I used to like to take Mondays off since Sunday is a work day for me.  I often find that playing church leaves me drained and feeling particularly vulnerable.  So the next day is a good day to gather my wits and resources.

Unfortunately, yesterday was not one of those Mondays.

I got up and grilled veggies for the staff luncheon.  I have been thinking of doing some veggie grilling as zucchini, eggplant, and mushrooms age in my refrigerator.  I had stupidly agreed to both a staff meeting yesterday and also meeting with my boss prior to this.

My boss has been encouraging the staff to do social things together like stay after the meeting and share some food. I think this is a good thing. Plus I like to prepare food.

Also the gas grill I purchased this summer is very convenient for quickly grilling food.  So yesterday I prepared 4 dishes: grilled potatoes with flecks of carrot, grilled zucchini, grilled whole mushrooms and small tomatoes, and grilled eggplant salad.

I managed to get all this done before my meeting with the boss.

She and I had a good meeting as usual.

The staff meeting was quietly salutary for me.  We spent the whole meeting seated around a table with a huge screen of the church’s google calendar. Both the boss and I had laptops.

Calendar is something I have been talking about with this group of people since our first staff meeting several years ago. I first introduced the idea of a master calender.  And then at this same initial meeting (at least I think it was this meeting) I mentioned the google calendar. There was so much resistance to the google calendar that one staff person got angry at me about it at this first staff meeting.

Yesterday people were cuing in to the way the mutual net calendar could work. One thing I have tried to show people is that a net calendar is very flexible and easily amended or added on to. In the time it takes to decide a date for something it can go on to a public calendar. When something changes, in the time it takes to talk about, it can be amended.

This concept seems difficult for people sometimes. I found it especially gratifying to see my young boss grappling with and effectively using and understanding this calendar. I also think the secretary is getting up to speed around the concept as well as some of the other staff.

Cool beans.

I came out of grad school like a bat out of hell.

Eileen and I chose a small college town near her family to live. I accepted a position at the local Roman Catholic church as full time church musician. During these years in the late 80s and the 90s, I did a lot of leadership stuff. I read tons of books on interpersonal relationships, psychology and leadership. I taught. I connected with colleagues and learned a great deal.

Imagine my surprise this morning when browsing the latest mailing from Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor and discovered an entire two page article about Servant Leadership (N.B. the online version seems a bit different than the one they mailed out in their brochure….. at least it has a different quote at the beginning of the article.).

Greenleaf was one of many authors I read during the last century. Inevitably I had to read a lot of business people because they were discussing ideas I was working on like leadership, accountability, and effective use of time and energy.  I read a lot of sociology because the population I was dealing with was changing.

I thought Greenleaf was one of the better business books I ever read. Basically he talks about the responsibility and good sense of the business community conducting itself as community leaders. Since then I hardly meet any business people who have heard of, much less read him.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see Zingerman’s (which I know gives workshops in effective small business practices) endorsing these principles.

More cool beans.

I finished off the day giving the kitchen a pretty good cleaning. Eileen has a contractor friend coming in today to talk to her (and me) about refurbishing our house a bit. I thought it might be nice if he could actually see the counters in the kitchen. I also scrubbed the floor which badly needed it.

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Two Saved From Drowning in Stuck Elevator on S.I. – NYTimes.com

These guys couldn’t get the door of an elevator to open. So they started going from floor to floor to see if they could get the door to open. Then they decided to go the basement. Bad choice. But they made it.

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A Novel Updated, for E-Book – NYTimes.com

I love the idea that technology makes it possible for continuing radical revisions of a book. Very cool.

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Nina Sankovitch, Allaying Grief Through Books – NYTimes.com

An article about a bibliophile who assuages her grief with her obsession. I’m very attracted to this. Her blog: http://www.readallday.org/blog/

She has a list about how to read all day. I quite like it:

Always have a book with you.
Read while waiting.
Read while eating.
Read while exercising.
Read before bed.
Read before getting out of bed.
Read instead of updating FB.
Read instead of watching TV.
Read instead of vacuuming.
Read while vacuuming.
Read with a book group.
Read with your kid.
Read with your cat.
Read to your dog.
Read on a schedule.
Always have a book with you.

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Shakespeare on the Subway – NYTimes.com

We used to call this sort of thing Guerrilla theater (as in Guerrilla warfare).

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These are the peaches I bought at the Farmers Market Saturday. If you look closely you will see that some of them are a different kind of peach shaped like a doughnut. The person who sold them to me called them “BuenO” peaches. Eileen tried one yesterday and raved about how sweet they were. She insisted I have one. I told her she was like Eve offering Adam fruit. I then pointed out that geneticists have recently been upsetting fundamentalist Christians with the notion of the impossibility of the human race descending from two individuals.

I finally got around to doing the bills after church yesterday. I try to do them on Fridays. It is nice when I do them and Eileen is around. That way when I can’t get the checkbook to balance which sometimes happens she can help me. This is what she’s doing yesterday in this pic. She easily figured out my error.

I’ve been meaning to photograph my hymn tune index.

I have recently been indexing new acquisitions and also previously owned music based on hymn tunes. This tedious work pays off in spades when I am trying to find a piece based on a certain tune.

My congregation has  a lot of energy and little patience for postludes. I have a colleague who simply refused to play postludes under similar circumstances. My solution is to sometimes play one of those varied hymn accompaniments I have been indexing. Yesterday I played one by Gerre Hancock based on MOSCOW (“Come Thou Almighty King” although the words we sang to it yesterday were “Thou Whose Almight Word.”).

The word, MOSCOW, is the name given to the melody. This is what I index this tune under.

I also finished transcribing a piece for my piano trio yesterday morning before church.

I managed to get the cello part ready (above).  When I work with classical musicians in ensembles they are often jealous of the fact that the keyboard person usually gets to see their part in a reduced fashion, while other instrumentalists only get to see their one line. I thought it might be fun to do scores for my cellist and violinist with the other parts in reduced scores.

This is especially helpful with a counterpuntal piece like this one where the voices are all moving independently.

The cellist wasn’t at church yesterday. So I came home finished off the violin version and emailed parts to both the cellist and violinist in the hopes that we can go through it sometime soon.

I have been wanting to take some pics and put them in a post. Unfortunately I ran out of batteries for my camera last week. Bought some on Saturday.  That’s why I’m able to post a few pics today.

These tomatoes from the Farmers Market are wonderful.

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lens culture: Robbie Kaye, Beauty and Wisdom

This is a link to some beautiful photos of elderly women at the beauty shop. It’s a bit counter cultural for our society where the old are often discarded, uncared-for or invisible. Beautiful pics.

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Giving Washington a Lesson in Meter and Verse – NYTimes.com

Former NYT editor, Bill Keller, has the mad notion that what is most needed inside the beltway is poetry.

He called on a colleague for ideas. Here’s a link to other ones the colleague came up with:

David Orr’s Picks for Poetry Congress Should Read – NYTimes.com

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In an Age of Vitriol, What Is Out of Bounds? – NYTimes.com

The NYT public editor (a kind ombudsman) weighs in on Joe Nocera’s recent vituperation and subsequent apology.

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Power to the Corporation! – NYTimes.com

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s remark about people and corporations keeps producing further observations (see the comments in my Saturday blog).

When a man in the audience yelled that corporations should be taxed more, Romney replied, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Give “The Stormin’ Mormon,” as Neil Cavuto approvingly called him on Fox News, credit: never has the traditional Republican doctrine been so succinctly explained.

Of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation. We the corporation. Corporations who need corporations are the luckiest corporations in the world. Power to the corporation!

Further analysis & comment:

Shiny Happy Corporate People | Truthout

“Funny thing is, Romney’s questioner wasn’t asking him about corporate personhood. He was asking why Romney wants to cut Social Security but while preserving corporate tax breaks. It seemed as if Romney had already memorized this little speech and was looking for a chance to trot it out. He probably had.”

