I read my composed responses to Eileen yesterday. She was as unhappy as I about family comments on Facebook. She suggested that it would be appropriate and constructive if I posted them. If you haven’t read them on Facebook, judge for yourself.

When a family member wondered in a status “How people could support a mis-guided movement” presumably like Occupy Fill in the Blank, I responded this way:

“I support this movement because I think something is out of whack with our society (and political system). IMO protesting does not perpetuate corporate influence and greed. I  don’t even see how it does.  I think it makes people in power and those that agree with them uncomfortable enough to demonize and jail and attack other American citizens they disagree with. I want to be on the side of the down trodden, the ignored, the outcasts and those who do not have enough. But that’s just me. My point is that this movement makes sense to the people in it and it makes sense to me as well.”

When family members seem to object to my posting of a brief commentary by Robert Reich and to be suggesting that the problem is the government itself, not so much corporations or others, I responded this way:

“The way I see (admittedly weird and probably old-fashioned) we are the responsible party not some government out there. It’s the democracy we need to get control of. I still believe that we are the government, you and me. But we are people. IMO and this is where I really agree with former sec of labor Reich, corporations are not people. Our government has been taken from us by “the real nuisances in our society: the tsunami of big money into politics. We are not Wall Street or big corporations that can now spend enormous sums and influence regulations.” (Reich) Demonizing people who demonstrate seems unproductive to me, whether it’s Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street. I feel that being a citizen is a privilege and a responsibility.  Free speech of regular people is essential to democracy.”

I mostly put them here so that you can judge for yourself, dear reader, if my responses were reactive, unhelpful, disrespectful or all three.

I’ve been reading a new bio of Big Bill Broonzy. Also listening to cuts of his music on Spotify. I’m not really that familiar with him. I first read his name on a Pentangle album.

John Renbourn, a guitarist I still admire, said he started off trying to play like Big Bill Broonzy and that he was still trying (to).

The bio is very well written and researched. I like how the author, Bob Riesman, is so astute about writing of how Broonzy manufactured his personality (even his name) but still in the midst of deception articulated basic truths.

For example, he told stories about returning from WWI as a black ex-soldier and receiving bad treatment from whites.  Unfortunately, it looks like he never served in WWI. But the stories he told were typical of other ex-service men returning. Riesman even (cynically?) cites the uptick in lynchings of black people in the year these men returned. Ten of these people who were lynched were veterans of the recent war.

This morning, I realized what a privilege it really is to learn about people like Broonzy and also to play through the music of Mendelssohn and Prokofiev (which I have been doing this morning on my EP with headphones so as to not disturb Eileen’s rest).

The juxtaposition of these three men strikes me. All brilliant, all artists, all with important things to say. I see them this way.

Broonzy paints America in his songs,

Mendelssohn was a classicist,

and Prokofiev walked the fine line of composing in a Communist country and spoke to the contemporary human condition.

A motley crew of people I totally admire!

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Ruth Stone, National Book Award Winner, Dies at 96 – NYTimes.com

Never heard of her. Here’s a link to her poems at poetry foundation.

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20-Year Term for Text Messages Against Thai King Bhumibol – NYTimes.com

Seems a bit severe. Ahem.

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Ex-Khmer Rouge Leader Blames U.S. – NYTimes.com

Seems self-serving to blame the Khmer Rouge on US atrocities.

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Enduring Thanksgiving – NYTimes.com

Are We Getting Nicer? – NYTimes.com

Couple of refreshing takes on Thanksgiving. Now back to your regular programming of stuff that makes us all crazy….

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South Africa Passes Law Restricting Press Freedoms – NYTimes.com

What can I say? The country that gave us Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu is now getting more and more repressive.

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The Poor, the Near Poor and You – NYTimes.com

“…[H]ow hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff?”

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Here’s a few I haven’t read yet.

Book Review: The Language Wars – WSJ.com

Peggy Noonan On Steve Jobs And Why Big Companies Die – Forbes

Jenkins: If Only Obama Had Been This Guy – WSJ.com

or watched

Stephen Fry & friends on the life, loves and hates of Christopher Hitchens – IQ2 talks – YouTube

The Dewarists

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Thought I would blog a bit before starting preparing today’s meal.

My second ballet class canceled yesterday, so I had some extra time. I came home and there was a phone message from the secretary at church. She was madly trying to get her work done so she wouldn’t have to come back to work on Friday. I ended up going over and talking to her about Sunday’s bulletin. Came home and made an insert for the first communion hymn and emailed it off to her. I told her I would be glad to come back and look at the bulletin again if she wanted a second pair of eyes. She called later and said she was good to go.

Funny how much time that sort of thing takes. I managed to get some serious rehearsal at the piano of Sunday’s prelude: the 1st movement from Mozart’s Piano trio, K. 564.

I was disappointed to read some anti-Occupy comments from my family on Facebook.  I have to admit that people who are staunchly partisan right now seem to me to be highly influenced by where they get their information.  Also the logic of ire is often difficult for me to follow.

I know that I am influenced by where I get my information. I also know that I am extremely critical of my sources and often find myself asking why basic journalistic questions of who, what, where, when and why are not addressed by supposedly journalistic sources.

It is the nature of bias that we do not see our own bias as easily as we see the bias of others.

So I try to keep my guard up and stay fair in my assessments.

I also try to respond to people I disagree with if I can figure out a constructive way to do so. Yesterday after reading a couple of disturbing (to me, admittedly) comments, I composed replies, didn’t hit send (so to speak) and wandered off to cook.

There is a french phrase cooks use: mise en place. It means “everything in place.” When I cook, I usually do a bit of this, laying out ingredients and tools. Yesterday I took advantage of my leisurely lack of scheduled events and laid out ingredients and tools for Upside-down Pear Gingerbread,

Pie Crusts, filling for 2 (naturally) pumpkin pies and one blueberry pie.

I also entertained prepping some other dishes for today but by the time I was done was a bit tired and didn’t do more than the Gingerbread and pies.

I never did “hit send” to my reactionary family. Sometimes less is better.

This morning I have already done some dishes by hand as I waited for my coffee. Only read a few poems in my usual morning reading time because I want to get to cooking soon.

Here’s our menu:

Turkey breast (for Eileen and Mom)
Stove top stuffing (carnivore & veggie)
mashed potatoes with gravy
store bought soft rolls (Eileen’s request)
Pearls & Rubies (onions & cranberries – a Jane Brody recipe)
Basil Butternut Smash (creamed butternut squash – a Devin Alexander recipe)
Roasted Root Vegetables with Pear Glaze (a Mollie Katzen recipe for sweet potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, parsnips in a pear glaze… mine will be with an apricot glaze because Miejers didn’t have any pear nectar only apricot and peach)

and of course Pumpkin Pie & Blueberry Pie for dessert

It’s kind of a big meal for three. And I always give myself the caveat that if I get bogged down I can drop one or more of the fancy veggie dishes.

