I broke my alcohol fast last night for the second time in 8 days. I had a real gin martini followed by 3 scotches. I can feel it a bit this morning which is unusual for me. Eileen suggested that I find a pattern that would allow me to have an occasional drink and stick to it. But I don’t see a clear way to do that. Meanwhile, back to the fake gin tonight.

I have resumed reading Martha Nussbaum’s 1998 Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. I’m not sure when I stopped reading it, but my place is clearly marked. In the back of the book, there is a newspaper clipping of her article, Making Philosophy Matter to Politics, which is undated, but seems to have been published in 2002. It’s probably been that long since I have read in it. I had marked my place with a charming bookmark made for me by my daughter, Elizabeth. It’s dated December 1999.

Anyway, I think it’s still very pertinent and interesting to read. This morning I was a bit amused to read that even in 1998 profs were finding that students didn’t have acceptable writing skills. Nussbaum describes three classroom experiences of taking a class on feminism at St. Lawrence U, Washing U. at St. Louis, and Stanford. She reports that first year students at St. Lawrence “do not write very well” and their prof spends a lot of time correcting grammar and style in papers they hand in. Nussbaum is examining their papers to partially determine what the teacher has communicated and the atmosphere prevailing in the classroom.

I’m also trying to finish the library’s copy of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. I resist purchasing my own copy of this book even though I have learned a lot by reading it. The author, Jonathan M. Metzl, is a sociology and psychiatry prof at Vanderbilt as well as director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

This book has helped me understand how people in this country routinely support public policy that is harmful to themselves. The short answer is that they understand this and are willing to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for what they believe. What they believe is usually confused and situated in misconceptions and societal racism. They are not conscious of this and would resent it being pointed out. But I am beginning to make more sense of them with Metzl’s help.

He seems to be a good listener. He and his assistants do focus groups and interview many people. He considers three policy ideas in three different states, all of which he has spent time living in: gun ownership in Missouri, health care in Tennessee, and education in Kansas.

I am learning some new concepts. Reaction formation and the formation role of nostalgia on identity.

There is actually a Wikipedia article on the former. Basically reaction formation is a personality swing from one extreme reaction to its opposite to mask it. Metzl uses it to postulate why Kansans imagine they are living in a vibrant progressive and rejuvenating place when they are living in an “ennui-inducing’ place of endless cornfields and plains. He expands this psychological diagnosis to include the “formation role of nostalgia on identity.”

I have about forty pages to go in Dying of Whiteness.

I listened to Ladies of the Canyon as I took my shower this morning. I keep wondering if anyone is writing pop music to the standard of the music I heard in 70s. I think it’s a stereotype to consider the pop music you heard when you were young as better than what is being made now. If I amend that to music that I am able to find now it’s hard for me not to think it is so especially in terms of song writing/.

There is a lot of great music being made now including pop music. But I’m thinking specifically of craft.

I also know that familiarity where music is concerned is tricky. We can like something because we are familiar with it. If we take time to become familiar with music it often increases its attraction.

I wonder about the music of the 70s. It was a dark time but much of the music has hope and stringent comment in it. I think now that hope is harder.

Nostalgia is an inevitable factor and I don’t even resist. I take my joy where I can find it.

I am meeting Rhonda in an hour to play some duets and listen to her play a piece she is working on. It is good to have a friend in her. I think of all the friends I have had over the years and there are few that still connect with me. As I play the memories of friendship I realize that it did not occur to me that I would lose so many friendships. This makes the memories both sweeter and sadder. But no matter.

No reason to feel sorry for myself when my life is going so well.

And part of this fun is listening to music, both from my past and new music.

I need to quit and grab some breakfast.

If you’re thinking about the Supreme Court at all, the latest podcast from the Constitutional Center is excellent. I’ve listened to most of it. Steve Vladeck is amazing in his analysis and understanding.