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Age of Outrage – NYTimes.com

It’s not just happening in Britain.

“The fury in British cities follows huge social protests this year in Greece, where violence also flared, and in Spain, where tens of thousands have camped out from Madrid to Barcelona. Other nations, including Portugal, have seen a diffuse anger rooted in a shared conviction: things can’t go on like this. This European malaise is no stranger to a United States of high unemployment, economic bafflement, ideological radicalization and political pettiness.”

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You Want Compromise? Sure You Do – NYTimes.com

I found this little quote sort of interesting in a goofy way.

“89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.”

My parents were always wanting to meet to eat at Cracker Barrel. I never could shake the bigotry in the name. A barrel for white people, you know, “crackers.” And apparently we will never have a Whole Foods store in Western Michigan. Thank goodness for the Farmers Market in Holland.

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The Elusive Big Idea – NYTimes.com

I have read the author of this article, Neal Gabler, and have found his insights helpful. Here I think he starts out with a good idea (literally that’s the topic of the article: “ideas”) and misses the boat with thinking that has not entirely adapted to or understood the evolving environment.

By that I mean that technology can enhance thought as well as provide ways for the trivial to drive out the meaningful.

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Chinese Director’s Path From Rebel to Insider – NYTimes.com

I bookmarked this to read after reading this quote from the person profiled in the article, Zhao Liang.

“I remember quite clearly one of my middle-school teachers telling me that I was a stone with sharp, jagged edges, but that I would turn into a smooth river stone as I grew older,” Mr. Zhao said. “During the years while I was making this film, I felt like I was getting sharper and sharper instead.”

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It struck me yesterday in an idle moment, that the local people who are good at some of what I do (play piano and pipe organ) do not connect with me. I am thinking of people who play piano and pipe organ. In specific instances they even do this better than me.

It may be that I am just living outside the discussion locally for one reason or another.

I was definitely part of a music community in Detroit while I lived there and attended WSU.

I think I see my time in South Bend as a transition from having a community of professionals to one of being alone.

In South Bend, I also had a community mostly made up of fellow Grad students, but also a few of the teachers. I felt accepted by them. They contributed to my musical and intellectual growth. I even played with the local South Bend Orchestra so I wasn’t totally stuck in the ivory tower.

Since coming to W. Michigan to live in the late eighties, I have gradually sensed a growing isolation. Right after I graduated from Notre Dame, one of my beloved liturgy teachers took a shotgun and killed himself. He had AIDS. Apparently he felt that his career in his field (which was pretty substantial) would wither if it was known that he was gay.

He had contemporary scholarly colleagues who were gay and ostracized. One of them told me over the phone that he didn’t even know the prof who committed suicide was gay. It was a discouraging time.

In addition to this, the program which I participated in was an interdisciplinary program which combined music and liturgical studies. It was a wonderful experience. This was dismantled shortly after I left. You can no longer get this degree from Notre Dame.

I also found out that I was accepted in to Notre Dame by the skin of my teeth (due to my level of playing ability). And that most professors predicted my failure as a student.

Happy stuff.

I didn’t fail. I excelled. But no matter.

Then in the first year I was in Holland, I attended an informal party where I learned from Hope professors of infighting and intellectual dishonesty at Hope.

I resolved to lay low.

And thus I have.

This leads me to my second insight this morning which is the difference between privacy and solitude.

Privacy considerations are much in the conversation these days. Germany has tangled with Google about their photographing to make visual street maps at eye level.  All of us who use the internet have to think about our private information and its protection and secure access.

I think that privacy has been gone for most of my adult life.  Technology has been available to monitor people remotely for years. It’s hard to think that it has not been systematically exercised.

So in a sense, resistance is futile.

Solitude on the other hand has become a valuable part of life for me. I need time to be alone. Time to think. Time to read and process.

I see a distinction between privacy and solitude. Privacy involves your relationship to others and what they know about you. Solitude is more about looking inwardly at your self and making your mind and heart still.

There is a full moon in the dark morning sky here in Western Michigan.

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Western secularity « The Immanent Frame

Excerpts from Rethinking Secularlism

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Why did Japan surrender? – The Boston Globe

A third understanding of the end of WWII.

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British Leader Seeks Public Housing Evictions for Rioters and Their Families – NYTimes.com

I have been traveling back and forth to the U.K. for over a decade. I have wondered about the obvious racism and class-ism I witnessed there. It seemed to not be on the radar in the USA.

Now it is.

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Grief Calls Us To The Things Of This World

by Sherman Alexie
from Thrash
Hanging Loose Press

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,

I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?”

more

from http://www.3quarksdaily.com/

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6:20 AM and I’m happy as a pig in shit sitting here in the early morning darkness listening to thunder crash and echo outside my open window. I started the morning indexing and researching music for my Hymn Tune index. I do enjoy this work. I don’t just record information, I also double check dubious information such as how composers refer to unfamiliar hymn tunes and consequently their origin. This used to be a bit slower before the internet. Now I just google and judiciously evaluate results. Very helpful.

I started another project yesterday. I was playing through one of the Counterpuncti from Bach’s Art of Fugue. I use Czerny’s over edited edition because it was a cheap way to purchase a keyboard reduction.

Anyway, I was thinking about my piano trio. I realized that I could transcribe Counterpunctus 9 easily for violin, piano and cello. I would give the soprano line to the violin, of course. The piano would take voice 2 & 3 (right hand and left hand), the cello voice 4. This would make this wonderful music a lot easier to play and probably more interesting to listen to.

I managed to get 90 out of 131 measures transcribed yesterday.

Here’s the Canadian Brass playing it.

I do love this piece. I used it back when I briefly taught Music Appreciation. I used the Swingle Singers recording which I love but could not find on YouTube.

I managed to finish filing all of my organ music yesterday in one file (except for the volumes I am indexing). That’s a big piece. Next I plan to file as much of the choral music laying around the choir room as possible. Some of it hasn’t been filed for 3 or 4 years! Then on to serious planning for the fall.

Eileen and I went and saw Harry Potter yesterday. I do like spending time with my wife. I find it more and more difficult to suspend my disbelief as I get older. This is of course necessary for dramas to be effective. I kept wondering how they needed to make these older actors (the three main characters) look young and even similar ages. The actor who plays Harry has a baby face and that makes it a bit easier with him. And the woman is pretty easy to portray as younger than she is. But the guy who plays Ron. His age and maturity come through the camera despite the magic of Hollywood.

Also I usually think about the music. What’s happening musically? Are the instruments recorded live or digital? Stuff like that.

I think the Harry Potter books are basically Young Adult market directed. I read about five of them before stopping from sheer boredom. A blessing on them for those that like them,however!

Back to work (after adding pics and doing the links below)

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Father of Man Killed in Unrest Helps Calm Tense English City – NYTimes.com

There are still some sane people in the world. This is a moving story of a man who led the calming down of a mob despite his own personal grief.

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U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Police, Survivors Say – NYTimes.com

This doesn’t sound good. I bookmarked it so I could return to this initial report when more accurate reports surface.

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‘Corporations Are People,’ Romney Tells Iowa Hecklers Angry Over His Tax Policy – NYTimes.com

This is my fundamental disagreement with lobbying and PACs. Corporations are more like governments than people. They need to be reined in and made accountable like governments. Of course that’s just my weak kneed immature sixties hippy musician opinion. Heh.

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On Jim Jones’s Agenda, a Prequel to Sept. 11 – NYTimes.com

Frightening new info on the Jim Jones saga. Does it never end?

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We Want Cake, Too – NYTimes.com

I found this intelligent and personal commentary by a transgendered person very informative and moving. But of course I’m just a weak kneed yada yada…. you know the drill.

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Turning the Wrong Page – NYTimes.com

I do think it was a big mistake to curtail the page program in the House of Representatives but one in line with the current philosophy of cutting back on governmental functional services like education and health services.