It should be a relaxing day.

Yesterday,  just for fun, I tried to use mostly compositions for ballet class instead of improv. It’s my impression that the other pianist employed by the college doesn’t do much improvising. He arrives with one or more huge books of music he has assembled.

When I asked him what was in them, he said he collects old music magazines with salon music in them.

The dancers never recognize them, he said. I supposed he thought that this was a good thing (the lack of familiarity). This music is kind of goofy to me and I don’t think I would enjoy sitting and playing it for hours. I, of course, didn’t mention this to him.

I recently bought some fake books for use with dance class. Yesterday I used Schubert waltzes from a collection of his waltzes

Bach pieces from one of the new fake books,

and Chopin music from another.

The fake books are a good reader’s digest approach to having a bunch of music available and they enable me to play without page turns and have enough control of the piece to follow the instructor’s intentions. It’s sort of tricky using a lot of music (like Bach and Chopin) because the structure of the music often includes some (wonderful) irregularities of phrase length. Thus, I have been analyzing pieces so that I am clear how they will adapt to ballet exercises (usually in 8s).

My Tuesday/Thursday class is a beginner class. I began the semester improvising very very clear pieces to help them with their dance. As the semester has proceeded I have used a bit more subtlety. It occurred to me, however, that they had not danced to pre-composed pieces. Hence, yesterday I managed to rectify this with some lovely music.

My music often is directed at the instructors. It helps them retain the clarity of the structure of their exercises.

Sometimes these combinations are rather lengthy and the class simply follows the instructor. In this case, especially, it’s important that the instructor not be distracted with irregularity in the accompaniment.

My nephew, Ben, put up this video on Facebook yesterday.

I quite like this. I have listened to Imogen Heap before. But this reminded me why I like her.

I made a treadmill Spotify playlist of her stuff. Excellent! This video’s piece reminds me of Peter Gabriel’s use of world music. Which I also have admired.

Finally, I continue reading Gilbert Murray’s elegant and entertaining The Rise of the Greek Epic. I enjoy his combination of erudition, humor and insight.

As I was reading this morning of the practice of symbolically sacrificing scapegoats (called pharmakoi) I was reminded of my own horror of watching my country embrace torture in its hysterical response to terrorism.

Although, Murray sees the Greeks of history as a sort of superior race, I still find his insights about how badly humans sometime treat each other enlightening.

“… [A]s so often happens in great crises and times of suffering, the multitude, putting all their hopes in something irrational rather than in reason, shrieked to the god with one voice, dragged the prisoners to the altar, and, as the prophet commanded compelled the whole sacrifice to take place.”

Earlier as he describe this entire incident where the prophet Euphrantides attempts to incite both the ruler, Themistocles and the entire gathered assembly to murder, Murray sardonically comments as the prophet enters into the scene: “there is sure to be a prophet in such a business!”

He continues later:

“As a matter of fact, it is just on occasions like this that human sacrifices have most tended to occur: in a disorganized army or a rabble full of fear, egged on by some fanatical priest or prophet. There were bloody doings in Rome whent the fear of Hannibal was strong, judicial murders of vestal virgins buryings alive of  ‘Gallus et Galla, Graecus et Graeca’ in the Forum Boarium (Livy, xxii. 57.) There was a great burning of Jews, we may remember, after the earthquake at Lisbon.”

Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 2nd edition. p. 34

Torture is not human sacrifice. But the idea of modern scapegoating is an interesting one to contemplate. Especially since it has along and sordid human history. It looks like to me like fear does breed irrationality.

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The Two Moons – NYTimes.com

Two minority parties?

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‘Rome,’ a Personal History by Robert Hughes – Review – NYTimes.com

Another book by Hughes. Looks like a good one.

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‘The Music Box’ in New Orleans is a Sonic Shantytown – NYTimes.com

This music entices me. I don’t see how it could anything but very very cool.

Slideshow:

House Music in New Orleans – Slide Show – NYTimes.com

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The Believer – Salman Rushdie talks with Terry Gilliam

Two of my favorite people. Bookmarked to read.

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Dallas Church Preserving the Legacy of Robert Johnson – NYTimes.com

Church of the blues.

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Over the years, I keep running across Gilbert Murray as a writer who informs my ideas.

I picked up his The Rise of the Greek Epic this morning and read the preface to the second edition.

Ed Friedman (of the fam system fame) derived his notion and title Failure of Nerve from Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion.

I think that I already had read some in Murray before reading Friedman, but F’s use of Murray solidified an interest of mine.

Several of Murray’s books including Five Stages are available free at Manybooks.net as ebooks.

Before reading in Murray this morning, I read an interesting poem by William Carlos Williams, “The Death of Franco of Cologne: His Prophecy of Beethoven.”

Franco of Cologne lived in the 13th century and was an important musical theorist.

His big contribution was that musical notation should notate duration.

Before that rhythms and note lengths were subject to applying certain patterns that varied according to applications called Rhythmic modes.

I spent a good deal of my Medieval Music class in grad school working these out.

Anyway, Williams’ poem reminded me of Browning.

It’s an early work of his.

Then I turned to Bacevich and found this enlightening paragraph which synposizing America’s change from an “Empire of Production” to an “Empire of Consumption.”

Bacevich gives Maier (another guy I’m reading) credit for these notions, but I like the way he puts it.

“In the 1960s, however, the empire of production began to come undone. Within another twenty years—thanks to permanently negative trade balances,

a crushing defeat in Vietnam,

oil shocks,

‘stagflation,’

and the shredding of a moral consensus that could not withstand the successive assaults of Elvis Presley,

‘the pill,’

and the counterculture,

along with news reports that God had died—

it [the Empire of Production]had become defunct. In its place, according to Maier,there emerged a new ‘Empire of Consumption.’ Just as the lunch-bucket toting factory worker had symbolized the empire of production during its heyday,

the teenager, daddy’s credit card in her blue jeans and headed to the mall, now emerged as the empire of consumption’s emblematic figure.

The evil genius of production was Henry Ford.

In the empire of consumption, Ford’s counterpart was Walt Disney.”

Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, p. 29 (pictures added, of course)

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Skipped blogging this morning to prep for Advent I Bulletin. That way the boss and the secretary could have it a bit earlier this week.

Right now I’m sitting in the ballet studio in between classes with my net book propped up on the lovely steinway baby grand I usually play between classes.

Yesterday, I played my little heart out at church. The choir did well. By the end of service I was feeling pretty beat. Still had the post service rehearsal to do.

During this rehearsal two men proceeded to climb ladders and hang the Advent wreath.

This totally ruined rehearsal and threw me further off. It prolonged work on one anthem a good 20 minutes as I personally struggled to focus and stay calm.

Finally I asked the men to delay their work which they readily agreed to do.

By that time, I had little wit and energy left. Finished rehearsal but was totally drained by the end.

Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you.

So my web site was not coming up this morning.

Neither was Bluhost (my server).

