I dreamed last night of my dead father-in-law. My dreams continue to be very important to me. In the dream he was disconsolate. He had behaved a bit badly (consistent with some of his behavior when he was alive). I embraced him with compassion and told him I loved him (something I never did).
I recently straightened my little area in the living room. I put away many books and kept only those books out that I plan to read regularly. Eileen took a picture.
If it looks cluttered, it’s no where near as bad as it was when I began organizing. I guess I aspire to “cluttered.”
I am blogging on Friday morning because I have fallen in love with some new music. It’s an album released recently. I ran across it on my music app, Primophonic.
I am a fan of both the composer, Shaw, and the singer, Upshaw. Narrow Sea was commissioned by the performers in 2017. Shaw took texts from Sacred Harp pieces and reset them.
It seems to be on YouTube.
Here are the first few cuts.
I recommend all of the piece.
I just ordered a copy of The Sacred Harp. I have several shape note books but not the original. I am very intrigued to see the original pieces. I didn’t know “I am a poor wayfaring stranger” came from this tradition. I have known that song since I was young. I learned it from sheet music.
This is my new book I have purchased to give to people. I haven’t quite finished reading my copy yet, but I have found it amazing.
Amazing to learn that we have a significant number of people in our country to who have fallen in the cracks of moneyless poverty. In the video, Edin says that the $2.00 a day figure was used by the World Bank because using zero was statistically unhelpful.
That’s right, using World standards, in 2011, there were “1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children who were surviving on cash incomes of no more that $2 per person, per day for any given month. that’s about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. ”
I found this book in Automating Equality by Eubanks.
If you’re not up for the book, the embedded video covers much of the same territory as the book.
In the video, Edin says that she met someone who was so used to be hungry that they described that it “feels like you want to be dead, because it’s peaceful being dead.” (This is around 1 hour and 28 minutes in the video).
Also, Edin mentions that one study she looked at said that getting hired at Walmart was harder than getting into Harvard.
And then there’s this happy video.
I learned about Belew from this episode of Deep Background Podcast.
Her historical background of the White Power movement intrigues me. I have interlibrary loaned her book,
She is thinking about now as well as history. You might know the insidious little book The Turner Diaries.
Timothy McVeigh read this. In the novel, there are details about idiots over throwing the United States. This includes a description (and instructions apparently) about blowing up a federal building and also congregating in the Nation’s Capital Building.
Here’s a recent article about this, although I learned what I’m mentioning from Belew’s video.
I have been listening to more of Lorrie Moore on YouTube as well as reading essays from her collection, See What Can Be Done.
First, I was a bit ashamed when someone asked her about blogging or being on Twitter. She replied, “I don’t have that much to say.”
Ahem. Yikes. Me neither, but it doesn’t seem to stop me.
When asked why reading was important, she replied (something close to this) “Reading is important because we need to get language that isn’t commercially mediated and increasingly we don’t have it. ”
This reminded me of some of my musical quandaries. I consider about music from my youth and wonder why it seemed to go from exciting to me at that time to the way I respond to much popular music that is being written now (meh).
Could it be that as popular music or subgenres continue to generate material that it becomes more and more about making commodity and less about fun and what people like?
Not that rock and folk rock and whatever style was ever non-commercial. I just think that we need music that isn’t commodified and increasingly I don’t find much in new music either popular or any other style.
But, of course, that’s me.
And continuing with Moore’s ideas paraphrased by yours truly:
We need reading to help us get close to another’s imagination and to spend time in this distilled space. Reading expands horizons, emotional knowledge, and knowledge of the world.
When you think of it, maybe the problem of people believing stuff that is crazy and untrue might have something to do with people’s uncharged imagination and lack of time in the space of thinking and reading.
I recently finished Gregory Orr’s little book of poetry, How Beautiful the Beloved. It consists of one page poems and many of them charmed me.
Here are a couple.
______________
Loss and loss and more
Loss–that’s what
The sea teaches.
The need to stay
Nimble
Against the suck
Of receding waves,
The sand
Disappearing
Under our feet.
Here, where sea
Meets shore:
The best of dancing floors.
_______________
Has the moon been up there
All these nights
And I never noticed?
A whole week with my nose
To the ground, to the grind.
And the beloved faithfully
Returning each evening
As the moon.
Yesterday was Lorrie Moore’s birthday according to Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. He quoted her as saying the following and it made me laugh.