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Spent a good deal of yesterday at church. I keep my music in files alphabetically by composer. Yesterday I took a stack of organ music upstairs to the choir room to refile in my main organ file which I keep there. This music has been laying around the organ for a awhile carelessly stacked after use. I also have stacks of choral music from the last two years I have to sort and file.

I keep a cross index for all my hymn based organ music. I started this index at my first Episcopal church job in Oscoda Michigan. That must have been in the mid-seventies. I have kept it up over the years and now have two file boxes of 4 x 6 cards, each card for a different hymn tune.

I think I came up with this idea on my own. I am proud of the idea that I began this card index before returning to school. I spent a good part of my grad school writing on index cards and doing research. My little hymn index was a foreshadowing of basic scholarship techniques I later applied. As I have said before in this space, I just missed the computerization of scholarship in my schooling (finishing my masters in 1987).

But despite the huge advancement computerization provides, the concept of my hymn index and later scholarship are related. I still have the 3 x 5 cards from my Music Bibliography class. Boxes of them.

Anyway, as I was filing music yesterday, I realized that I have several (many?) books of arrangements of hymns for organ not as solos but as accompaniment for congregational singing (varied hymn accompaniments they’re called). Some of these books are indexed, but some are not. I decided I should complete their indexing.

I brought a bunch home and now they are stacked around the computer as I am slowly going through each volume and carefully indexing them in my hymn tune index.  Even with care, I still find mistakes.

It’s funny that I am doing this, because at this point I have a tendency to improvise these kinds of varied hymn accompaniments on the spot. Nevertheless occasionally I like to pull out a classic or fresh newly composed accompaniment.

Are you asleep yet?

Being a careful and conscientious church musician can seem tedious and boring to others. I don’t blame them. My favorite story about the obscurity of my work is the one about my hispanic Detroit landlord. I think he liked Eileen and me because we faithfully paid our rent. Judging from the conversations in his office that was unusual in his experience. When he asked me where I worked, I told him I was the musician at St. Damian’s church in Westland.

He wrinkled up his nose and honestly asked, “They pay you for that?”

It still makes me happy to remember that.

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Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books : NPR

Since I am a bibliophile,  I like lists of books. This one was modestly pointed out by John Scalzi on his blog http://whatever.scalzi.com/ . His novel, Old Man’s War, is number 74.

I have read many of these books. Maybe a third to half of them. I do like sci fi.

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Deciding on a Book, and How to Read It – NYTimes.com

Nice overview of a little experiment of going from one ebook reader to another while reading the same book. Finishes with a paperback and the only good thing the reviewer has to say is that it was cheap. Nice.

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Interactive Cubes Recall Games of the Past – _ State of the Art

The idea of having a computer game in little screen modules is pretty cool. I hope this is a trend.

I dropped by the public library yesterday. Checked out several books including the graphic novel, Lint by Chris Ware.

Inside the front cover is this fascinating page. I know it’s probably hard to see. Ware specializes in small. On the top right is a family tree of the characters in the book. On the left is a diagram which I quite like. Not sure exactly about the meaning. But it seems to start with planet Earth on the upper left hand corner  and the proceed through a series of stylized snapshot diagrams which explain and obscure the book.

In very fine print it says “This periodical comprises one chapter from an ongoing, ridiculously long work.”

Volume 20? (since this number is printed on the spine) But from poking around here, I think this is a publisher number and not the 20th volume of Ware’s “ongoing, ridiculously long work.”

This out of print version of part Ware’s story of Jimmy Corrigan does say “First in a series of pocket size chapters.”

I think these chapters were bound together and made into a book I know I have read (owned?) and given away as gifts, Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid on earth.

I think if I could find my volume, I could figure out if the characters in Lint have anything to do with Corrigan.

Anyway, Lint is a bleak little read which outlines the life of Jordan Lint. Jordan Lint is pathetic in the way we are all pathetic. He is handed a life where his mother dies when he is young and his father is a creep. He then spends his life alternately being creepy (good old Dad’s influence?) or pathetically trying to be good (presumably like his mom was).  The balance definitely comes down on the creepy side when he googles his estranged son and finds the son has written a tell-all memoir which details his (Jordan Lint’s) abuse and repression of his (the son’s) homosexuality.

Not an uplifting little tale. But I do like Ware’s work quite a bit.

The main reason I dropped by the public library yesterday was I was about done with The Family Trade by Charles Stross and wanted to get the next volume in this series, The Hidden Family.

This is escape reading for me. I finished the first one last night and started the second. So far the story is about one journalist’s descent into discovering her birth mother was “world-walker” who was murdered when she was a child. Miriam (the journalist’s name) is caught up in a web of corruption both on earth and it’s phantom parallel world(s).

The writing is clear. The plotting engaging. What more do I want from a summer read?

I also phoned up the college music library yesterday and convinced them to let me in to look at a couple of volumes of Scarlatti Essercizzi (Keyboard Sonatas).  It’s only open 2 hours a day in the summer.

I wanted to research the one I have been rehearsing (K. 135 link to old post “Thank you, Scarlatti” with more info in it)

The Longo edition which I own raises questions about the editor’s choices in which notes to include in the edition. I photocopied and  examined a facsimile edition and a more up to date modern edition to help me decide how to play this piece.

I sometimes feel like my blog is a sort of convoluted swollen esoteric self absorbed “tweet.” Ahem.

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Al Jazeera Changes Plan to Rerun Documentary – NYTimes.com

I read Al Jazeera English version from time to time. Sorry to see them struggling with integrity issues but I guess that’s the name of the game.

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Robert McChesney interviews economist John Foster on Media Matters Aug 7th show and podcast

I was riding on a train from Chicago to Holland years ago when I caught a lecture by McChesney on WBEZ. I ended up reading books by him that helped me understand the history of journalism and politics in the USA. Now I catch his radio show from time to time on the web. I think he is brilliant.

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Riots Spotlight London’s Troubled Youths – NYTimes.com

Some interesting “on-the-ground” reporting about the recent riots.

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Blue Donkey Bar on West Side Shuts After Complaint – NYTimes.com

In the book (which I admire), Chairs are where the people go, Misha Glouberman describes the conflicts he has with bars in the neighborhood of Toronto he lives. This recent article reminded me of his stories about this.

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Philip Levine : The Poetry Foundation

Levine is the new US Poet Laureate. Link to his bio and online poems.

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An Era in Ideas – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Again I close with a link I have bookmarked to read. This seems to be a bunch of articles to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

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I received an email from my former teacher at Notre Dame yesterday. He occasionally sends out emails to former students regarding jobs and other stuff.  This email was about a job as music director for a parish in Chicago I have noticed before. The church is The Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood. If I was in the market for a job, this is one of the rare gigs that I would be interested in. It is similar to my present gig with the exception that they have instituted better liturgical reforms. The music seems to be similarly diverse and of high quality.

Eileen usually tells me she is game for change whenever opportunities like this arise.  But I’m not looking for change in my church work. I’m happy at my present gig. I would like living in Chicago. But I’m pretty sure Eileen wouldn’t.

We talked about the alterations to our present home we have been thinking about yesterday. Part of this is finishing off the back roof to stop the leak in the kitchen and completing the heat tape project we began in the dead of last winter. Also we want to fix the upstairs bathroom. But in addition we are thinking of adapting this house so that we can live on one floor in our old age. I called the roofer and the electrician and Eileen emailed a contractor friend of her family.

So I guess we’re not thinking of moving. Heh.

For some reason this morning I have been thinking about the friends I have had over the years who have lost interest in our friendship.  I have to wonder how I have contributed to this loss. Realistically I know that most times I am not a big factor in these kind of changes. I can think of a couple instances where friends have cut off contact to me in anger. But usually it’s more like people drift away and lose the habit of connecting.

Lately I seem to have been reconnecting with beauty. When we were in California I was impressed with the breath taking beauty of the mountains where my son lives east of L.A. Just this past weekend when we drove to Mears, Michigan I noticed the way the pale Michigan colors streak the landscape in rain and create a beautiful picture of trees, grass and crops.