Okey dokey, I thought, I’ll just use a FB note as a substitute.

FB is a heckuvalot clunkier. It apparently doesn’t allow links, so I guess I couldn’t do my usual list at the end of a blog.

Also importing images doesn’t seem to work.

Sheesh.

Fortunately I kept checking back and it did come up eventually.

I began my morning thinking about Ed Friedman…. My brother Mark asked me if I had any of the tapes of the lectures he and I heard by Friedman. I couldn’t find them. But I have been thinking of re-reading Friedman, anyway.

He was a huge influence on me.

From this morning’s reading.

“When anxiety reaches certain thresholds, ‘reasonableness and honest’ no longer defend against illusion, and then even the most learned ideas can begin to function as superstition.”

[SBJ note: Superstition can be thought of as the disconnection between cause and effect]

Friedman is mostly about encouraging people to keep their own sense of differentiation in the face of other people’s anxieties and emotions.

It’s a ‘failure of nerve’ in his view to ignore how a situation adapts constantly towards the members who are weak and ignores those trending toward visionary, energetic, imaginative, and motivated behavior.  I see this each time a group attempts consensus when someone in the group is not quite on the same page and brings process to a halt.

It’s a ‘failure of nerve’ when a leader relies more on expertise than his or her own capacity to be decisive.

It’s a ‘failure  of nerve’ when in the face of emotional process we become obsessed with data and technique.  This is a kind of denial or looking in the wrong place for something. Emotional processing is pattern oriented. But this pattern is often denied or not factored into empirical  considerations of information and a bad pattern continues to repeat itself despite new information and new techniques in a baffling way.

It’s a ‘failure of nerve’ to “assume that toxic forces can be regulated through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values and striving for consensus.

Anyway.

Enough preaching.

But it does bring to mind the movie Eileen and I saw yesterday.

Although Hoover (in this movie) commits a lot of Friedman errors and is an extremely flawed character, I saw the movie more as a love story than a history of a monster.

Di Capprio gives a stellar performance (looking eerily like Jack Nicholson at times). His make-up to portray the character at various ages works.  Other actors are not quite as believable especially as old people.

I have to stop because I started late due to stupid stupid server failure.

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Art Endures, Capitalism Degenerates: The Evolving Career of Amanda Palmer < PopMatters

Amanda Fucking Palmer (as she calls herself on twitter) is Neil Gaiman’s wife. who knew?

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So It Went: A New Biography of Kurt Vonnegut Is a Portrait of an Artist who Cultivated a Scruffy Image | The New York Observer

This guy seems to totally not get Vonnegut. Wonder if the bio he is reviewing talks about Vonnegut raising his nieces and nephews after a death in the family.

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Why Doing the Ethical Thing Isn’t Automatic – NYTimes.com

I think we never know how we will respond in a crisis until we are actually tested.

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Mocking Vladimir Putin With Poetic Flair in Russia – NYTimes.com

More poetry in the news. Hopefully these people will not be killed.

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Kindle Fire: An open letter to Jeff Bezos • The Register

Well this article really cooled my ardor for Kindle Fire. The writer returns his Kindle Fire to Best Buy because he can’t use his Google Log on. Sheesh.

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Here are some articles I have bookmarked to read.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The Educational Lottery

Jonathan Rée – Dissing God | New Humanist

I Was Wrong, and So Are You – Magazine – The Atlantic

New Left Review – Dylan Riley: Tony Judt: A Cooler Look

Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error | Business | Vanity Fair

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I had another full day yesterday. All good stuff but it left me pretty exhausted at the end of the day. I managed to treadmill but omitted the dancing….

I was proud of myself for balancing both checkbooks yesterday. Eileen and I have consolidated most of our debt into a house equity account which has a very low interest. Now if I can just refrain from building up debt again. I have a plan of paying myself $400 a month for savings and retiring this debt at $1K a month. We’ll see if I can actually pull it off.

I have been relistening to Quadrophenia on Spotify.

I still have the vinyl for this one. Relistening to this, it strikes me how good the writing and production is. Nice melodies, good orchestration, good use of sounds. Very cool. Townsend really is a fine composer in my estimation.

Also relistening to Bartok’s first piano concerto.

Gyorgy Sandor’s recording is sitting on Naxos and Spotify. I head Sandor lecture and play years ago.  He died in 2005 and actually knew Bartok. Helluva player playing fantastic music. Listening this morning I could hear Stravinsky’s influence on Bartok more than usual. I interlibrary loaned the score.

So today is officially a day off for me. I slept in a bit. Eileen and I will probably spend the day together goofing off, maybe take in a movie. I need to rest.

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Michelle Obama’s Mission – Energizing the Campaign – NYTimes.com

Upcoming election will be an interesting one. Mrs. Obama has changed her tune a bit. Starting to get much more involved. I think she is acting a bit like a VP by saying things that the Prez can’t say in the same way due to his position.

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Supreme Court Coverage of the Health Care Case – NYTimes.com

I hope the Court grants C-Span request to broadcast this.

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The Technocratic Nightmare – NYTimes.com

I was intrigued by this description in this article:

“At one point, everyone was asked to sing the new European national anthem to the tune of “Ode to Joy.” Dead silence. No one knew the new words that had been written to go with that masterpiece.”

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Failure Is Good – NYTimes.com

Good because partisanship has so divided the conversation as to make it functionally unworkable….. let the voters decide which direction they would like to take: government or free market. At least this is the point of view of this article.

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Presidential Politics and Clean Air – NYTimes.com

this is the editorial

Re-election Strategy Is Tied to a Shift on Smog – NYTimes.com

this is the reporting.

It seems like we are headed in the wrong direction when we compare health and profit, but what do I know?

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Russia – Chechen Poet Shot to Death – NYTimes.com

This guy sounds like he was a government supporter but it is still terrible that he seems to have been killed for his ideas and poetry by the rebels.

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FUN OBITS

Lee Pockriss, Composer and Songwriter, Is Dead at 87 – NYTimes.com

He wrote the song:

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving ‘Oz’ Munchkins, Dies at 93 – NYTimes.com

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The future is definitely interesting.

By that I mean I sometimes feel like I am living in the future: reactionary comments from adults on the internet that I knew in previous lives;

following my daughter, Elizabeth, on Twitter who was wandering the streets of New York last night facilitating the street protests of Occupy Wallstreet;

chatting online with my other daughter, Sarah, who is living in England;

reading the blogs of my son in California (detailing his daily bus commute to his job as a mental health care worker),

my quasi-son-in-law, Jeremy (who is living in China and posting translations of surreal Chinese short stories which I quite like);

my niece, Emily, who keeps up entries in her own blog describing her efforts to live a clearly socially responsible and interesting life of farming, food and horses;

my nephew Ben, whose blog is an opportunity for him to show off his clear writing style and preoccupation with decency.

Pretty cool, actually.