When she was once asked in an interview why she writes so often about characters who make lots of jokes, she said: “I feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh. I’ve never been to a dinner party where nobody said anything funny. If you’re going to ignore that [as a fiction writer], what are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” indeed.
My boss and i were goofing off yesterday. She was trying to broadcast organ music via her phone on a blue tooth speaker. I was the “talent” as they say and kept playing organ while she experimented. This apparently failed. She’s still working on something for tomorrow’s funeral.
In the course of the afternoon, I mentioned to her that there were two different hymns from which she could choose for this Sunday’s stream paraliturgy. She couldn’t decide. She said she would think about it. Consequently, I haven’t done this Sunday’s submission of hymns and music note. I did pick out organ music. If I haven’t heard from her tomorrow I will simple pick a hymn and write a hymn note.
Keillor inspired me to search for Lorrie Moore on YouTube. Bingo. In the above video, she not only talks charmingly and intelligently, she reads her essay about her marriage ceremony, “One hot summer, or a Brief History of Time,” in its entirety.
It was first published in the book she is plugging on this video.
I requested the library copy of the book and picked it up today.
On Tuesday, I read an essay by Zadie Smith called “The Bathroom” in her collection, Feel Free. It is about her family and her understanding of family. I was struck by her description of how her family fitted into England’s class system.
“The spare room, the extra toilet—these represented, for my parents, a very British form of achievement. Raised in poverty, they were now officially what the census takers call ‘lower middle class.’ … When you were lower middle-class, in the eighties, you went to Europe occasionally—though only on flights that left at 3 a.m., and on planes in which you freely chose the smoking section—and you drove a Mini Metro, and you bought fresh orange juice. You went to state school of course and had never seen a ski lift but you took the Guardian (footnote here: If you were on the left) and, if there was a good front-page scandal, the Mirror, and you had those nice stripy Habitat blinds in the kitchen and china plates hanging on the walls and you absolutely understood that doormats with jokes on them were in bad taste. You told people you ‘never watched ITV,’ although this was actually a lie: you watched ITV all the time. And each summer you packed the car and motored down the M4 to Devon or Cornwall, stopping along the route to take tea—thanks to the National Trust—in the various country mansions of penniless aristocrats. At least that’s how it was for us.”
Class systems always confuse me until my nose gets rubbed into them. This happened to me on one trip in the UK when the car of the train we were on lost power. We were shepherded into the first class car. A bald man in an expensive suit holding a conservative book glared at me and my family for the entire time we were there.
I assume that was class stuff.
I read that passage to my wife since we have a daughter who is firmly ensconced in England. (Hi Sarah!)
But more startlingly in Smith’s essay was her observation that “every family home is an emotionally violent place, full of suppressed rage… no one gets out of a family unit whole or with everything they want.” Here she quotes Jerry Seinfeld: “There’s no such thing as fun for all the family.”
Smith writes “Somebody’s going to have to give up something: it’s only a question of how much and to whom.
Something to ponder.
She reprints a photograph her father took of himself, his first wife, and Smith’s step sister. It is stark and looks highly composed. The mom sits like a painting staring at the TV. The father and daughter are whispering to each other. Smith titled it “The Family is a Violent Event.”
Zadie Smith’s brother, Ben, is a rap artist. Without talking to her about it, he independently chose this picture as the cover for his rap album.
Something else to ponder is what Lorrie Moore said in another interview I listened to on YouTube:
“You can’t carve solitude out of loneliness. You have to people your life and go from there.”
“White terror is as American as the Stars and Stripes. But when this is denied, it is no wonder that the events at the Capitol are read as shocking and un-American.”
I keep thinking I should quit blogging. I’m not getting to it as much as I used to for one reason or another. However, I still see some value in continuing to sporadically update for the handful of people who check it.
Mark recently put up a video of himself reading from Auden’s Christmas Oratorio: “For the time being.” It reminded me of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.
First, Mark read the ending of the long poem which is the third section of “The Flight into Egypt.” It ends with some lines that have been pressed into service as a hymn in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. (Hymn 463, 464 according to my notes in Auden)
Mark is claiming a Creative Commons Attribution License for his reading of it. The software that comes with the hymnal (Ritesong) however does not have it as one that can be reproduced with permission. Not sure what all that means, just that I won’t put the hymns here.