I received a nice postcard from a woman who attends church at Grace yesterday. She has always been very complimentary of me. Her compliments seem to speak from a place of pain and consolation. So many compliments a sort of bouquet of weird tribute resonant with distancing and misunderstanding. But I think it is important to take compliments well. This is not easy but is something you learn to do. Anything else is ungracious to say the least.

We live in such a weird time of consumerism where everything is at some point reduced to a commodity. It’s difficult to break out of this mindset. But it’s probably necessary to be human.

My admiring friend used words like “grateful,” “joy,” and “hopeful.” I know that she is someone who doesn’t often miss beauty or substitute something for it. She put me in mind of Christopher Small and his ideas about music being a verb and also the result of many hands and minds.

These hands and minds of Small are not just the immediate participants, including the listener, but the hands of the people who set up the chairs, the minds of the people who make up the community where the music happens. I logically extend this to include every human who has lived and made music. And even all humans who ever will live and make music.

So someone like my postcard writer is intrinsic to music in a way that is difficult pinpoint in a society much defined by economics and consuming.

She didn’t put a return address on her postcard. I’m hoping I can run her address down and drop her a note in response. I’m sure to include Christopher Small’s ideas in my appreciation of her reaching out to remind me how important music is to all of us.

I sometimes say that music is constituent to being human. Unfortunately, my OED tells me my use of this word is obsolete.  That which “constitutes or makes a thing what it is; formative, essential; characteristic, distinctive” is not longer the meaning of this word. Oh well.

I would like to add that honesty itself is also something I have been thinking about. In this discussion, I think that to me perceived honesty or authenticity is important. This importance extends to the music that draws me in and that I end up liking or making. It even includes loving. Honesty is something I aspire to and admire when I find it operational in others.

I think the absence of honesty is something we live with on a daily basis. It doesn’t do us any good. Although it’s not always easy, honesty is definitely something worth striving for.

End of sermon.

I learned to pronounce Goethe correctly as GUH-tuh (approximately).

But I always pronounced the main character in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther as WERE-thur not VUH- tuh.

I probably learned to pronounce Goethe correctly after already reading The Sorrows of Young Werther and didn’t mentally correct the pronunciation in my head.

This morning i was listening to an old “Aria Code” podcast, The aria for the day was the Letter Aria from Massenet’s opera, Werther. As they were discussing it I immediately realized that I had always pronounced Werther incorrectly. Live and learn.

Trying to situate Beethoven’s first symphony into context I realize how much less I know about him than say Haydn or Bach. I turned to the Beethoven section of Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.

I have always found Rosen’s observations enlightening and helpful. The Beethoven analysis I was previously reading by Samuel Hollister mentioned Rosen and also the fact that his terminology had been adapted by The Groves Dictionary. I don’t think of the many Rosen books I own as textbooks, I’m not sure exactly what they are except excellent and informative.

He is helping me sort through my misconceptions about Beethoven especially historically. For example, I was taught that Beethoven was the ‘Father of Romanticism. You may know the famous picture of Liszt and others sitting at the foot of a huge bust of Beethoven.

The Romantics admired him, no doubt. But when it came to the nitty gritty they actually derived many of their compositional techniques including their famous chromaticism from others.

Beethoven himself took a turn toward the past toward the end of his career nodding to Haydn and Mozart more than to the future. Granted he did so in incredibly beautiful and wonderful new ways. But this gauntlet of technique is not picked up by the next generation. It has to wait for Brahms, Mendelssohn, and others who in Rosen’s opinion do not extend the compositional ideas of sonata allegro form terribly successfully. Specifically no one ends up doing it quite as artfully as Beethoven.

Hmm. I did not know that. But when I think of it, it makes total sense.

Finally, I want to mention the group, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

How does one find new music? I’ve never had a very good answer to that question my whole life. In this case, I was helped by the damn YouTube algorithm which popped into a Dirty Dozen Band NPR Tiny Music Desk video after I listened to one by the Westerlies (whom I do admire).

Wow. This group can play. I love the tuba and the rhythms and the whole deal. Recommended.

This morning I listened to most of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Album 2006 What’s Going On. Here’s a YouTube Version of the first track.