I managed to have a very full day yesterday, beginning with the usual ballet class. Then I came home and quickly changed into my funeral clothes and walked to my church. There I met with the cellist and singer and did last minute run-throughs with both of them. Proceeded to play the funeral. High points included listening to my cellist play 3 movements of some of my favorite music: the Bach Cello suites (from no. 1). Then grabbed some food at the funeral luncheon, rehearsed with my piano trio, walked home and worked on my harpsichord a bit, chatted up the worker who was putting the final touch on our new kitchen flat roof (handrails), chatted with Sarah in England online (as mentioned above), treadmilled and prepared Eileen’s late supper.

Life is good.

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Subsidies of the Rich and Famous

Facts from a Republican senator.

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The Face of Modern Slavery – NYTimes.com

Slavery is still with us in the world. It needs to be stamped out.

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In Campaign Financing, More Money Can Beat Big Money – NYTimes.com

I admire the author of this, Lawrence Lessig.

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Cornel West Returning to Union Theological Seminary – NYTimes.com

Another hero of mine.

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Don DeLillo Stories, Led by ‘The Angel Esmeralda’ – Review – NYTimes.com

This looks like a good read.

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Sam Haywood and Joshua Bell at Carnegie Hall – Review – NYTimes.com

Two examples of the impact of tech on concert etiquette in this article: the Ipad page turner and the dam cell phone interruption.

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Jon Gillock Plays Messiaen – Review – NYTimes.com

Interested in this man’s book on Messiaen.

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Blaze Destroys Pavilion, Gay Dance Hall on Fire Island – NYTimes.com

A little bit of history destroyed…. also learned a new word: “bleve” boiling liquid expanding vapor explosives

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Found a good poem in Bly’s book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, this morning.

A Family Thing

I guess it’s an old family
Thing. Someone is Napoléon,
Someone is sacrificed. Call in
Jesus, if you don’t get it.

Pick up that cooking on the floor.
Let the hired man go on
Wasting his life. He’ll find
Someone to waste it with.

It’s like a game in which
The game itself loses.
It’s like a picnic in which
The basket eats the food.

It’s all right if I go to college;
Most people don’t. It’s all right
To end up bringing your own
Father home. Just be quiet.

Some powers are stronger
Than we are. They never say
When the battle is.
It was last night. You lost.

I think it captures something about family. Heh. Years ago I heard Bly do a poetry reading at U of M.

Much later he got into the “bunch of guys drumming a circle thing”of Iron John.

As I recall, this book had some nice stories in it, but I never really got into the whole guy thing.

I laid out my harpsichord jacks on Tuesday.

They’re the little thing that moves up and down and plucks the string.

Eileen helped me tape them down yesterday morning.

Then I marked them from the guide jacks the length of which I had previously determined.

The next step will be to trim them down.  My thinking is that I should just go ahead and attempt to get my harpsichord back in working shape. If I screw it up, I will either order more parts and try again or (more likely) find a builder to finish it for me.

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Candidates’ Gaffes Dismay Some Republicans – NYTimes.com

Hard, really, to lose credibility in this day and age of short memories and uneducated people who like to be angry.

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Mayor Bloomberg Confronts Occupy Wall Street – NYTimes.com

I’m a little concerned. My oldest daughter, Elizabeth, is right in the middle of all this. They have more stuff planned today. I just hope she doesn’t get hurt.

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Why China Won’t Listen – NYTimes.com

Description of some Chinese subtleties of culture. I remember watching my my daughter, Elizabeth, and her partner, Jeremy, argue with their Chinese landlord, (in Chinese) deliberately trying to use “face” to get her to do basic upkeep of their apartment.

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Health Insurance and the Broccoli Test – NYTimes.com

A nationally mandated health insurance law makes sense to me. One has to insure one’s car, right? I would prefer that we handle our health care without insurance companies altogether, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

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Sexual Harassment in the Workplace – NYTimes.com

Some follow up letters on an article I posted recently.

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The People’s Library and the future of OWS – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

Salman Rushdie commented somewhere that this is what pissed him off the most, the city police confiscating the library. I get that.

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I finished reading “Songs of Grass” by Whitman this morning. It is a beautiful poem. An all encompassing vision of humanity (and especially America), it ends where it begins with simple images of grass.

Grass that grows from the dead body of the poet that feeds us.

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”

from section 52 of “Leaves of Grass”

Earlier images in poem linger in my mind.

Grass as “the handkerchief of the Lord…”

as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves….”

from section 6 of “Leaves of Grass”

A section in The Gift by Hyde jumped out at me this morning as well.

I think about the way I have chosen to live and how it contrasts and even sometimes troubles the people around me (excepting of course those that love me).

“The village indolent appears whenever the will to work devours necessary leisure…”

Writing about Whitman and his imagined American type, Hyde touches on something that is dear to me…. necessary leisure.

Necessary leisure appears “whenever farmers in the Midwest start plowing at night or cutting down the groves around their homes so as to plant soybeans right up to the windows.”

“Whitman’s idle man stands for the hidden spirit without which no one gets anything from trade. He refuses to anything but enjoy the fruits of commerce.  He eats up all the profits. The harder they work, the lazier he gets.

The more money they reinvest in the company, the more he squanders his inheritance. The village indolent, like the religious mendicant, has riches that cannot be distinguished from his poverty. The ‘poverty’ of the mystics is a not an absence of material objects; it consists, rather, in breaking down the habit of resting in, or taking seriously, things that are less than God. ‘ “Blessed are the poor” is a psychological law,” says the poet Theodore Roethke, ”it’s the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers the freedom of the universe.” ‘

This leads me to another book I have been reading in.

The Quantum and the Lotus is literally a dialogue between an astrophysicist (Trinh Xuan Thuan) and a Buddhist monk (Matthieu Ricard). Both are Buddhists. Both are scientists.

I am drawn to the Buddhist ideas about egoism and altruism. They seem to describe a Whitman like poverty of spirit (Blessed are the poor, again). The God of Whitman and Buddhism is a God I can acknowledge and believe in. It swells and encompasses other ideas of religion.

“If our aim is to be profoundly satisfied with our existence, then some things are essential and others can easily be dispensed with. Buddhism’s way of looking at the world allows us to draw up a priority list covering our goals and activities, and thus take control of our lives. Its analysis of the mechanisms of happiness and suffering clearly shows the divergent results of egoism versus altruism.”

Mattieu Ricard in The Quantum and the Lotus

” … whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”

Whitman again, section 48 of Song of Myself.

As so often happens I find my divergent reading converging. Authors chatter on about the same ideas and subjects. I find this very satisfying and keeps me thinking.

All this seriousness leads me to further serendipity. I read for two hours last night in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

His characters began discussing Herodotus…even to the point of calling him the “Father of Lies.”  Somewhere in the past few days I read the same quote in an article or book referring to a series of historians, Herodutus, Gibbons and another one. The source escapes me this morning, but not the meaning.

I quite like the way Gaiman humanizes and immortalizes gods of differing traditions wandering around the US with his character, Shadow. Fun reading.

