UPDATE

It looks now like I will be able to go to Mark and Leigh’s the week of the fourth. Eileen hadn’t gotten out of bed when i wrote this blog post. She and Mark spoke last night. They are ready for us to come for the whole week so that’s what we will do if we can get Elizabeth to come and cat sit.

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I read recently that when one is old, one of the things one is sure of is that one did not die young.

I always thought that I would not live this long. Turning twenty was  a surprise, as were all the anniversaries thereafter.

Now I am 69 which is not old by American standards in this century, although that standard is apparently dropping as the life expectancy of white American males diminishes.

I find myself blogging earlier in the day. I have what I hope will be my last staff meeting at Grace this morning. I am actually drawing further away from the life of a church  musician daily.

I have been spending time with the Child Ballads.

I have always loved folk music. Now it interests me much more than hymnody or academic music.  You can define that last term for yourself if you want.

I was disappointed with my local library yesterday. I was sure they would have on their shelves some poetry by Brook Haxton, Kim Addonsio, and Hayden Carruth. These are all poets I want to read more of. There was a Collected poems of Carruth which i checked out. I was hoping for more.

Also, my grand daughters are reading a couple of books I don’t know and want to look at if not read: Normal People by Sally Rooney and  The Black Castle by Jeannette Walls. Neither was on the shelf at the library.

So I plan to interlibrary loan all of this, probably this morning if I have time.

I continue to spend time at the piano. Robert Schumann has been very satisfying to read, even though he can be very difficult. Also, I have been reading a bit in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as I think about folk music. There are many settings of tunes from the time that interest me.

 I did enjoy browsing at the library, something I haven’t done much of in the past year. Of course I  managed to find a stack of stuff to take home and look over.

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SEE UPDATE AT THE BEGINNNING OF THIS POST

Elizabeth called last night to say that she can come and watch the cat the first week of July. Unfortunately, it looks like Leigh had rightly assumed we wouldn’t be coming and has scheduled lessons in the guest bedroom where we usually sleep. Hopefully we can go over a bit that week anyway. At any rate, I was thinking of asking Mark and Leigh to meet Eileen and me halfway between our  homes for a meal and some chat. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.

It has occurred to me to use this web site in my retirement. I have been thinking of organizing my compositions for my own amusement at this time of life. Putting them in chronological order. It might make sense to reorganize this web site and put them here. The website sorely needs reorganizing, but we’ll just have to see if I ever get to retire.

Yesterday while my wife was taking her daily walk, my blind cat attempted to leap up and join me on my dead mother’s recliner. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite make it. In the process of losing his balance he caught his left hind leg in the recliner apparatus and flipped over, sprawled on the floor and crying out.  I was afraid he had broken his leg.

I had to extricate myself from the chair without putting it upright position so as to not crush his leg. I carefully lifted my cat and gently took his leg out of the chair. I put him on the ground. After a moment he walked blindly toward the kitchen, no limp, no visible effects.

I was grateful. Now when he leaps up onto the chair, I watch him carefully and block the open mechanism with my leg.

I got up early this morning hankering for a shower. So after cleaning the cat litter which we now keep in the main bathroom on the main floor for the blind cat, I took a shower. Then I made coffee, did stretches, and my daily exercises.

After exercising I turned on the tap to get some water. Nothing. The water had ceased to flow. Yikes.

My wife got up also hankering for a shower. Unfortunately there was not going to happen until service was restored. Some time after i discovered it, a man in one of those orange yellow reflector worker vests knocked on my door and told me it was a mistake. The water should return in a couple of hours.

So Eileen and I had breakfast, played our usual four games of boggle. By that time the water was back on.

Eileen showered. I went to the grocery store and picked  up groceries and some food for our date day picnic by the lake.

The humidity has been dreadful. It has been in the nineties according to our humidity gauge. If it rains does the gauge go one hundred per cent?

Eileen decided that it was too humid to go sit by the lake today for our date day.  So we stayed home. I think we might go out Thursday instead.

I am adjusting to the idea that I am retiring soon. Today it occurred to me that retiring would in many ways return me to the hapless dude I was when I met Eileen. At that time we had lots of time on our hands to do nothing.

I can’t wait until that time comes again.

My retirement from Grace as music director is now public knowledge. I have agreed to continue to play the liturgies and recommend hymns until they either find a replacement or hire an interim musician. The latter is what Jen said she would do if my weekend duties went on too long.

I am receiving nothing but support from Jen and the community on this decision.