You don’t really get the joyful sense of this band from this track, but it’s still good I do love me some Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

When exercising my range of interests it never fails to surprise when coincidences occur.

When my brother was visiting recently in the course of our chatting he mentioned Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Oh shit, I thought, I’m not sure if I read it or if I read it and I don’t remember it. Later I decided to add it to my list of things to read and pulled it out of my library.

I’m about a third of the way into the second volume. The writing is not great but it’s not bad for 1952. I read the first one and wasn’t excited to read more until my experience with Catling’s Vorrh Trilogy. Fuck it. Asimov at least has ideas and coherence.

It is in the Heinlein tradition of space operas which to me means more adventure than ideas and definitely omission of women or in Heinlein’s case full blown misogyny.

This morning while unloading the dishwasher and making coffee, I listened to the 538 podcast and got bored with it. Switched to Now and Then, Heather Cox Richardson’s podcast. Then I decided I need some upbeat music for my more strenuous exercise and switched to Vampire Weekend.

Finally I did my usual twenty minutes of “old man” running in place (or Bill Clinton running in place if you prefer to acknowledge my inspiration). For that I switched to Into the Zone, my current favorite podcast.

The Episode I was listening to was entitled Dead or Alive. I had listened to some of it and remember thinking this wasn’t that interesting an episode. Then when describing Nova Spivak’s crazy notions about preserving all human knowledge and burying it on the moon, it suddenly got my attention. I’ll let Wikipedia describe it.

“In 2015, Spivack co-founded The Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit organization created to spread knowledge across the solar system. Through the Arch Mission Foundation, Spivack curated the first permanent space library, which contained Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy contained on a quartz disk aboard the Tesla Roadster that was sent to space aboard the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket in 2018”

The “arch” in “arch mission” is supposed to be pronounced “ark” I think. So it’s like “archives” but also Noah’s ark with Kunzru did not mention. Goofy, sure. Elon Musk sends a car to Mars. Spivak talks him into including a small quartz disk which contains the Foundation trilogy. But startling to me since I’m on page 64 of 224 of the second volume of Asimov’s trilogy.. .

The rocket was supposed to crash on Mars but according to Hari Kunzru’s podcast it missed and is on an incredibly large orbit in our solar system.

Kunzru admitted reading the Foundation trilogy as a kid and being happy that the main character’s name was Hari. That would be Hari Seldon whose name Mark had remembered in our chat.

Goofy stuffy first thing in the morning.

Yesterday was my fourth Sunday not having to do church. Last night I dreamed about attending a concert. The players were all string players. I knew some of them. They were not happy with their performance. I remember giving the bass player a big hug of encouragement after the performance and listening to the cellist’s processing of the experience. Somehow I was involved in the playing but I’m unclear just how.

It’s a relief not to have a church dream to mark the fourth Sunday since quitting. I spent most of the day arranging my books. I have a new shelf in the study. Unfortunately I have been allowing my books to be in disarray in the living room. I have several bookshelves in that room and have started organizations more than once.

I have a shelf of T. S. Eliot stuff except for the wonderful Christopher Ricks edition which sits on my desk along with Emily Dickinson, Dante, and John Donne. I have a shelf of James Joyce stuff in the living room except for the stuff that is scattered throughout. I am a bit overwhelmed in trying to organize books on this floor. Upstairs my consistent goal is to shelf books by author. On the main floor I have found it convenient to have my music books in one place shelved mostly by author but sometimes by subject and my poetry books the same. I have also started little sections like African American history and music books and a folk music section.

My goal is to find a book when I want it. I need to organize the books on this floor somehow. I don’t think I have enough shelf space in the study to bring all of them into this room.

I like having a study and I like having important books on shelves in this room. But I haven’t figured out exactly how to do that.

And then there’s the planned upstairs music room.

I need to start working on that. I have put it off because it has had all kinds of stuff stored in it, but now most of that has been removed. Eileen and I are planning a trip to drop off games, clothes, and blankets to the Bibles for Mexico shop today. A lot of this stuff came from what will be the music room upstairs.