I have fallen in love with some music this week as well and this is related to this feeling of reconnecting.  A Scarlatti piano sonata, some organ music of Bach and, just yesterday, another unusual organ piece (A Trumpet Tune) by Calvin Hampton.

This interests me because I realize that it is me that is keeps changing and evolving, not the landscape and not the availability of beautiful music. Perception and awareness are everything I guess.

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House Shuts Down Its Page Program – NYTimes.com

Sort of sad to see this historic institution discontinued.

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Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic – NYTimes.com

New efforts to inform public policy with non-partisan science. Interesting to find out about scientists who are now or have recently been members of Congress.

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Police raid Milan offices of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s | World news | The Guardian

Italy reacts a bit differently to S & P’s outrageous behavior. This is from a few days ago.

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The Transformation of Michele Bachmann : The New Yorker

Heard the author of this article on the radio yesterday. Bookmarked to read. Frightening to hear about Bachmann’s influences, especially Francis Schaeffer who seems to have advocated violent overthrow of the U.S. Government due to its “secularization.” He is a writer I have read.

Schaeffer’s son, Franky Schaeffer, wrote a book I sometimes point out to people.

Francis is a apologist for extreme Calvinism and fundamentalism. Franky support his dad’s views for years before leaving that church, converting to Orthodox Christianity and becoming an astute critic of his former faith.

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The Green Earth Girl » Blog Archive » No-Pasta Zucchini Lasagna

I was surprised when Eileen linked this recipe on Facebook. On questioning her I found out that she hadn’t noticed how it relies on eggplant as well as zucchini. Not really her favorite veggies. Darn. It looks pretty good to me, but I hate to make stuff that I know she won’t go for.

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Misha Glouberman’s Terrible Noises for Beautiful People

This is Chairs are where the people go guy. I bookmarked it to read but haven’t done so yet.

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I received an email from Sheila Heti (pictured above) yesterday. She was letting me know that my responses to her online poll of artists about what they think of their work was now added to the list: http://www.sheilaheti.net/2012.html

I took the opportunity to tell her what a fan I am of her book Chairs are where the people go. She thanked me and said she would pass it on to Misha.

I think stuff like that is cool. It’s really one of the main reasons I continue to blog and facebook and twitter. I like conversations and connections and ideas. When someone who is having these reaches back to me I remember my little dream about using the interwebs for this sort of thing. It does happen from time to time.

Well London is burning again. This time it seems to be disgruntled youth and thugs who are doing the rioting. Yikes.

It’s hard not to ascribe some of this unrest to the effects of the policies of the Cameron government.  When governments like the U.K. and the U.S.A. decide not to be vehicles of protection and empowerment of their populations the result is hardship for those left to their own devices.

There was an excellent article in yesterday’s New York Times which brought to bear some Lakoff like insights into what is happening between the U.S. population and its leaders:

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? by Drew Weston

I know I included this in yesterday’s links, but actually hadn’t had a chance to read it.

I recommend reading this yourself if you are interested or troubled by what is going on in the United States right now.

Weston and Lakoff are obviously using brain science to understand the United States movement to more and more  extremes.

In his NYT article, Weston begins by saying Obama lost the opportunity to articulate a more clear narrative of where he entered the presidency. A narrative is not a policy, Weston says. But he seems to understand the power of stories in our lives.

He imagines Obama saying this in his first inauguration.

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.”

[Weston then continues in his own voice:]

A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.”

Imaginary presidents are always smarter than real ones I guess. But Weston says clearly how things have seemed to me for years.

I like how he calls out the false framing of the extremists:

“revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them)

“entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts)

Anyway you can read it for yourself if you’re interested.

More links:

London riots: world reacts to city’s ‘hungry mutiny’ – Telegraph

This situation is breaking fast, but this dated story gives an interesting overview of world reaction.

Bolton considers running for president

Bolton articulates his reasons for considering running. I of course totally disagree with how he seems lay so much on Obama’s performance as president. It is so easy to blame. Bolton did a lot of that when he was in power. And scolding. Lousy leadership as far as I’m concerned. Also he is extremely pro-Israel.

Transgender Wedding Bells – Politics – Utne Reader

Texas accidentally made transgendered marriage legal. Now trying to undo it.

Fewer dinners mean meaner politics – The Washington Post

This seems to illustrate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s idea discussed in a recent radio program  in which he says we need to have conversations with people we disagree with about stuff other than what we disagree.  Once again the show is called “Sidling up to differences.”

Mark Bittman – Recipes: Summer Tomatoes – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com

Lovely page of recipes.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman weighs in on S & P’s credibility and its part in the current economic problems.

Waiting for a Landslide – NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat analyzes the damage done by parties waiting for a large shift in public opinion.

Lexington: An underperforming president | The Economist

I was surprised by this clear helpful article in The Economist….

Lost Angeles by Joel Kotkin, City Journal Summer 2011

This article gives a history of the city of L.A. in which I learned stuff.

Here’s two I haven’t read yet:

Cohan: Ending the Moral Rot on Wall Street, Part 1 – Bloomberg

GOP Causes S&P Downgrade, but Republican Candidates Blame Obama | The Nation

The assistant priest preached yesterday on the concept of “ideology.” Not sure how he got there exactly from the gospel story of Peter walking on water with Jesus (“I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore…”).

He struggled with the idea and read us the Webster Dictionary definition. He said he had his own definition but never quite got round to telling us what it was. He was trying to define ideologies negatively but kept tripping up and saying that though St.Paul sounded like an ideologue he wasn’t one. I wasn’t convinced.

Ever since I was a kid, I have had problems with St. Paul. I think the problem was that I actually read the Bible and he says some pretty outrageous stuff in it.

This morning I was finishing up reading my treadmill links (I usually line up a bunch of news stories to read while I treadmill…. usually from the New York Times which I subscribe to online).  Began reading True Believers, All of Us  by Frank Bruni. Bruni used the word, ideology, in his article and reminded me of wondering about the whole concept and how I think of the meaning of the word when I use it.

It turns out that the word, ideology, was coined in 1796 by the French philosopher, Destutt de Tracy, to mean “science of ideas.”

It is ironic that this enlightenment philosopher coined this word to mean a “philosophy of the mind which derives knowledge from the senses” (as opposed to metaphysics), from Fr. idéologie “study or science of ideas.” Since now the word is often used in a derogatory manner to describe unthinking allegiance to a belief system not based on logic:

“Ideology … is usually taken to mean, a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument.” [D.D. Raphael, “Problems of Political Philosophy,” 1970] link to Dictionary.reference.com where I found much of this info

Bruni used the word as he sought for examples in the public rhetoric to support the idea of faith in general:

“While it’s inarguable that government has a tropism toward waste, and while tax increases should indeed be preceded by an inquiry into other options, the adamancy of the puritans’ position flew in the face of what many economists say, and it brooked no dissent. It felt more like theology than science.

“Particularly on the conservative side, we’re seeing a lot of beliefs that have this faith-based quality: ‘We know it’s true because our ideology tells us it’s true,’ ” said Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, when I raised the subject with him on the phone last week.”

link to the article (same as above link)

Years ago I read Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements. This book, published in 1951, generalized many traits common to mass movements.

“Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one.”  from The True Believer by Hoffer

I was obviously interested in this idea because of my church background as well as witnessing the craziness of true believers in the sixties.

I remember well one young radical who was angry with me because I was trying to see policemen as humans: “You’ll think differently once you’ve been bashed over the head,” he said to me with passion. Later he was in on the group that blew themselves up trying to make bombs in Flint Michigan. Ay yi yi.

I often think of Hoffer as I read and study. I heard him once say that if he found a good sentence in a paragraph he would celebrate for a week. I understood this to be another expression of Theodore Sturgeon’s maxim: “90% of everything is crap.”