Odin is called Wednesday in Gaiman’s novel. “Wednesday.Danish, Dansk Onsdag, (“Ons-dag” = Odens/Odins dag/day” link to source of this etymology. )

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Rushdie Wins Facebook Fight Over Identity – NYTimes.com

The part I like best about this article is Rushdie (unconsciously?) quoting Talking Heads: “Give me back my name.”

There’s a word for it
And words don’t mean a thing
There’s name for it
And names make all the difference in the world
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth
Let X make a statement
Let breath pass through those cracked lips
That man was my hero
And now that word has been taken from us
Some things can never be spoken
Some things cannot be pronounced
That word does not exist in any language
It will never be uttered by a human mouth

Give me back my name
Give me back my name
Something has been changed in my life
Something has been changed in my life
Something must be returned to us
Something must me returned to us

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It looks like I have a new poet to continue reading. I finished Paterson by William Carlos Williams this morning. I am quite taken with his writing. I ordered his two volume Collected Poems from Amazon (used, of course; plus I used my Discover Dollars to pay for it).

I also interlibrary-loaned a poem I found mentioned in the bio on the Poetry Foundation page, Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

Apparently this was panned by the critics, so of course I’m pretty interested in it. Heh.

Also read the last chapter in Williams’s autobiography which is entitled Chapter 58 The Poem Paterson.

The last complete section of Paterson begins with a detailed description of this painting.

I haven’t quite worked out why he does this. Something to do with beginnings and endings.  Click on the pic to read this section of the poem.

I laid out my jacks for my harpsichord yesterday. The next step appears to be cutting them to the proper length.

I am playing through the 300 or so pieces in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (mentioned in previous posts). Doing so in order to keep myself inspired to finish off the harpsichord and get it back in playing condition.

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Flavorwire » A Collection of Rejected Titles for Classic Books

Some interesting back story on proposed titles for familiar works.

“Philip Roth’s most famous novel went through incarnations as The Jewboy, Wacking Off, and A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis before it became Portnoy’s Complaint.”

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London Under – The Secret History Beneath the Streets – By Peter Ackroyd – Book Review – NYTimes.com

This makes me want to go back and finish his huge book on London.

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Astronauts Head To Space Station in Russian Craft – NYTimes.com

This reads like the sci fi of my youth.

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How Romney Could Win – NYTimes.com

Bill Keller outlines reasons this could happen.

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Is Mandatory Voting a Good Idea? – NYTimes.com

Letters about this article.

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Support for Raising Taxes – NYTimes.com

Letters about THIS article.

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Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time – NYTimes.com

Kristoff continues to tell stories of courageous people.

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The Topic of Cancer – NYTimes.com

This is from the Ethics column which I read each week. I think the answer to this person’s question about abandoning her dying boyfriend is a good one.

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Rules for an Honorable Nightcap – NYTimes.com

I like this.

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An Unusual Library Finds a New Home – NYTimes.com

Only library of its kind. Features obscure and local small publications of Chicago.

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Liberal or Conservative, the Problem Is Ignorance – NYTimes.com

This has myth busting ideas in it about who people get their news.

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I have been fantasizing about completing my harpsichord’s renovation during Hope’s Christmas break.

The main job left to do is insert the plectra and then voice (trim) them.

There’s no question I don’t have enough time to do this right now. Even though I only work a couple hours a day accompanying ballet, I find it difficult to motivate myself on a large project like this.

And Monday’s are especially hard due to the effort I put out on Sunday.

Yesterday, I pretty much nailed the Milhaud and Buxtehude organ pieces I played.  The choir sounded good. Afterwards, there were some visiting musicians who were not particularly friendly and I was glad that I the music had gone well. They chatted me up but very reservedly. Good grief.

I seem to be continuing my preoccupation with the music from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.

I was reading in Naylor’s book (see previous post) and he mentions how appropriate all the music would be when staging Shakespeare since it is contemporary to him.

I even Spotified and listened to people play music from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as I treadmilled yesterday.

So enough blogging…. back to work today!

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Architect Rafael Viñoly Likes His Sundays Dull – NYTimes.com

I like this feature that the NYT runs on Sundays describing how different people live out THEIR weekend.

This guy actually works as well as plays his many pianos. Very cool.

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David Lynch’s Album, ‘Crazy Clown Time’ – NYTimes.com

Did you know this guy was a musician? I didn’t.

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Turning the Dialogue From Wealth to Values – NYTimes.com

I basically agree with this article but am puzzled that he didn’t address the basic lack of value in people who move money around for exorbitant fees… which makes them rich but doesn’t really contribute to society

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Dirty Harry Meets Dirtier Edgar – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd has an interesting interview with Eastwood. Some fascinating back story on the movie and history. I love the comments of screenwriter, Black.

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Sex Harassment – What on Earth Is That? – NYTimes.com

Telling dirty jokes? Does my language offend? Tricky stuff.

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Why Are Political Cartoons Incendiary? – NYTimes.com

Intelligent questions from the former long time editor of The Nation.

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As I reached for my copy of Edward Naylor’s An Elizabethan Virginal Book, the phrase, “catching up the past,” went through my mind. Although this book was originally published in 1905, I still think it might have insights for me.

My edition is a Da Capo reprint from 1970. I have had it for ages.

After catching up a bit on William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman this morning, I pulled out a volume of my old Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (the subject of Naylor’s book) and began playing in it.

The music dates from over a hundred years before Bach was born. It’s beauty and cleverness still holds my attention. Once again I am impressed how little squiggles on a page are sort of a secret message from people who lived and breathed centuries ago.

I originally purchased this volume and a volume of Bach’s harpsichord music as I was putting together my harpsichord kit. I find it satisfying that this music still draws me in and holds meaning for me decades later.

A section in Paterson which struck me this morning seems appropriate:

A WORLD OF ART
THAT THROUGH THE YEARS HAS
SURVIVED!

-the museum became real
The Cloisters—-
on its rock

casting its shadow—
“la réalité! la réalité!
la réa, la réa, la réalité!”

As I read this in Paterson, I thought of the idea of an existing canon of art that is somehow permanent (an idea that I find myself resisting as I realize how ephemeral the whole idea of humanity is in the eyes of the universe). But I like the idea that some stuff survives. And that it informs our experience now in a way that relates to the original creators and their audiences.

This leads me to another section of Paterson I came across this morning:

Death
has no peer:
wandering in the woods,
a field crowded with small flowers
in which the wounded beast lies down to rest     .

We shall not get to the bottom:
death is a hole
in which we are all buried
Gentile and Jew.

The flower dies down
and rots away      .
But there is a hole
in the bottom of the bag.

It is the imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It  is through this hole
we escape    .     .

WordPress doesn’t seem to want to let me do the indentations that Williams put into this poem (as it has refused to do so in the past). I mention it because it did allow me to put space in the periods which are Williams’ original.

Anyway…. I love the idea that both death and imagination are holes at the bottom.