As soon as I can make some room in the music room we will arrange for someone to move the harpsichord from the church to the music room. I look forward to that. I’m also planning to put the marimba in that room. We may do them at the same time but that’s not necessary. The marimba disassembles and Eileen and I could probably do it ourselves, but we’ll see.

I am just beginning to see what it s to be “retired.” I put it in quotation marks because I’ve never emotionally understood church work as a job per se. I have always felt a bit like someone who does things he enjoys and gets a bit of pay for it. It’s still like that even without the responsibility of helping a community pray through its music. But the pay is coming from social security. Soon we will add a pension to it. And Eileen has her incomes from similar sources.

We are planning to hire a financial advisor after my eye surgery. They should help us sort all this out.

When Black History Is Unearthed,Who Gets to Speak for the Dead? by Jill Lepore

The October 4th issue of the New Yorker is the Fall book issue. I didn’t know they did one. The articles from it I am linking today are both dated September 27th but I have been reading them in the actual copy which is dated October 4th.

Jill Lepore always seems to grab me with her prose and ideas. This article about historic African American cemeteries is no exception. Lepore has a historians eye for complexity and coherence.

A Straight Line in the Darkness excerpts from Patricia Highsmith’s diaries

I have found three titles for this same article. It’s not unusual for a magazine or newspaper article to have a couple different headlines or titles, one in print and another online. But the title I have used is sort of the one in the actual magazine I have. A different title came up when I googled it. I’m about halfway through it. Highsmith is a writer I admire. The diary is bit gossipy but has interesting parts.

It’s a rainy morning in Holland, Michigan. I listened to We The People’s latest podcast during my morning routine. The participants outlined the upcoming Supreme Court docket and it doesn’t look good.

As I watch a fair amount of social media go by I suspect I am living in a age of propaganda in the U.S. Otherwise how can so many people support such many unsubstantiated and basically untrue notions. Of course truth might not have that much to do with it. It’s more about entertainment. But even the the entertaining is getting monstrous to me.

Case in point, the novel, The Vorrh by Brian Catling. I finished this on Friday. Whereas Kunzru put together a puzzle of characters and story and ultimately succeeds, in Gods Without Men for my money Catling doesn’t succeed with his array of characters and situations.

He pulls the story together at the end, but by that time I had lost patience with almost every character. I googled reviews and I seem to be in the minority. Michael Moorcock liked it in his 2015 Guardian Review.

I just took a moment and read this review. I learned from it that Catling was doing some satiric things on actual people of whom I have never heard. According to Moorcock not only does Catling come up with a character based on the French surrealist Raymond Russell, but Russell has written a book (mentioned in the novel) which also has a mysterious forest named The Vorrh. So maybe it’s just my ignorance showing. I note that nowhere does Moorcock say he likes the book. Only blurb worthy quotes and comparisons. I respect Moorcock as a writer, but I find the infighting about genre and so on uninteresting if not boring.

This reader did not like the book. It seems full of missed opportunities to wade into the nasty post colonial discussion of Europe and Africa. I know. I know. That’s not the point of telling a story. The story is the point. In this case as I followed the story I was repelled. Repelled by characters and situations. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing in a book. But I found myself questioning weird plot twists. Catling and his readers must have a taste for gratuitous bloody violence. More and more, I do not.

So maybe the judgment is upon me as a reader. Ignorant and seeking a character to admire or a plot with some daylight of redemption or decent humor. So be it. At this point, I’m not planning on reading the next two volumes of this trilogy that Moorcock was panting for in 2015.