In the meantime, I do feel as though a great weight has been lifted from me. I have enjoyed being a church musician and serving Grace, but it’s not something I am passionate about by any means.

And that’s what I’m working on discerning. What are my passions at the age of 69?

I told the trio that I would need some time before I would know whether or not I want to continue meeting with them. Dawn who is retired seemed to expect this.

I had some very hopeful back and forth text messages with my lovely grand daughters. Catherine and Savannah recently. I pulled back from connecting with the California Jenkins branch when my daughter-in-law seemed to have misgivings about a conversation I asked to have with Catherine about a book she and I had both read.

Savannah called recently to ask us if we could loan her some money to buy a car (of course). In this conversation she told Eileen that everyone in her family had had Covid, Cynthia and Nicholas showing the most dire but not life threatening symptoms.

I wondered if this had anything to do with Cynthia’s behavior around my request to talk to Catherine.

Anyway, this past weekend Catherine texted me to tell me what she is going to read next. I asked her (and actually asked all of them) to let me know what they like to read and what they are reading. I was tickled to see she had purchased and was planning on reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Likewise, Savannah texted me (actually using Catherine’s phone) that she is reading Clockwork Orange by Burgess. She and I some text discussion about Burgess, the book and the movie based on  it.

I finished reading the library’s copy of Last Poems by Hayden Carruth. This is a clever posthumous publication. Micheal Wiegers and Copper Canyon press decided to publish the last poem from each of Carruth’s previously published works along with a few  unpublished poems.

I enjoyed most of these poems. See You Tomorrow is one of the new unpublished poems in the collection that I like.  I think the idea that aging people do not approach twilight as they near death, rather

               they are entering the arcade of
Death. Flashing lights and crashing bells
Surround them, and the only darkness is
The space between the soles of their shoes
And the floor.
from See you tomorrow by H. Carruth

Carruth mentions Ezra Pound a few times. This led to me pull out my battered old copy of The ABC of Reading and start it once again.

Pound has had a huge influence on me. I was amused to find a story that I sometimes tell on the first few pages. It’s the story of the biologist Agazzi and a student.  I didn’t remember it came from reading Pound. i thought it was more likely from something like Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

Hah.

I am doing a lot of pondering of how I plan to spend my time in retirement. Maybe I’ll blog more. Who knows?

I’m taking a break between my two morning ten minute sessions of what I call old man running I never used to think I could run to exercise. Then I saw video of Bill Clinton running as president. He did it with a minimum of effort and movement.

I think to myself, i can do that. So I have been doing twenty minutes a day of old man running in place for about two years.

I break it up into two ten minute sessions. If I’m feeling frisky I move quickly from one to the other. I am not frisky this morning.

Yesterday I played two services. At each service I performed a courante (Curant) by Scheldt and a toccata by Sweelinck.  The Sweelinck was the postlude. At each service, I was surprised that people not only hung around for the postlude, they applauded. Sweelinck is a bit showy I guess. But I wasn’t expecting such appreciation.

I like this music myself. it fits nicely on the Pasi. Plus the pedal parts are minimal which allowed me to rehearse using my little keyboard on vacation. It paid off. Most of the tricky parts (of which there a few) came off nicely.

I am not a fan of Radiolab. But I happened on to recent series they are doing about Harry Pace.

Harry Pace is part of our American music history of which I was unaware. I had wondered how we got from the awful minstrel show music to early blues and syncopated prejazz. These musics exist simultaneously.

Harry Pace was a prodigy of sorts. He learned Latin and Greek as an eleven year old. Became an assistant to W. E. DuBois in college. Met W. C. Handy while he, Pace, was working in bank. They start the first all black record label.

Although they start out as a sort of expression of DuBois’s concept that the “talented tenth” of the Black population should be evidence to the whites they were not only equal but could excel. Thus, the first recordings were of opera.

Pace stumbles onto Ethel Waters, records her, and Black Swan becomes insanely popular and sells many, many records of the blues.

So why don’t we routinely lionize Harry Pace? Radiolab has the answer. I recommend listening. Here’s a link to the first show in the series.

Back to old man running.

My daughter Elizabeth graciously house swapped with Eileen and me this week, so we are staying in her lovely home in Delton, Michigan until Saturday, then back home.

I have enjoyed being away with Eileen. We have added Scrabble to our daily Boggle routine.

Yesterday was Bloomsday.

It’s a celebration of Ulysses by James Joyce. The reason June 16 is Bloomsday is that is the date of the one day on which the entire book takes place. I have read it a few times, but yesterday I revisited some of the symbolism that draws on The Odyssey. 