Ozeki’s book is one that I have recently recommended as an audiobook to my daughter, Sarah. Also I gave the audiobook to my boss, Jen, for Xmas. It is a marvelous book. I seemed to remember reading an ebook version of it, but instead I found my hardback copy under “O” in my library. I have to invade my guests living quarters to access books like this.
Regarding writing an online blog, Ozeki has these marvelous comments, but :
Writing of her grandmother Jiko’s stories, the narrator says “Apart from me, who else would care? I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I’d post her stories on a blog but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.”
The character named Ruth in the book is reading this dairy aloud to her husband, Oliver. There is a footnote here where Oliver says “I never think anyone gives a hit… Is that sad? I don’t think so.” Ruth continues
“And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages, that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.”
Here there is another footnote (I love footnotes), “Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding” – Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1989.
So welcome to my own “lonely little pages,” dear reader.
Another odd juxtaposition of ideas happened to me recently. I have been reading Alex Ross’s book, Wagnerism, and listening to him talk about it online.
I have had ambivalence about Wagner all my adult life. But, Ross’s book is mostly about Wagner’s influence on others. One of these people is Thomas Mann. Mann has been an enormously important influence on me and a source of many insights. I decided to pull down his “Death in Venice” and read it.
After several pages of reading Helen Lowe-Porter’s beautiful translation, I came on a sentence that left in German that the main character quoted. I asked the interwebs what the sentence was. It translated it and identified it as from Homer’s Oddysey. It did not say exactly which line it was, but apparently Mann will go on to quote more of Homer in this little story. Cool.
Well, children, I am bringing another of my lonely little pages to an end. Although I have had a bit of weird sadness lately, my life continues to be uncommonly good. I can only pray for my country at this time. The prayers of an atheist. What good are they?
Here it is, January 3 and I haven’t blogged since way back in December. I’m afraid I am filling up my time with reading, practicing, and other stuff like cooking. The picture above is one Elizabeth drew of me. She was thinking of giving it to me when she informed me that she and Jeremy had bought me a the Trust Fall Quarterly Subscription from Book People Book Store (Texas’s largest independent book store).
Over the next twelve months they will send me four books by new authors they recommend. Cool.
Jeremy and Alex made snow men a while back. The one on the left is Alex’s. I think it’s a snow woman.
Here’s a pic of them a bit later.
Christmas morning there was a huge package under the Christmas tree. I figured it was something for Alex. Nope. It was a reading desk that Jeremy picked out for me.
I quite like it. I can working on my Greek on it or just use it to read. This morning I plopped my huge copy of Don Quixote on it. It works great.
I was entirely spoiled this Christmas. I made a Wish List on Amazon and Eileen availed herself of it. I got tons of books. My brother and sister in law gave me two books I have had my eye on: Harold Bloom’s The Bright Book of Life
and Kevin Young’s African American Poetry.
Both men are heroes of mine.
I listened all the way through Bach’s Christmas Oratorio recently. It is wonderful music. Of course, I love the cantatas and it’s really six cantatas to be done from Christmas to Epiphany.
I received Alex Ross’s new book on Wagner from Eileen for Christmas. After having finished his previous book which I was reading (Listen to This), I plunged into it. I am trying to read more of a book than a few pages a day. I’m on page 84 of Ross (I just checked).
I finished several books I was reading previously and am now starting some of these Christmas books. I am also working on Dante and Don Quixote and others I have on the stack. All this reading is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging. In fact I am itching to get back to my reading this afternoon.
I ordered the Dover edition of the score of the Christmas Oratorio and several vocal scores of some Wagner operas. Buying these used is very economic. I followed the Christmas Oratorio in a vocal score as I exercised. The score is in English unlike the recording I was listening to but I could still see how the music was working. I know it’s sort of cheating but I find it so much easier to learn about this kind of music in a vocal score. This is one that just has the voice parts and a reduced piano rendition of the orchestra parts.
I also ordered a box of used music from Craig Cramer.
I have been going back and forth between Bach and Buxtehude at work, reading and enjoying playing their music on the Pasi.
I am spoiled and lucky.
I have a new hero: Heather Cox Richardson. There was an article about her in the NYT. She writes a newsletter that is informed by her own background as an historian. She took the title from a book called “Letters from an American Farmer.”
I am enjoying them. Here’s a link to her Substack page where you can read some of them and sign up for her email.