Instead of reading yet another Kunzru novel I turned back to J. G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy. I have read two of the volumes, Troubles and The Singapore Grip which I remember enjoying. Farrell has a bitterly ironic eye for the fading empire. And he mercilessly concentrates on the perpetrators not the victims. He continues this in the last volume of the trilogy that I am now reading, The Siege of Krishnapur. It won the Booker Prize. It takes place in 1857, the year of what the Brits call “the great mutiny.” The introduction by Pankaj Mishra is very helpful in pointing out that “mutiny novels” were a Victorian thing for a while. Farrell’s story satirizes them and goes a step further in comedic ridicule. The intent reminds me a bit of Robin Diangelo’s insights about progressive white people in her Nice Racism.

The blurb on my copy of The Siege of Krishnapu describes the other two volumes of the trilogy. Troubles was “about the Easter 1916 Rebellion in Ireland. The Singapore Grip “takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set on the British Empire.” I have to quote the next part: “Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.”

I have all three in New York Review of Books reprint editions. These editions I find unfailingly well written and worth reading.

Eileen and I finished sorting and filing music in the choir room yesterday. It was quite a relief. I went to the organ area and checked for stuff I might be leaving behind. I believe my replacement begins this weekend, so it’s nice to gather up everything I’m planning to take with me and get out of the way as much as possible. I found some Bach that I definitely wanted. I also brought home my harpsichord toolkit and a gong.

Now all that’s left to bring home is my harpsichord and my marimba.

I celebrated with a real gin martini (and several more drinks) and put a few more items on my Friday night pizza.

Earlier I had a good meeting with my therapist. I found myself struggling to come up with a clear short description of the book Gods before Men. This is ironic because I have read it twice and Kunzru’s ideas are having an impact on me.

I’m referring to more than just that book. I plan to read all his novels but I’m also working my way through his 2020 podcast season of Into the Zone and following him on Twitter. It’s hard to define my attraction but I am enjoying learning about his take on many subjects.

I chatted with Dr. Birky (my therapist) about being an outsider. This is not the first time I have talked to him about this idea.

It occurred to me this morning that so far in his book, The Outsider, Colin Wilson has not used a musician as an example of an outsider. The section I read this morning was about Van Gogh. Previously he has used characters in fiction by Hemingway, Sartre, H. G. Wells, Camus and other real life people like T. E. Lawrence. Wilson was writing in the 50s and his thinking about this stuff would probably be different if he was writing in this century.

Either way, what’s important to me is not his ideas about being an outsider but my own evolving notion. Maybe “outsider” is the wrong word. But there is a pattern in my life and the life of my Father and his Father of not quite fitting in or meeting expectations of our chosen fields.

In my own case I feel like this stance has a strong redemptive side. I am a sort of outsider because the better colleagues and friends perceive me the less likely they are to invite me into their lives and circles. This feels redemptive because I’m pretty certain they (and I ) would benefit. But I need the invitation before this would be appropriate.

Plus I definitely do not see myself as an outsider in the arts.

I am drawn to beauty especially in music, poetry, and ideas. But, my experience has been that people in these areas usually have a prior criterion before granting credibility. This criterion boils down to fitting in and often, in my case, appearance.

I find this hilarious. In the age of the internet, I still have tons of access not only to works of art but information and discussion about them. This is despite not approaching my life work in a way that is obvious and acceptable to many if not most others who share my interests.

My eclecticism probably works against me. But of course it’s as aspect of myself that I value and enjoy. When I was young someone cautioned me about being a “jack of all trades and master of none.” Thankfully I didn’t take this little bit of advice. I think a good solid intellectual curiosity combined with an interest in craft and analysis has served me pretty well up this point. I’m certainly not a “jack of all trades,” but I do have a wide range of tastes and interests, often wider than other people I have met who also like music, poetry, and ideas.

If this isn’t correct, it is at least the way it seems to me. In addition I find that when humans are excluded from inner circles of art something in me questions it. I think this is because when I find art (music, poetry, and the like) successful and most beautiful there is a basic connection to what it means for anyone to be a human.

This is what I like Christopher Small’s concept of musicking: music as a verb which incudes many human activities that contribute to it.

So it doesn’t exactly feel like being an outsider when I find the things that give my life meaning are basically inclusive instead of exclusive. In fact it feels redemptive and rewarding.