow, he was somehow the most popular man in the country. He was hated. He was hated by white people all through the country. He was hated at the very highest levels of law enforcement in this country.” Ta-Nehisi Coates

I can remember that Sheryl Hayes, my Dad’s assistant minister in Flint, was reading Martin Luther King. This was probably just before King was killed. At that time, it was unpopular to be following King.

What Defund the Police Actually Means – Rolling Stone

So, the news is finally getting to me. I think we are living through an unprecedented time in the USA. I read where there have been demonstrations in 50 states. I heard Ta-nehisi Coates described his father’s reaction to what is happening now. Born in the mid40s, his Dad was a returning veteran in 1968. He thinks what is happening now is different in that the interest in injustice is not as limited to the black community the way it was then. Coates expresses some hope.

I could use some.

I’m not going to rant here. I just bent my poor daughter’s ear and am feeling a tad guilty.

I’m just going to put some links up and go have martini.

Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus | JSTOR Daily

Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes – Words Without Borders

Seems to be an excerpt from a graphic novel.

Barack Obama Speech Transcript on George Floyd Death

Anguish and Action – Obama Foundation

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change

NYTimes: The Supreme Court, Too, Is on the Brink

I had the same reaction, Greenhouse expresses here when I read about the decision.

Okay. I have changed the two pieces of music I uploaded yesterday and corrected the links on my “free mostly original sheet music” page.  There aren’t many people checking this site these days. I’m pretty sure there aren’t many guitarists or cellists. But on the off chance here the corrected files:

Westminster Abbey for cello link to PDF

Guitar transcription of Bach’s bouree for unaccompanied violin link to PDF

Dawn the cellist phone me this morning to discuss the first of these pieces. She likes it and played for it for me over the phone. That was fun. But she didn’t recognize the melody. I figure if she doesn’t others wont as well so I added a play through of the melody at the beginning of the piece. We also discussed tempo. She likes it slower (and so do I) so I adjusted the score to reflect that. it sounds cool.

I printed up the version of the Bach bouree and discovered mistakes it yesterday. I was too lazy to edit, but I did so today.

It is a bit odd to worry about stuff like this while my country is in such turmoil. But on the other hand, now is a good time for art.

I had a good staff meeting online this morning. Before that I connected with the young woman who is playing the prelude this Sunday. Her name is Cate Kreuger and she is graduating from high school. She just happened to be one of the people Jen and I thought of as a possibility to contribute some music for us. In addition to the crazy shit happening in our country, we will also be acknowledging the graduating seniors in our community this weekend, so it’s nice that she is doing it.

I was a bit apprehensive to try and connect with her on StreamYard, but it was easy peasy. She liked the platform. Jen said that she (Cate) could probably write a program like that if she hasn’t already. Jen was especially pleased when I reported that Cate liked StreamYard.

So Zingerman’s gave me another discount at the end of May. I ordered cheese and coffee beans, all on sale. They arrived today. I made bread today and we have already eaten most of one loaf. Even though my country is falling apart, we are living very well in our little bunker.

The news is distressing that’s for sure. At the age of 68 I am so much more aware of the riots than I was in the sixties. This reminds me of them. Not in a good way.

My friend, Dawn Van Ark, has agreed to play a piece of mine for the prelude on June 28. Here’s  a PDF if you’re interested.

I’ve just about learned Bach’s bouree above. I did the transcription myself from his unaccompanied Violin Sonata in B minor.  Again here’s the  PDF

What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach? | National Endowment for the Arts

I’m always skeptical of these virtual recreations. But it’s interesting to think about.

The End of Policing