I lazily used the Shmoop study guide I have on my kindle since I didn’t bring any of my Joyce reference books with me. It was pretty good up until the 8th episode. Up until then, the guide was explicit about how Joyce connected Homer to his novel.

It was a refreshing way to spend some time on Bloomsday. Plus I am learning more and more about Homer and his stories.

I finished Dances for Flute & Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Insults, poetry from Ancient Greek translate by Brooks Haxton. They are kind of fun. I started another book by him.

I especially liked Thy Name

This poem suggests “Let’s call God Fun.” You know, “In his heart the fool has said there is no Fun.” Anyway it worked for me.

I have been enjoying poems by Kim Addonizio (from Mortal Trash). Here are links to three with some of my favorite lines from them.

Anyway, back to goofing off.

Eileen’s back has been giving her all kinds of trouble. It’s not clear what’s going on, but she is determined to attempt to exercise her way out of it. Yesterday was a bad day. But today she is walking downtown for her “alto breakfast.”

I have been having a fantasy about what it would be like to retire. It began as a little niggle a few days ago and hasn’t gone away. Instead, I find myself asking myself questions about what I am passionate about at this time in my life.

I discovered a new podcast this morning: The View from Somewhere

It was created and is hosted by Lewis Raven Wallace, and produced by Ramona Martinez.

This is from their website:

The View from Somewhere: A Podcast About Journalism With A Purpose features stories of marginalized and oppressed people who have shaped journalism in the U.S. The podcast focuses on the troubled history of “objectivity” and how it has been used to gatekeep and exclude people of color, queer and trans people, and people organizing for their labor rights and communities

These two people have caught my attention. After Wallace published an article about the myth of objectivity in reporting, he was called on the carpet by The Marketplace NPR radio show where he worked. Subsequently he was fired.

Martinez had a similar path. I’m retelling these anecdotes from hearing them once on podcasts. Martinez was a producer for NPR. She quit after she was called on the carpet for posting on Facebook: “SCOTUS you motherfuckers!” NPR was willing to give her a slap on the wrist as it was her first offense of expressing a political view publically. I think she quit.

These are my kind of people. If you decide to listen to the podcast, I suggest you do what I am doing and go back and listen to them from their first episode. Many podcast say this shit, but I do think this time it is a very good idea.

Recommended.

Wallace is co host of this weeks On The Media. It’s a good episode.  In it, when Jay Rosen, the journalist prof, was asked about how to handle the problem of covering misinformation, he replied something like, “Sunlight is the best policy. But sunlight not only disinfects, it helps things grow.” Then he recommended a “sandwich” approach to reporting misinformation: start with the truth, put the lie in the middle, and end with the truth.

I like that. I’m ending with a quote from Ramona Marinez:

Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.

Eileen and I had our first date night in a year last night. It was unbearably hot in Holland. Too hot to sit outside in one of our favorite downtown restaurants. We decided to drive out toward the beach and stop and eat at a restaurant out there if it was cooler. It was. We still are leery of sitting inside a restaurant and eating so we sat outside at Ottawa Beach Inn.

The good news was that I was able to have my evening martini with my meal since they sell alcohol. Eileen has missed eating out a great deal so I’m glad we were able to do this.

Then in the afternoon, I planned the Sunday music for June 20th. I wanted to schedule some literature that would fit my instrument and at the same time have little pedal work to rehearse. As I mentioned in the last blog, we are planning to be away next week and I want to be able to rehearse music that I will perform on June 20 on the little keyboard I  will take with me.

I started out looking at some pieces by Gottleib Muffat (1690-1770). Gottlieb is son of Georg (1653-1704) who is also a composer. Their music is a blend of the German Baroque and the French Classical. Their styles differ. The father, Gottlieb, reminds me of Frescobaldi. The son is more standard French Classical in style.  I find both of them quite charming for different reasons. Unfortunately, the volume of Gottlieb’s music I own is basically harpsichord music. I am certainly not above performing this kind of literature on my Pasi. But it didn’t seem quite the right thing.

So I pulled out some Sweelinck and Scheidt. With a little searching I found a prelude and postlude. The prelude is a dance by Scheidt. The postlude is a Toccata by Sweelinck. They sound wonderful on the Pasi and are stand alone charming pieces in themselves.

I recently finished The Singapore Grip by J. G. Farrell. It’s the second book of his I have read. About eight years ago  I read Troubles by him. I liked it enough to read another. I also sent my brother a copy of this book for his birthday.  He might enjoy it. I know I did.