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Today’s links

The last great bookshop – Books, Top story – Macleans.ca

Matt Ridley on Volcanoes, Iceland and Natural Climate Change | Mind & Matter – WSJ.com

Debt deal doles out economic pain unfairly Robert Reich in the San Francisco Chronicle

The Arms Race Intrudes on a South Korean Paradise – NYTimes.com Gloria Steinem unearths another outrage

Harold Koh’s Flip-Flop on the Libya Question – NYTimes.com

The Thrill of Boredom – NYTimes.com

Paying for News? It’s Nothing New – NYTimes.com

Sunday Dialogue – How to Fix Government – NYTimes.com

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – NYTimes.com

It’s Not Easy Being the Conservative One – NYTimes.com

Learning to Cope With a Mind’s Taunting Voices – NYTimes.com

I got up and went to the Farmer’s Market yesterday morning. It wasn’t as busy as I usually find it later in the day. I bought some watermelon and musk melon and came home and made this fruit salad for the Hatch family reunion.

I also made some sandwiches. The ones above are chevre and prosciutto. Interestingly enough not one person tried them at the reunion. I finally had to break my vegetarian oath and have one. Yep. They were delicious.

The vegetarian sandwiches I made proved a bit more popular. These also had chevre on some of them. After I ran out of chevre, I used mozzarella. The basil leaves from Eileen’s garden at work were a bit tougher than I had hoped. Should have cut the basil up more. But these sandwiches were still good.

I’m always fascinated by the nearby cornfield that surrounds the house we have the annual reunion at. Eileen reminded me that it used to be an asparagus field.

Eileen took her bubble equipment. These photos are slightly out of focus. I think it’s due to the fact I was using the virtual zoom on our ancient digital camera.

I still like them.

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That truck driver you flipped off? Let me tell you his story. | StarTribune.com

Good empathetic look at the world of a truck driver.  I grew up romanticizing about them. Knights of the road, I heard them called. In Tennessee it was not too uncommon for one of them to lose control descending the mountain roads.  On the mountain side of the road you would see dirt roads designed to safely slow down trucks whose brakes malfunctioned.

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Labour Leader Ed Miliband Rebounds Amid Turmoil – NYTimes.com

Great Britain has been suffering hugely under the Murdoch cell phone scandal. The conservatives have lost ground. PM Cameron who is suave and articulate has been having difficulty explaining his connection to the corrupt Murdoch regime. Murdoch also owns Fox and the Wall Street Journal. Hence their coverage has not been as objective as might be desired.

Miliband was chosen as Labour leader over his more politically bland but more polished brother Dave. Ed’s star was descending until he responded to this scandal with a bit more aplomb than expected.

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The Tea Party, Take Two – NYTimes.com

I accidentally linked it the “Take One” of Nocera’s partisan column on the Tea Party.  In this follow up column, he apologizes for “name calling” in the first article.

“Name calling” is a one of many logical fallacies that are trotted out in all sorts of conversations, dialogues, and rhetoric. I would say that logical fallacy is the language of television reporting and much partisan wrangling. Here’s a good list of them.

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I have been playing through some of Domenico  Scarlatti’s Essercizi on piano the last few days. A couple years ago I purchased my former teacher’s copy of his complete works for keyboard.  It’s not a great edition and is over edited in them manner of the 19th century scholarship. But I have been playing through them ignoring the incorrect editing as much as possible and am on volume 5 of 11 volumes.  Scarlatti wrote 555 of these little keyboard sonatas, most in one movement. I find them charming and surprising.

I picture Scarlatti as he was, a son of a famous Italian opera composers (Alessandro) spending most of his adult life in service to the Spanish Court. He didn’t write operas which made him pretty unfashionable at the time. Instead he wrote, performed and taught keyboard pieces. His students were in the royal families of Portugal and Spain.

He is known for the quirkiness of his music. It is often rhythmically surprising and even tempts one to think he is emulating Spanish folk rhythms that he would hear on the street in Spain. His harmonies are sometimes outlandish and even sound dissonant to the modern ear. His melodies dance all over the keyboard and intertwine the hands with the right hand often passing the left hand and dipping into the bass and the left hand hand scrambling up into the high keys.  He loves to have the hands jump to these places as well.

Yesterday I kept playing one of them over and over.  I marvel at the basic idea that via music notation I can recapture the joy and charm that Scarlatti put into this piece in the 18th century. The music itself is so alive and full of meaning to me. It’s almost eerie that I can have this communication with someone so long dead. Sometimes I talk to dead composers in my head. Often I apologize to them for screwing up their music, “Sorry, Scarlatti!” Yesterday I was simply basking in the beauty emotion of this music.

In the first video you can see this particular piece being played as well as hear it. The recording is not very good. The first player takes it more the tempo I like, though, a bit slower than the second video which has better sound.

Anyway, this was a very nice part of my day yesterday.

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Yes, Congress Is in Session (for a Few Seconds, Anyway) – NYTimes.com

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Scientists Find Signs Water Is Flowing on Mars – NYTimes.com

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Classical Music Moves From Concert Halls to Cafes – NYTimes.com

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The true price of publishing | Books | guardian.co.uk

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Kwame Anthony Appiah on Honour – Telegraph

I know I linked this yesterday, but I wanted to comment a bit on it today.  Appiah is Krista Tippett’s guest on this week’s “Being” radio show.

I think I learned something about myself from this guy. He talks about his ideas on “honor” and how it has been significant in moral shifts in society. Also how important honor is in most human societies.

In U.S. culture one thinks more easily about the concept of respect (which is an expression of honor). When my brother was visiting he pointed out that most of my colleagues in the area just don’t “get me.” He brought this to my attention by suggesting that if I had returned to Detroit after grad school I would have had a ready made group of colleagues who were as eccentric as me and many of them in similar ways.

Instead I am living in an area where few people understand and respect my work and abilities. I was reading a letter to the editor in the most recent New Yorker magazine. The writer was describing  “the traits that make women different—the ability to pick up subliminal codes, develop relationships, collaborate..” I was struck once again that when gender stereotypes are articulated I identify strongly with the feminine.  This seems to contribute to the difficulty people have in “getting me.”

I have been grappling with this whole notion this summer and hopefully am coming to some closure around the idea that I have little honor and respect with many in this area.

The trick is to get past the humiliation. I hadn’t thought of it quite like that until I heard Appiah talk about his ideas and his own life.

It makes sense to me that one cannot compel respect, but that it does entail understanding one’s self as worthwhile in spite of the fact that one is invisible, under-estimated or whatever.

I don’t feel this as negatively as it probably sounds.

It’s more like Scarlatti. It attracts me that he developed his art in an independent way and was living in the shadow of his father and was ignored by many of his colleagues and benefactors because he didn’t write operas.

Anyway, what I really feel is gratitude to him and also grateful to get a life where I get to do music. That’s really how I feel about “honor.”

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“Framing the truth so that it can be understood is not just central to honest, effective politics. It is central to every aspect of human life. It takes knowledge and honesty, skill and courage. It is part of being a full human being.” George Lakoff, The Political Mind

“Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve writes in his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.’ ” George Lakoff, The Political Mind

“Greenspan even advised Bush that ‘taking Saddam Hussein out was essential’ to protect oil supplies.” George Lakoff, The Political Mind

“Human minds create a number of types of prototypes. Any important category has at least thee types of prototypes: a typical case, an ideal case, and a nightmare case.” George Lakoff, The Political Mind

“Then there is the salient exemplar: a well known case that stands out, perhaps because it is highly publicized.”George Lakoff, The Political Mind

“Reagan made the invented Welfare Queen into a salient exemplar, and used the example in discourse as if it were the typical case.”George Lakoff, The Political Mind

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Adam Kirsch On The Literature Of David Foster Wallace | The New Republic

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Kwame Anthony Appiah on Honour – Telegraph

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How a Great American Painter Vanished From the Critical Scope | Sightings by Terry Teachout – WSJ.com

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Americans Elect 2012 | About

An attempt to create a national primary and a new party online.