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The Reign of the One Percenters | Christopher Ketcham | Orion Magazine

Fascinating diatribe most of which makes sense to me. I liked this:

“… [P]attern exhaustion, … paleoanthropologists define [it] as that moment in Stone Age societies when the patterns on pottery no longer advance. Instead, old patterns are recycled. With pattern exhaustion, there can be only repetition of the great creative leaps of the past. The culture loses its forward-looking vision and begins to die.”

Sounds suspiciously like a lot of stuff I see around me these days.

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Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Will Contest Large Tax Bill – NYTimes.com

This guy keeps on keeping on. Inspiring to me.

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Friend With Benefits – NYTimes.com

Charles Blow: “Government is not the enemy. Not always. Don’t believe that right-wing malarkey.”

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Arms and the Corrupt Man – NYTimes.com

Update on arms dealers in the world.

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Newly Released Transcripts Show a Bitter and Cynical Nixon in ’75 – NYTimes.com

Nixon continues to fascinate me.

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Morris Philipson, Who Led the University of Chicago Press, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com

Another obit.  I admire the U of Chicago press.

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This morning I’m thinking about the concert Eileen and I attended last night.

We heard the Kenny Barron Trio.  Technically, he was impeccable. And his bass player, Kiyoshi Kitagawa (http://kitagawa.exblog.jp/) was amazing.

This will give you a taste of Kitagawa’s playing. The first 4 minutes are his solo. Different drummer in this video.

and drummer, Johnathan Blake (http://johnathanblake.com/)

was phenomenal. But I found myself losing interest in Barron’s playing after about half the program when I began to hear some of the same licks over and over in his improvs.

In this YouTube you can hear Barron’s solo at the beginning which was pretty similar to a lot of his playing last night (at times it reminded me of technique exercises – 1:18 – 1:34 played with excellence – but I just don’t find it interesting musically), but you can hear Blake playing up a storm here on drums (different bass player).

It probably didn’t help that a couple of the profs at Hope raved about how good he was. One of them (a fine jazz pianist himself) even said he was his favorite player.

And Barron’s compositions (which made up most of the evening) had nice tunes (or “heads”) as they say. But I found the bass player and drummers improvs much more interesting and unpredictable.

I would say that he started 90% of his arrangements the same way with a solo piano intro. This puzzled me. With so much talent on stage why wasn’t this man being more creative? Hard to say.

I just know that after hearing the Dave Holland group a few years ago, I walked away with unabashed enthusiasm and admiration for what they were doing in their music.

Last night, I thought once again that historical jazz performed live has lost its edge and interest for me.

I was unsurprised to read that Barron is a professor himself (currently at Julliard). I suspect there’s something about codification of thought and development of pedagogy to transmit a lively art like jazz that suffocates it.

I felt little risk taking in his playing. On the other end of the stage the bass player and drummer were all about excitement and risk. And they played with incredible ensemble.

Attendance was good and the audience was very receptive (standing ovation). There were many young people in attendance unlike for the Enso String Quartet.

I ask myself why I was more impressed with the Enso String Quartet’s playing of Haydn, Bartok, and Dvorak? I guess I see their music also as historical but still of interest to me. I listen and study this music in a certain way, not as a pattern of contemporary music making but of art worth studying and learning from. For me historical jazz is more about recordings in 20th century than what people are playing now.

The harmonic vocabulary of jazz doesn’t interest me that much as living breathing music of now.  It seeks complexity almost for its own sake like much 20th century music did.

If the results were intriguing to me I would think that’s fine. But I look for music which attracts me viscerally. I am often attracted to the simple and profound (at least what seems profound to me).

Virtuosity and complexity for its own sake just doesn’t interest me that much. Probably I’m just a simple rock and roller at heart looking for musical beauty wherever I can find it.

There was musical beauty in the performance last night. I just didn’t find it in the piano improvisations.

I am blogging right away this morning because I have another full day today and might not get to it if I begin my day reading.

Yesterday after playing class, I practiced organ then went to a doctor’s appointment.

Gained 4 pounds since my last visit. She is unhappy with my blood pressure. She has now set an even lower standard for me: 120 as the high number. Trending over that, she says, is as  bad as 160 at my age. I’m actually not sure I totally buy this. She asked me to lose some weight and refrained from upping my meds. I was looking over my last few months of BP readings. Of 79 readings, 19 are 120 or lower for the upper number and 42 are 130 or higher, so I guess I am trending higher. It was low this morning.

She also ordered a bone density test for me.

She thinks I have lost height,

but this stems from a measurement of 5 feet 10 inches her office once took.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been that tall, but will obviously get the test. She asked me to start taking Calcium and Vitamin D, so I started doing that today (Eileen has a lot of this laying around).

Went from the doctor to a piano trio rehearsal, then a meeting with my boss. The arrangement I did yesterday sounded pretty cool with violin, cello and piano. I showed my boss several possibilities of service music for the future as she requested.  Came home and exercised then picked up Eileen and we went to the pub. A good day but a bit tiring.

Today I have an even fuller schedule. Class at 8:30,

then a veteran’s day service at my Mom’s nursing home, a wedding at 3 and then Eileen and I have tickets to a jazz concert this evening. She is meeting some family and friends in Muskegon today for lunch.

I will need to pace myself a bit today even though all my gigs are pretty easy.

The people fixing our bathroom ran into problems yesterday. Our old fashioned claw foot bath tub didn’t go back together easily.

It had a broken part. Also at one point a valve they were working with gave way and started leaking. They looked pretty harried. It’s still not quite done and at least one of them will back this morning to finish the job, hopefully. They have been every morning this week since Tuesday. I am surprised how much this intruded into my solitude. The workers are friendly and seem competent. I just like having some down time alone I guess.

I finished reading Playing the Jesus Game by Alden Nowlan. I don’t usually read books of poetry straight through. I tend to savor a poem when I find one I like. But I have enjoyed Nowlan.

Here’s a poem from this collection I liked.

CHRIST

Aloft in a balsam fir I watched Christ go,
two crows in that same tree made human laughter.

He clambered over the log fence and crossed
the orange-yellow field, his purple skirts

swishing the grain and I could hear that sound,
so close he was, and separate the hairs

in his red beard. He passed beneath me, never
once looking up, and having reached the gate

to the hill pasture shrank smaller and smaller
becoming first a fist and then a finger

and then a fleck of purple on the hillside.
At last, at the edge of the wood, he vanished altogether.

from Playing the Jesus Game by Alden Nowlan

I inter-library loaned 3 volumes of his work.

I sat reading The  Mysterious Naked Man by him while I waited at the doctor’s office yesterday. Here’s a poem from it I liked.

ABSOLUTION

father it seems
I am condemned
to forgive

you,
having looked
into my own mirror
so many times
and seen your face.

When I like this many poems by a poet, I like to have a volume of his work handy so I can remember him and read him from time to time.