These two books are part of a trilogy he wrote which is called “The Empire Trilogy.” The Singapore Grip takes place  in Singapore just before it falls to the Japanese army in WWII. The main characters are English businessmen. The whole book drips with satire and dark humor.

It reminded me of descriptions I have read about the fall of Saigon at the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. In the afterword, Farrell thanks Mr. Lacy Wright and Miss Thé-anh Cao “who kindly showed  me Saigon in the last few weeks before it became ‘Ho Chi Minh City.'”

Farrell died young (44). The books he left us, especially these three, are widely acclaimed as masterpieces. I like to think he could have produced an equally acerbic book about US involvement in Vietnam if he lives.

I found his Seige of Krishnapur, the third book in the trilogy on the shelves of my library. I don’t remember reading it and don’t think I have. But now I will.

Secrets That Were No Secret, Lessons That Were Not Learned by Andrew Bacevich

Bacevich is a writer and thinker that I respect and read. I found it clarifying when he pointed out to how the Pentagon papers had failed to teach us anything when you think about the following (taken from the linked article):

More such episodes of questionable legality and logic were to follow, even after the South Vietnamese government finally fell. Among the most prominent: the Reagan administration’s illegal sales of arms to Iran to illegally fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua; clandestine U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; Bill Clinton’s ill-conceived assault in Somalia culminating in the infamous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993; the George W. Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence to create a pretext for invading Iraq in 2003; and Barack Obama’s embrace of “targeted killing” as an executive power.

Capping off this entire sequence of events was the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran. Much as the Kennedy administration concluded in 1963 that President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam had become expendable, so too President Donald Trump decided in January 2020 that General Suleimani should die.

On Saturday, Eileen and I had lunch with her sister, Nancy, and her husband. Walt. It’s the first time we have eaten out in a year. We ate at the Curragh. It was very windy. So windy, in fact that a couple of the umbrellas were lifted off their stands. The Curragh has expanded its outdoor seating considerably: two or three times more than it used to have. It was a lovely meal and we came home and had home made ice cream and blueberry buckle in the back yard. It was fun to chat with people in person.

I have been neglecting this blog in favor of reading and practicing.

I recently ran across this reading of a new play by Ishmael Reed.

I am a fan of his and it amused me to no end that this play is mostly about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cool cool.

I heard about this play on the podcast: The Cyborg Jillian Weise and Ishmael Reed in Conversation

Great quote from Reed on this podcast: “Words built the world.”

I also recommend a recent United States of Anxiety podcast called “The Big Bang Theory of Jazz.”  It taught be about a musician who was instrumental in spreading Jazz to Europe around the time of WWI.

The musician’s name is James Reeses Europe.

I was very interested to learn about this composer. He looks to be instrumental in beginning the love affair between American Jazz musicians and France.

I was keenly disappointed that he does not have an entry in the Groves Dictionary. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Here’s a link to his Wikipedia article. He is important for many reasons. Here’s some quotes from the Wikipedia article regarding his Clef Club Orchestra.

The Clef Club Orchestra, while not a jazz band, was the first band to play proto-jazz at Carnegie Hall. It is difficult to overstate the importance of that event in the history of jazz in the United States – it was 12 years before the Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin concert at Aeolian Hall, and 26 years before Benny Goodman’s famed concert at Carnegie Hall. The Clef Club’s performances played music written solely by Black composers

It’s insane that this guy is not better known. Gunther Schuller mentions him in his seminal book on Early Jazz.

Europe’s genius apparently was to gather large groups of Black musicians together to perform.

He ends up in France leading a band of musicians who were part of the Harlem Hellfighters (the all Black 369th Infantry). He was a lieutenant in this unit which was the  most decorated unit of all WWI American units. Unfortunately all of the decorations came from the French, none from the Americans.

In February and March 1918, James Reese Europe and his military band travelled over 2,000 miles in France, performing for British, French and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Europe’s “Hellfighters” also made their first recordings in France for the Pathé brothers.[19] The first concert included a French march, and the Stars and Stripes Forever as well as syncopated numbers such as “The Memphis Blues”, which, according to a later description of the concert by band member Noble Sissle “… started ragtimitis in France”. (from the linked Wikipedia article)

Next Sunday afternoon, Eileen and I will drive both of our cars to Elizabeth’s house. She will return driving one of them and stay here to watch the blind Edison the cat. Jeremy is driving their car to visit his father who is quite ill. Eileen and I will have five days of vacation at their home.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to this.