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Facing gridlock and hysteria, the US may yet be reformed | Timothy Garton Ash | Comment is free | The Guardian

Interesting take from the U.K.

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Eileen and I marched with this group yesterday protesting the Holland City Council’s vote against adding sexual orientation language to already existing discrimination ordinances.

Here are some links to reporting about it:

Young marchers make voices heard at city hall over housing ordinance Holland Sentinel

Young people promise to march “until love is equal” in Holland | Michigan Radio

We marched to the Holland Council Meeting and sat through its agenda until time for public comment. Then many individuals stepped forward and commented, mostly in support of reconsidering the Council vote against the change.

I am pretty discouraged about politics right now. I am especially unhappy with the highly emotional and angry language and prevalence of obfuscation both intentional and apparently unintentional. But it was inspiring to see so many young people speaking up and participating in this process. It was instructive to listen to people who spoke up in opposition.

We sure are a churchy community. A lot of the comments mentioned religion and it was cited as support for both points of view.

Even though I was struck once again by the mildness of the people in this community. This time I admired it because it seemed to be civility in action.

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That Monolithic Tea Party Just Wasn’t There – NYTimes.com

This is an article I meant to post yesterday which talks about some interesting takes on the Tea Party stuff. It unfortunately doesn’t say where its polls come from. I do wonder if the the politicians and apologists are more extreme and less reasonable than the rank and file.  I hope so.

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The Debt Crisis, Merely Postponed – NYTimes.com

Bowles and Simpson weigh in on the topic.

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Reagan vs. Patco – The Strike That Busted Unions – NYTimes.com

Reagan was the first president of the Screen Actors Guild to lead it in a strike. His stand against air traffic controllers (which I vividly remember happening) changed anti-union rhetoric world wide. Maggie Thatcher ran with it and privatized and ruined the UK.  Some interesting history in this article.

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20 titles marked down temporarily to .99. Here’s a link to a list. They are available for Kindle on Amazon which is how I purchased them. So far here are the ones I have bought.

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I finished this book a couple of days ago.  Then I sat down and sent copies to family and a friend.  I especially enjoyed the last chapter in which Glouberman talks about quitting smoking and simultaneously beginning to habitually wear suits. This guy rocks!

Today is staff meeting and then I drive off to give a piano lesson to my student Rudy.

I wanted to use my cheese making kit and maybe make mozzarella to use in some excellent capri salad for the staff lunch.

Unfortunately, it calls for milk that has not been heated over 172 degrees. Most brand names are. It’s illegal to sell unpasteurized milk in Michigan. So I have to figure out what to do and will not be making mozzarella this morning.

I think I might be able to buy some real mozzarella locally. We’ll see.

Speaking of food, my niece, Kim, asked me for a recipe for Anadama Bread. Here is the Facebook link to the recipe. If it doesn’t work, let me know and I will make it available.

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Column: GOP’s disrespect of Obama goes beyond debt fight – USATODAY.com

Wow. In USATODAY. Whoduh thunk it?

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Media Malpractice on Debt Ceiling

“Five ways media misreported deficit debate”

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What Were They Thinking? by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books

“Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult?”

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Can you remember the summer of ’74? I sure can – Berklee College of Music – Epinions.com

Vaguely interesting description of spending a few weeks at this school in 1974.

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Fiscal Conservatives Barred from Supercommittee | The Weekly Standard

People who voted against the recent debt ceiling extension eliminated from the Supercommittee by the Republicans?

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RealClearPolitics – Green with Tea Party Envy

by Richard Cohen….

“The odd thing about the tea party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy.”

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Putting an Antebellum Myth About Slave Families to Rest – NYTimes.com

“Why does the ugly resuscitation of the myth of the happy slave family matter? Because it is part of a broad and deliberate amnesia, like the misleading assertion by Sarah Palin that the founders were antislavery and the skipping of the “three-fifths” clause during a Republican reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The oft-repeated historical fictions about black families only prove how politically useful and resilient they continue to be in a so-called post-racial society. Refusing to be honest about how racial inequality has burdened our shared history and continues to shape our society will not get us to that post-racial vision.”

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The Tea Party’s War on America – NYTimes.com

Surprising stats about people who identify with the Tea Party. Not what you might expect listening to the Republican leaders.

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As We Seek Nature, We Wall It Out – NYTimes.com

More on how nature is still with us. Excellent article by author  Diane Ackerman.

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Elected as Cost-Cutters, Freshmen Push Spending for Home Districts – NYTimes.com

As I commented on Facebook and Twitter when I passed this along: “Austerity for thee, but not for me.”

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Complaint Seeks Punishment for Classification of Documents – NYTimes.com

Classifying documents that have nothing that needs protecthing in them can lead to conviction of people for leaking them….. good grief.

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Senators to Obama: Leave Oil Subsidies Alone! | Public Campaign Action Fund

This article has a list of senators who have received bucks from Oil companies.

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The diverging diamond interchange: A new kind of intersection eliminates dangerous, time-wasting left turns completely. – By Tom Vanderbilt – Slate Magazine

“Michigan Left” as a precursor of new ideas. Found this link before I heard a report about it on the radio. Led me to the link below which has a very cool interface for reading online.

Magic motorways : Geddes, Norman Bel, 1893-1958 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

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Dams to Be Removed in Washington to Replenish Salmon – NYTimes.com

Nature keeps on coming.

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I have been thinking about the two sides squared off in the US right now. Red states, blue states; Republican, Democrat: right, left; label them what you will. Lakoff in The Political Mind suggests that they are aligned with two types of family models and that most of us have both sides in us.

His two family  models are “authoritarian” and “empathetic.” The authoritarian model is one that is based on the father guiding the rest of the family with his wisdom,

the empathetic is one based on compassion and equality.

I can see both of these in myself. Sometimes when I speak I sound so authoritative that you might think God whispered the truth in my ear. This is probably not a nice part of me. But I also think that my search for coherence and logic comes from this kind of thinking as well.  I tend to seek out “authorities” about subjects.

The empathetic side is the side of me that I consciously cultivate. Here is where I try to put myself in other people’s shoes. Also I have a strong value that everyone should be respected and have opportunities to take care of themselves. My sense of fairness might come from this side of me as well.

I also believe that we are responsible for who we are.

The only person one can really change or answer for is one’s self. This seems to combine aspects of both family model philosophies.

These ideas do help me a bit when I see people so angry around distant political and moral questions.  But I think it’s important to mostly look inside myself.

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Historic Chelsea Hotel Closes to Guests – NYTimes.com

” … Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Robert Crumb roamed its halls… ”

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Biased but Brilliant, Science Embraces Pigheadedness – NYTimes.com

Examining bias as part of truth seeking.

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Samuel Barber and William Schuman, Awaiting Their Due – NYTimes.com

Some anecdotes from these men’s lives in this article.

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I found Rebecca D. Costa’s book, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, sitting on the new shelf at the library on Saturday.

I have been thinking a tiny bit about science and politics and thought this might have some insights in it so I grabbed it and put it on my stack after perusing it briefly.

It seems to have been a lucky and serendipitous choice. Costa is talking about thinking our way out of our current global problems and adds the neuroscience of the past decade.

After writing yesterday’s blog, before church, I sat down and started reading it. After I had put stickies in several places for excellent ideas and quotes, I bought an ebook copy of it online.

One of the things I am discovering about the Kindle software that I use (Kindle for PC) is the ease and helpfulness of bookmarking and putting in comments for myself.

Here are some of the sections I found interesting yesterday.

First a summarized list of the juxtaposition of the six things that were necessary before she could write this book.

It took all these discoveries—evolution, genetics, sociobiology, memetics, neuroscience, and my work in the vortex of Silicon Valley—to bring me to the biological reasons for the ascension and decline of civilizations.

Costa, Rebecca (2010). The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction (Kindle Locations 214-215). Vanguard Press. Kindle Edition.

“Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.” (Wikipedia link where I found this definition)

Costa’s working in Silicon Valley (impressively to me) was being in on the the ground floor of CAD (Computer Aided Design) development as a science writer.

Besides the juxtaposition of the items on the quoted buy diazepam bali list above, Costa enumerates the signs of decline in our global civilization.

“Today, the issues that threaten human existence are clear: a global recession, powerful pandemic viruses, terrorism, rising crime, climate change, rapid depletion of the earth’s resources, nuclear proliferation, and failing education.”

I was struck by several of her sources and colleagues. Primarly, E. O. Wilson who is someone I have admired and read and apparently is a founder of the field of sociobiology.

Richard Dawkins (memetics) is also someone I am aware of and admire. Finally, Jared Diamond seems to have had a bit influence on Costa’s argument. I recognize her description of the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization from reading Diamond myself (Guns, Germs, and Steel).

A couple more quotes I had to mark yesterday morning.

She quotes Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute and professor at Harvard University from his book, Making Things Work.

“The rule of thumb is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment at all scales in order to increase the likelihood of survival.”

The other salient quote:

“The point at which a society can no longer “think” its way out of its problems is called the cognitive threshold.”

It was at this point I put the book down for a while and resisted purchasing it for about a half hour. When I returned to it, I realized I was going to want to do a lot of bookmarking of ideas, so I just went ahead and bought it online.

I then decided  I would finish Chairs are where the people go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti before reading further in Costa.

I generally keep several books going but try to restrain myself to one per genre: non-fiction, light fiction, heavier fiction, music stuff.

Finished off a reading of The Hobbit last night. I wanted to finish it before starting a new novel or two.

I find characters in books have so much more texture and depth than movie characters. Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf seem much more real to me as personalities in the world Tolkien creates with the words in his novel.  It is the difference between two dimensional experiences and three dimensional ones.

Tolkien creates in Baggins a person who combines the self-interest of someone whose takes a deep delight in creature comforts with the irresistible charm of someone who cannot stop themselves from being drawn in to adventures and who is caught up in wonder and curiosity at the world. The reader develops an affection that is pretty unique for this literary character. At least this reader did.

Gandalf also surprisingly leaps off the page as not only the mysterious wizard of the movie but a fallible interesting person whose self interest is off set by his obvious affection for Baggins.

Maybe this stuff is in the movie, but I certainly don’t remember it.

I find that most movies bore me with their predictable formula like creations of stereotyped people and plots. But maybe that’s just my age showing.

I particularly liked (and identified with) this description of Bilbo at the end of the book:

Upon returning to his hobbit-hole at the end of this adventure and discovering that all of his belongings had just been auctioned off since his absence had been so prolonged everyone thought he was dead, Bilbo Baggins attempted to retrieve his property. He gets a lot of it back but has lost many of his silver spoons.

Then Tolkien writes:

“Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons—he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighborhood to be ‘queer’—except for his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.

“I am sorry to say he did not mind. He was quite content….”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I smiled when I read that.

My quasi son-in-law, Jeremy Daum, (as he charmingly describes himself in his relationship to me through my lovely daughter, Elizabeth) recently recommended an author to me.

I went to the library yesterday and picked up a couple titles by the recommended writer, Charles Stross. After finishing The Hobbit, I dipped into Stross’s short story collection, Wireless and read an inventive little novella called Missile Gap. The outrageous plot is based on the notion that during the Cuban missile crisis some incredible powerful and mysterious power moved the surface of the entire earth to an unthinkably large disc of which earth is so small in comparison it makes up only a very tiny portion of  its spinning surface. In the resulting story one wonders whether the characters in the story are simply earth memories appropriated for an alien experiment and whether the incredible alien species that infiltrates the earth inhabitants are the ones who “moved” the earthlings or are themselves a species that has been transplanted to this huge galaxy size disc world. Not a bad plot.

Then I started the novel by Stross I had checked out, The Family Trade.

It is the first of a trilogy and Jeremy was quick to point out that it is more fantasy than sci-fi and he didn’t vouch for Stross’s fantasy writing. No matter to me.

I find Stross himself pretty engaging. It was actually his introduction to the collection, Wireless, that helped me to overcome my natural disinclination initially to choose a collection of short stories in addition to a novel by a new writer.

Then there’s his website, where you can download his novel, Accelerando, for free, and read his moderated blog which seems to include several guest writers.

This morning I found his FAQ on why there is no tip jar on his web site enlightening in its description of how book publishers differ from music and movie distributors.

More on books tomorrow.

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On the Party Circuit, And Upsetting the Party – NYTimes.com

Chinese fiction writer. I would be interested in reading this dude once the English translation becomes available.

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John H. Marburger, Bush Science Adviser, Dies at 70 – NYTimes.com

The description of Marburger in this obit is intriguing to me because Marburger seemed to have kept his own scientific opinions to himself and propagated the conservative political needs of his masters. A Democrat working for Republicans in a bitterly partisan era.

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My Very Own Captain America – NYTimes.com

Charles Blow touchingly writes a tribute to his heroic grandfather inspired by noticing the historical inaccuracy of the new Captain America (integrated troops in WWII).

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The Centrist Cop-Out – NYTimes.com

Krugman makes it clear that pundits who try to put the blame for the current mess equally on the President (whose budget proposals have been right of center) and the House Republicans freshmen (who are radically and extremely right of center and brook no compromise) are wrong. I especially found it hilarious that at the end of the article there is a typical notice that columnist “David Brooks is off today.” Brooks has been popping up all over touting that very notion.

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Americans Who Tell the Truth Robert Shetterly

Shetterly paints portraits. This is his web site.

Bill Ayers Biography

Educational Theorist, Professor, Writer, Anti-War & Civil Rights Activist. b. 1944

“There is, after all, no basis for education in a democracy outside of a faith in the enduring capacity for growth in ordinary people and a faith that ordinary people … can, if they choose, change the world.”

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I have drawn a bit of fire on Facebook.

When I put up this link: Should we teach examples of scientists falling for unscientific practices? | Code for Life an old high school acquaintance took the opportunity to echo ideas about Al Gore and “global warming” as an example of bad science.

Partisans love to get emotional these days. I am finding the whole hate and anger thing less and less interesting.  It troubles me, of course, but I think I am at the end of my tether regarding trying to understand people who don’t make sense to me.

When I tried to point out that global warming is accepted by the world-wide scientific community via links to National Geographic and then a pretty good wickipedia article, my acquaintance just kept focusing on Al Gore.

I’m not really that into Gore. I read about half of his “The Assault on Reason.”

When I think of Gore, I think primarily of how the Supreme Court handed the election to Bush in 2000 reversing their own conservative principles of states rights.

I find that people who describe themselves as  conservative stay pretty consistent but sometimes falter when their principles have to be applied to something near and dear to their heart. Just something I have observed living in Western Michigan.

Anyway, Gore’s book is good and full of ideas. I seemed to have left off reading in the long chapter on carbon emissions. Not sure why.

some quotes from the excellent introduction:

“… [S]o long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role.” The Assault on Reason, p. 8

“The mental muscles of democracy have begun to atrophy.” p. 11

“It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable.”

“The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas [jupe note: wherein the accountability occurs – the public forum]:

1.  “…. open to every individual”

2. “… fate of ideas … depended … on an emergent meritocracy of ideas…”

3. “…. discourse presumed …. [a] search for general agreement… a ‘conversation of democracy’….

p. 13

My facebook friend’s idea seemed to be that politics should keep out of science.  (Here’s the URL for the conversation… not sure if it will take you there… ). I disagree.  I see the concepts of government and society as positive forces wherein informed conversations and decisions responsibly happen. My freedoms end where your nose begins and vice versa. Granted all this rarely works out in practice, but it’s how I perceive the ideas of government and society.

So it makes no sense to me to disconnect science and clarity of thought from the conversation and process whereby we decide how we as a society should live and elect our leaders.