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Brain Exam Detects Awareness in 3 ‘Vegetative’ Patients – NYTimes.com

This is fascinating to me. When I was a child in Tennessee, one of my fellow students was hit by a car and never regained consciousness. She eventually went home in a twilight state half way between wakefulness and full coma. I remember her well. I’m sure I visited her. Eventually I wrote songs and poems about her.

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Girls Just Want to Go to School – NYTimes.com

Another story of courage, this time of a young girl. I love it that Kristoff points out how we can learn from her.

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We are having our bathroom floor redone and the workmen have been showing up good and early for the last three days. This means I have a bit less time to blog for some reason. They should get here about ten minutes and hopefully finish the job.

Yesterday, Eileen helped me run down the songs usually associated with all the service branches: Anchors Aweigh, From the Halls of Montezuma, Off we go into the wild blue yonder, The Caisson Song, & Semper Paratus (Always Ready) – I think this is the Coast Guard one. I am playing a party for Veteran’s Day tomorrow at my Mom’s rest home. Most of the patriotic hymns are in the hymnal and are scheduled to be sung in a little ceremony. They asked if I could have these others up my sleeve as well.

I also had an interesting email exchange with my former teacher, Craig Cramer, about that passage I mentioned in Buxtehude. It turns out that Craig is actually performing this piece Sunday a series of concerts in which he performing all of Buxtehude’s organ music so the question was apropos.

His comments were helpful. And it was fun to actually talk shop with someone about Buxtehude. I need to get more of the Broude edition, I guess.

Finally, I decided that since my piano trio is scheduled to play a movement from a Mozart piano trio on the first Sunday of Advent (known to everyone else in the bloody world as the Sunday after Thanksgiving), it might be fun to transcribe a chorale prelude on the closing hymn for us to play as well.

I landed on Charles Ore’s treatment of the tune, EBENEZER. With just a bit of adjusting I made it work for piano trio. I put it up a third and gave the strings the vigorous obbligato (which I made a bit more vigorous and string like).

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No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America – NYTimes.com

Good article about racism in the USA.

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Ohio Turns Back a Law Limiting Unions’ Rights – NYTimes.com

This doesn’t seem to be all that partisan a deal. But still interesting and encouraging.

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In Overheard Comments, Nicolas Sarkozy Calls Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘Liar’ – NYTimes.com

Ah, technology! Is this mic on?

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Health Law Survives Test in Court of Appeals – NYTimes.com

“The fact that two leading lights of conservative jurisprudence decided against positions held by opponents of the health care law threatens to upend the popular notion that the fate of the law will be determined by judges along political lines. In lower courts, judges appointed by Republican presidents did tend to rule against the law while those appointed by Democrats issued rulings in its favor. Those expecting the pattern to continue have predicted defeat for the law at the Supreme Court.”

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Personal Foul at Penn State – NYTimes.com

“Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique.”

I still wonder if I was remiss in reporting my own suspicions about people who later turned out to be criminals in the RC church (Detroit).

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Trouble Beside the Bay – NYTimes.com

Yay Ishmeal Reed. He gives a little insight into the complexities of outside people coming to join Occupy Oakland and the ongoing struggles with the police there. He is also a very interesting novelist in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut.

Tuesdays are my usual deadline for picking preludes and postludes for the weekend. It’s about the latest I like to do so. Better to plan more ahead.  After my morning ballet class, I waited for Eileen to leave for work, then headed for the church to pick out music. I quickly landed on a lovely (but rare) Milhaud piece for organ.

It’s called “Pastorale.”  I found some info on it here. It’s quite lovely and will make a nice prelude.

I had much more difficulty choosing a postlude. At first I thought I would consider matching Milhaud with a contemporary like Bloch or Copland. Unfortunately though I have compositions by these and others I couldn’t find an appropriate piece.

I spent more than an hour with this frustrating task.

Gave up.

Returned to it later in the day.

I had examined some organ works by Buxtehude as possibilities.

He was a north German composer a bit older than Bach. I love his music but it’s not all that contemporary listener user friendly.

They tell the story that Bach took several months off from his regular duties and traveled to study with Buxtehude. Buxtehude wanted to apprentice Bach and have him marry one of his daughters, but Bach did not do this.

I have the idea that he loved Buxtehude but thought his daughter unattractive or not marriage material.

The pieces are long and actually written for large wonderful organs

in resonant buildings.

Although it is a bit of a project, I finally landed on a Buxtehude Praeludium for Sunday’s postlude: The A Major BuxWV 151.

Came home and queued up some recordings to find the BuxWV number. I was surprised that all the recordings I listened to omitted a section I quite like.

Bah. It’s probably spurious, but until I find some evidence for this, I plan to keep it in.

This recording also skips the section I like.

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Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause by Ezra Klein | The New York Review of Books

Review of Susskind’s Confidence Men.

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‘Back to Work’ Has Bill Clinton’s Ideas for Economic America – Review – NYTimes.com

Bill Clinton’s new book.

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Computer Experts Building 1830s Babbage Analytical Engine – NYTimes.com

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Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows – NYTimes.com

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Since I have been sitting at the piano and practicing between classes on Mon and Wed, I spend 3.5 hours on the bench on these days. That’s what happened yesterday.

During that hour, I played through all of Bach’s 3 part inventions (sinfonias) and several of Joplin’s piano rags and marches.

I have been systematically playing through a book of Joplin’s rags that I own in order to better understand the piano rags of the living composer, William Bolcom.

I find Joplin very elegant. I read through the Groves entry on him yesterday. Bolcom is much harder. He writes in difficult keys, creates intricate harmonies, in short he calls on much more keyboard technique.

I can’t help but wonder if this might have been partly in response to the pressure of other U of M music department profs. Bolcom writes in a style that acknowledges the importance of popular music. Music departments in major universities have long held back their approval of entering popular music styles into their accepted canon (although this seems to be changing).

Bolcom may have felt compelled to demonstrate his compositional prowess by making his piano (and organ) music a bit more difficult than it needed to be. Or maybe he’s just a very fine keyboard player and composer who thinks in difficult ways.

At any rate, Joplin is simpler and more elegant in my opinion. But I am intrigued by and happy that Bolcom writes such nice music that nods to the historical American popular styles.

I have been contemplating submitting some of my work to publishers again. I do believe in my work but have found very little encouragement from publishers over the years. I knew the man who founded the church music publishing company, Morningstar. His name was Rod Schrank and he went from an important position at the prestigious church music publisher, Concordia, to starting a little publishing company of his own.

He was very critical of my work and labored in a very Lutheran way to get me to write more conventionally. I didn’t find writing in that style very difficult, just not terribly attractive and definitely not my own compositional voice.

Anyway, Schrank has retired and my connections in the music world grow more and more meager. I also knew the executive editor of GIA for many years. He is also retired. GIA rejected every manuscript I ever sent them.

But I am thinking that the market might be coming closer to accepting my own style of writing for church.

