9:11 AM

I finally finished Pickwick Papers last night. It was fun but long. I do admire Dickens’ use of language. And his powers of observation are keen. Pickwick was serialized initially. Dickens is clever how he keeps your attention. He does primarily through subplots. The whole story is basically two years in the life of Mr. Pickwick. In that two years, many things happen to him. He is sued and thrown in jail. He assists in many trysts for younger people. And you get to know the marvelous Sam Weller, his manservant and Sam’s father. The Wellers are the most attractive characters in the book to me.

8:24 AM

Read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” last night.

I was reading in Luntz’s “Words that Matter,” and he prefaced a chapter with an interesting quote from Orwell’s essay.

God bless the net. I googled it and came up with above link. It looks like someone has hurriedly typed it in (lots of typos) but I got the idea (There are quotes in the previous post).

I continue to enjoy Luntz’s observations, though I read it with my guard up. I know the power of language and it’s ability to fool the reader or listener. But I prefer to do a lot my own reading and thinking and testing my brains against the person who I am reading.

Luntz’s political stands are practically the opposite of my own. But he insists that he is not a polemicist. Instead he is trying to contribute to clarity in language.

I think this is a good goal. I know that I watch my own language and try to make it more clear.

Luntz’s has this notion that it’s not what you say or what you mean to say that ultimately matters it’s what people hear or perceive. I think that this is true a lot of the time.

But it is just a step away from saying that perception trumps reality. Or that perception is reality.

This step discards content in favor of manipulation of the reader or listener.

I don’t think Luntz is doing this.

But I think he is close to other people who advocate the idea of “framing” (which I think means choosing language to shape your audience’s response and staying “on message” avoiding any exchange of ideas that does not serve your ends). His arguments are right at the edge of the terrible word waltz where words do the leading and listeners slip helplessly into their dance without thinking.

7:50 AM

“Words end up meaning nothing when they are used improperly.”

“The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.”

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

“Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets, this is called pacification.”

“Let the meaning choose the word, not the other way around.”

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

from “Politics and the English Language” (1946) by George Orwell

9:09 PM

Speaking of what happens to our humanity when we are constantly being exposed to brutalities like executions and genocide, Patricial Williams quotes Cynthia Cannady:

“What has happened to us is a violation of our being. And we do not even seem to know it. Yes, there are numberless victims in Iraq. But we are victims, too. What is being killed is our ability to care about what happens to other people. We think we can just on with our private lives, but we [actually] can’t take back what we have purchased.”

The whole article is worth reading.

They told me that I wouldn’t have a computer in my office at GVSU, but I do. Taught class today even though I’m still in a fog from my flu. This class asked a lot of good questions today. Somehow there’s more participation and interest than I remember. People seem in good spirits. Very helpful today. I only got through about 2/3rds of my lecture, but whotthehell.

I’m doing this entry from school. I like the ability to do remote blogs. This means I can blog easily when I’m traveling (assuming I can get access to the Web).

Explorer shows a big gap at the top of my web site, but Mozilla doesn’t. I’ll have to fix that when I get my brains back.

11:49 AM

I have been thinking about the new theme (template appearance from WordPress) I am using.

I think it is a good one for me, because after just a little coaching from my kids and a bit of thought on my part, I figured out how to link in my myspace site and put up a gas mask pic.

I did this despite having a sort of flu/body cold which makes my head more foggy than usual.

After doing this, I begin to see just how flexible this particular set up is. It is more basic than the set-up that comes with WordPress. You have to edit the xhtml language with very few point and click features. I like that actually. It helps me understand what the heck I am doing.

I corrected about a third of my papers I want to have done by tomorrow.

8:53 AM

Great. I’m sick. Church went well yesterday but my throat was hurting.

Last night I slept badly.

I need to correct papers for tomorrow but I think I will just lay in bed.

12:45 PM

“The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can’t check out.” Cory Doctorow on Boingboing.net (You have to scroll down a bit.)

“Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.”

7:30 AM

Received 3 puchased DVDs in the mail yesterday: Freiburg Orch playing Bach Brandenburgs, Herbert Von Karajan conducting Beethoven’s 4 & 5th symphony and Touch the Sound.

Also received the first of 10 Netflix disks of the 50s TV series: “Young Person’s People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic” Leonard Bernstein (pictured above). I put Bernstein on first. I purchased a book that selectively transcribes these shows this summer. I like Bernstein’s aesthetic a lot and I’m always looking for ways to talk about music to listeners.

What I like most about the Bernstein recordings is that they are so obviously early live TV (1958). Instead of a teleprompter he is working from two scripts, one at the podium and one at the piano. He grunts and hums along as he demonstrates and conducts. Some engineer has obviously been instructed not to turn down his mic because he occasionally talks over the music to the audience.

The show was too long for me. The pace was slow and even the young audience from an era of longer attention spans gets tired about halfway through the whole thing.

Read about 25 pages into Luntz’s “Words that Work” last night. So far I have been caught up in his ability to move back and forth in opposed political interest groups even though he is a declared conservative. (And reading this book, you can tell he really is brain dead conservative on many issues.) Secondly, his insight that “it’s not what you say, it’s what is being heard” is a very important thing to think about in terms of teaching and communication.