I have a theory that many angry people in the USA live mostly in echo chambers that reinforce their understandings of the world however confused.

The ones that disagree with me probably think that I live in an echo chamber as well. This may be, but I do try to break out of it and engage with ideas and people I disagree with on occasion.

And I admit that people who excoriate the New York Times as wildly partisan must live in another universe than I do.

I regularly read many different news organizations online and find that the NYT often gets a lot right (I’m talking about reporting). And reading any news report often sends me to a quick research online to verify or find out more about ideas and people.

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Useless Pharmaceutical Studies, Real Harm – NYTimes.com

More bad science.

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Disney Wins Marvel Comics Copyright Case – NYTimes.com

I put this link on my niece’s husband’s facebook wall. He is a comic book artist extraordinaire.

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I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me | Common Dreams

My daughter Eliz linked me to this.

“Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for ‘disrupting’ a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:
“… those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we want to change that status quo, we might have to work outside of those rules because the legal pathways available to us have been structured precisely to make sure we don’t make any substantial change.”

I used our handy dandy outdoor gas grill yesterday so I wouldn’t heat up the kitchen.

I put creamed corn and water in a small pot. One of the burners on my grill works like a stove top burner. I put the corn on that. Meanwhile I grilled sliced potatoes, onions and mushrooms. When the corn was done, I heated up the left over green beans.

When Eileen came home, she picked some more basil and we added it to the pesto I had been making in the food processor. This was excellent. I had it on my potatoes, Eileen ate it on crackers.

I served all this with a plate of fantastic sliced tomatoes dressed with olive oil, Parmesan cheese and more basil.

For dessert we had pitted cherries, blueberries and peaches with ice cream.

Life is certainly rough at casa Jenkins.

I have been very discouraged by the behavior of our leaders in Washington.  I follow Lewis Black in that he voted for Obama but  noticed a telling feature about him. He is a Democrat. He says that if Republicans stink up Washington by farting , the Democrats simply waft the aroma to their noses and go “Ahhhh.”

My congressman, Huizenga, is so far to the right of me, I have quit bothering with the letters and emails. He votes the opposite of the way I would like to see on almost every issue. He seems pretty much in lockstep with  the inexperienced, freshman reps.

It’s hard to tell how dishonest these people are being about the budget or if its sincere misreading of the situation. I still suspect at least some of them have no belief in government and simply want to kill it. Others represent interests which I am sure benefit from their presence in Washington. I am thinking mainly of business interests but I’m sure there are others.

I yelled at the television last night over my excellent supper.

The House is stalled over a bill that the Senate has vowed not to pass and the President has promised to veto.  So the actions of the House and the reporting on it seem like theater to me.

My response is to read more in two books I have been reading.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

and the Political Mind by George Lakoff.

I am convinced that the paucity of the political discussion and the reporting on it results at least in part from people who are not educated in any sense I can recognize.

By this I mean they cannot reason well, they “believe” things in their hearts that are more about their emotions and anger than reality.

Kearns tells a intricate story of Lincoln’s abilities. They are heartbreaking to read about now since America has no leaders of any real quality. I do continue to support Obama, but I do not understand much of what is happening right now and cannot coherently evaluate what he is doing. I can see coherence in his rhetoric. At the same time I am convinced that much of the rabid opposition to him is squarely seated in racism and self serving positions if not out and out corruption.

Lakoff’s book is an argument for a New Enlightenment which combines traditional American rational values like government as a societal force that protects and empowers citizens with the necessary emotional framework of a morality based on empathy not authority.

Half way through the book he starts to sound like a wild eyed idealist. I find it both attractive and sad. I think I’m one myself.

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Should we teach examples of scientists falling for unscientific practices? | Code for Life

I found this link on my Twitter feed. The answer, by the way, is yes we should teach this idea since there is so much misinformation and bad science in the mix these days. It even comes from scientists. Badly educated ones.

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President on Sidelines in Critical Battle Over Debt Ceiling – NYTimes.com

Despite the headline, like so much criticism I read these days, this author doesn’t only hold the President responsible for the current crisis.

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Human Run-Ins With Bears May Portend Deeper Changes – NYTimes.com

The basic insight in this article is that it’s not just bear populations that are changing the interaction between humans and bears. It’s much more complex and includes larger human populations and different bear behavior.

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This Is Called ‘Small’ Government – NYTimes.com

This editorial outlines the recent debacle at the F.A.A. courtesy House Republicans.  Maybe you’ve heard about it.

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Obama and His Discontents – NYTimes.com

The author of this article, Ta-Nehisi Coates, critically if sympathetically analyzes a historical metaphor Obama used in a recent speech, namely the Emancipation Proclamation.

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Keeping Abloom the Inspiration for Monet’s Masterpieces – NYTimes.com

Monet’s actual garden.

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Hard Times Causing Rifts Among Mariachi Bands in Los Angeles – NYTimes.com

It’s 50 bucks an hour for the good musicians, $30 an hour for the less good.

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America’s own Taliban – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

A frightening lengthy look at “dominionism”. Crazy scary stuff.

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Saturn’s water mystery finally ‘solved’ – The Times of India

Water is gushing from one of Saturn’s moons to the planet. Only known instance of water coming from space to a planet in this manner. Very cool.

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I played Bach inventions, a Mozart sonata movement and a Beethoven sonata movement for the residents at my Mom’s assisted living facility yesterday. The inventions gave me an opportunity to talk briefly not only about my grandchildren but also musical texture. I personally am always a bit dazzled that Bach wrote the inventions and sinfonias for students.

I played the C major and F major 2 part inventions and the Eb 3 part sinfonia. I don’t remember ever performing the F major in public before. When I first began piano lessons I already had a copy of the inventions. I talked my teacher into letting me learn the F major. Unfortunately this was in Flint and I was in my very early teens. I wasn’t a great student. I lacked discipline (that came later).

So what I did with the F major invention then was more harmful than helpful. These beginning stumbling attempts colored my approach to playing it for years. I love it and am glad to say I can now play it after working hard to offset my initial goofing around with it.

Its basic melody of leaping notes always reminds me of Bach’s take on Vivaldi.

I played the first movement of Mozart’s piano sonata, K. 279. This is one of several I can basically pull out of my hat and often use at weddings or funerals.

The Beethoven was the slow movement from his Sonata Pathetique.

For years Karl Haas used this as his theme song for his radio show, “Adventures in Good Music.”

Several in the audience recognized his name when I introduced this piece.

After the classical music I played several numbers like “Raindrops keep falling on my head” (It was raining), “How much is that doggie in the window,” and “Whose sorry now?” There was much singing along to these.

Then since it was the July birthdays we were celebrating, we did a stanza each of America, “O beautiful for spacious skies,” and the National Anthem. I suggested that maybe the audience didn’t need to stand for the latter as is usual. This was a bit unnecessary since many of them were in wheelchairs and weren’t actually able to stand.

So that whole gig went well.

Today all my rehearsals and appointments have canceled so I have the day free to relax and read.

I went to the Farmers Market yesterday and picked up cherries, blueberries, onions, corn, tomatoes and more. I will probably cook up something nice for us to eat this evening.

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Not O.K. at the O.K. Corral – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd gets witty using the new movie, “Cowboys and Aliens,” to talk about John Boehner (the cowboy) and Barack Obama (the alien).

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Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History – NYTimes.com

Report about new 3D images of reconstructed historical landscapes.

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That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner – NYTimes.com

Cooks using parts of plants usually discarded for interesting eating.

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Brown Butter Nectarine Cobbler/Cake — Recipe – NYTimes.com

This recipe looks great for fresh fruit!

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Survivors Recall 1927 Michigan School Massacre : NPR

In this case the killer was angry about the use of taxes for public education.

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Gidon Kremer: why I quit the celebrity ratrace

The letter this famous violinist sent to the director of a festival withdrawing recently.

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