I don’t see my church music as particularly important in my work. But I don’t really think about my work in that way. I persist in writing music in sort of a local on-the-ground way, visualizing the actual musicians who will help me perform it.

It was bit serendipitous that yesterday I received a royalty statement from Morningstar.

I have sold one copy of each of two of my three compositions they have published. Net royalties are $.19 ($.13 for  one and $.06 for the other). There was also a polite unsigned notice with the statement that since the dollar amount of my royalties is under $10 (!!) they will carry forward the amount they owe me.

Ah the life of a composer.

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Was King Hammurabi a Commie? by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Stein’s Picasso Poem

Bitter little article about the lessons of history by Simic. Reminded me of the linked Getrude Stein poem.

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Day of the 40,000 Dead by Alma Guillermoprieto | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Interesting glimpse of life in Mexico.

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Here Comes Solar Energy – NYTimes.com

“[I]f you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.”

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7 Pakistanis Are Indicted in Benazir Bhutto’s Killing – NYTimes.com

Sooprise, sooprise. The Pakistani government was involved in this political assassination.

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Free Signs for Panhandlers Receive Mixed Reaction – NYTimes.com

Weird idea, I think.

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Andy Rooney, Mainstay on ‘60 Minutes’, Dead at 92 – NYTimes.com

I continue to peruse obits.

“He ]Roooney] once concluded that “it is possible to be dumb and be a college president,” but he acknowledged that “most college students are not as smart as most college presidents.”

True and true.

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I sometimes complain in this space about how local musicians and professors seem to ignore me and my work, so I should report faithfully that almost every music prof who attends my church complimented me yesterday.

Rubbing up against so many different people as I did yesterday in the course of my work leaves me a bit frazzled. I think this is the introvert in me, the person who values solitude and sitting and thinking. At the same time, this very solitude does lead me back to community, whether flesh and blood or the community of composers, poets and writers I experience in my playing and reading.

All Saints is a big feast in the Episcopal church. We celebrate this musically by combining efforts of several groups of musicians: an array of instruments (flute, viola, cello, guitar, electric bass, handbells, marimba), the Youth Choir and the Chamber Choir. Negotiating and leading this group was both fun and freaky.

The violin teacher from Hope remarked he found it satisfying to watch the viola player hold her viola and sing sections of the little jazz arrangement I did of “For All the Saints” (I think this was a compliment).

I was astonished this morning when I noticed the congruence of the different books and poetry I am reading. I discovered that the section of William Carlos Williams’ book length poem, Paterson, I am reading seemed to correlate precisely with two other books I am reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde and American Empire by Charlse Maier. Williams and Hyde both specifically refer to Walt Whitman whom I am also reading.

(More confluence occurred when I noticed that the Google logo for today celebrates Marie Curie’s birthday and the section in Paterson I am reading and studying right now uses her as symbol of both radioactivity and feminine success…. weird)

I guess it boils down to the idea that art is cannot avoid becoming political “simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the collective” (Hyde).  And in all of these books I am referring to here, it specifically refers to American spirit.

“Whitman envisioned drawing isolated individuals into a coherent and enduring body politic without resorting to the patriarchal articles of the social contract. In short, he would replace capitalist home economics with ‘the dear love of comrades.’ His politics reveal an unspoken faith that the realized and idiosyncratic self is erotic and that erotic life is essentially cohesive. He assumes that the citizen, like the poet, will emerge from the centripetal isolation, in which character forms, with an appetite for sympathetic contact and an urge both to create and to bestow.” Hyde in The Gift:Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

This relates to what I said earlier about my own solitude leading me back to community.

I’ll close with another quote that shows how important the artist is when the society is sick.

“So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will, whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not….  In times like these the spirit of the polis must be removed from the hands of the politicians and survive in the resistant imagination. Then the artist finds he is describing a world that does not appear in newspapers and someone has tapped his phone who never thought to call in times of peace.” Hyde, ibid.

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An Undertaker With Purple Nails – NYTimes.com

The decorative pillow above Ms. Amen’s head was embroidered with the words “Behind every successful woman is herself.”

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Broadway Revival of ‘Godspell’ – NYTimes.com

Church and church music has changed so much that this revival of Godspell is so sincere that it unpleasantly reminds this critic of church. Very funny.

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In an Iranian Prison, Tortured by Solitude – NYTimes.com

First hand description of experiencing solitary confinement.

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Telling Americans to Vote, or Else – NYTimes.com

Did you know that Australians are legally supposed to vote in every election or get fined?

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A Russian Robot, a Martian Moon – NYTimes.com

Russians on the move in space. Cool.

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His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives – NYTimes.com

Inspiring library/education story.

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A Visit to Typhoid Mary’s New York Domain – NYTimes.com

Visiting an island near NY where Mary Mallon and others were quarantined.

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After Eileen and I had breakfast at the Wooden Shoe, we went to a local used furniture store and looked at tables.

It was my idea because I had looked at some pieces the day before while my Mom was in the Dollar Store.

I was thinking about how small our kitchen is and how every time Eileen and I have breakfast together we have to sort of stand to the side while the other one gets their plate from the cupboard or orange juice from the fridge.

I call it the breakfast dance.

I was thinking our old table sort of needs replacing anyway, so we settled on this one.

It was only $250. We also bought this one for when we need to seat a few more people:

It comes with chairs that fold neatly inside it.

It was $200. I think the prices were pretty reasonable. We put it on Discover. I plan to pay it off with the reimbursement check from Eileen’s flex medical fund for 2011. But I did think of this Saturday Night Live skit I saw recently online.

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Lush Workers Cut Wallets From the Pockets of Drunk Train Riders – NYTimes.com

Apparently this kind of robber is an endangered species.

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The Privileges of China’s Elite Include Purified Air – NYTimes.com

The future is fun. It’s like living in a 20th century sci-fi novel sometimes.

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U.S. Commander Fires Senior Officer, Fuller, for Remarks on Afghans – NYTimes.com

Why do I suspect this guy got fired for telling the truth?

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3 New Elements Named – Darmstadtium, Roentgenium and Copernicium – NYTimes.com

Two pluses on this article. The basic idea of new elements is cool. And also it mentions Tom Lehrer.

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Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography Spurs Debate – NYTimes.com

Just finished Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks which describes the life of convicted sex felons.  This article points out that if this guy had molested a child instead of collecting kiddie porn he might have received a lighter sentence.

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With New Book, Bill Clinton Makes New Bid to Bolster Obama – NYTimes.com

Hmmm. Sounds a bit self-serving if not totally unhelpful to Obama’s reelection. Bill Clinton just keeps on keeping on. Sheesh.

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David Gelernter Discusses Patent Claim Against Apple – NYTimes.com

First the Unabomber blows him up, then Steve Jobs steals his ideas. Wow. Wonder how much of this is true? Probably the bomb part.

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Edging Toward Equality – NYTimes.com

It does seem that the abolition of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” will lead to better rights for gays and others.

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