I am reminded of an article I wrote several years ago. The editor sent it back and told me I was writing for too educated a reader. Instead of college level vocab he wanted me to consciously take it down to 7th grade. For some reason I saw this as an interesting challenge and did several rewrites to achieve this.

Clarity (for me) is always a high value. If the vocab is not familar to the listener or reader, the speaker or writer has failed to communicate. Unless of course he expects the reader to pick up a dictionary.

Luntz is clear that it is not just style that helps communication it is also content. Some ideas are wrongheaded no matter how well they are “framed.” I agree with him on this, but I suspect that our ideas differ radically.

He lists off the ten basic rules of communication in his first chapter: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning and context.

It’s a good list. He suggests an 11th that would address the need for visual symbols.

When I am teaching, I write a daily “word for the day” on the board before each class. I tell the class that I find I use words that people sometimes do not recognize. A “word for the day” might help with this. Unless I warn them, I don’t put these words on tests and quizzes.
Not sure this is effective beyond demonstrating my own obvious conviction that words are important. No wonder I picked up a book called, “Words that Work,” eh?

Well, I put up a new look from WordPress. Spent the last hour or two trying to get it to not look like a template. Still figuring this thing out…. Sheesh

Did I tell you I changed my google home page? I made one tab for conservative news sites and one for liberal news sites. This should be interesting to check out once in a while. Yesterday, Eileen brought home the book I interlibrary-loaned, “Words that work: It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear” by Frank Luntz.

I heard him recently on Fresh Aire and decided he was worth checking out. His point on the radio was that liberals need to listen to conservative media and conservatives need to listen liberal media.

This morning on “On the Media,” one of the people they were interviewing starting naming off conservative and liberal radio/ tv people. I only recognized the conservatives.

This is probably because they are more popular and have more of a public presence (Bill O’Reilly, Fox News).

Luntz is a certified conservative, I believe. He seems to have been part of the whole conservative move to frame (read lie about) issues to make them more palatable to people whose interest they do not werve.

He might have gotten religion since this interview with Samantha Bee on the Daily show. (Warning it’s just the transcript. I checked Youtube and couldn’t find a video)

Read “A New Story for America” by Bill Moyers in a recent Nation magazine. I read the print version. I see that online it is retitled “For America’s Sake.” I think the first title is better because it is actually what he is writing about.

I use this metaphor myself quite a bit. What stories do we tell each other and ourselves? That woman is bully. That president is stupid. My parents hate me. Stuff like that. Stories help me but they also need to be examined.

Moyer’s point is if Democrats (or anyone else for that matter) are to do some good in leading this country they need to recapture the story that is actually a bit more historically American. The relatively new story that needs to be examined, challenged and replaced is the one of capitalism and economic free market and profit margins ( this story covertly seems to think that “greed is good” and so is commodification. It reminds me of the quote I read once from an advertising executive: “People like advertising.” This is so not true for me. Heh.)

Moyer believes the more historical and essentially redeemable American story is one of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out.

Some things that jumped out at me in Moyer’s article:

Economic growth… by its very nature is valueless.

Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control–a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.
(emphasis added)

Freedom… is “considerably more than a private value.” It is essentially a social idea, which explains why the worship of the free market “fails as a compelling idea in terms of the moral reasoning of freedom itself.”
(here Moyers is quoting from John Schwartz’s book, Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision)

He also mentions two other books that he says that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate. Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism by Paul Starr and The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth by Norton Garfinkle.

My local library system doesn’t own any of these. But GVSU owns one and is processing another of them. So maybe I can get a gander at them that way.

I worked hard on my lecture for today’s class, but didn’t feel as effective as Tuesday. As I drove home, I recognized the feeling of sheepishness that sometimes comes over me after I babble for a while.

I saw the inside of my office for the first time today because a student asked to speak to me. There did seem to be a computer in it but I didn’t turn it on.

I have been laying on the couch reading old New York Times (I am now caught up to yesterday) and gathering strength for this evening’s Mens sectional and subsequent choir rehearsal.

I received my new job offer (these things can’t really be contracts if they can just change them at will, right?) in the mail today. I suppose this means I will not only get paid less this term (since I am only teaching one class) but also will miss the first pay period since my paperwork is arriving on the fourth day of class.

What I have learned from this is that my concept of college as a community of scholars is as defunct at GVSU as I suspected it was. I have taken to referring to myself as a subcontractor.

Anyway, even though I don’t think I was especially brilliant today, I still enjoyed it. And I think this class might be responding more than usual. They talk. Cool.

I made quiche for supper. Eileen and I ate by candlelight (something we’ve been doing)

Now I’m surfing and finding these links:

Leaping Mandarin Ducks on video.

This sure gives meaning to leaving the nest.

Nina Simone sings Four women

I love Nina Simone.

Finding Nemo Mission Impossible trailer

1984 Larry Flynt for Prez Ad

I’m just going to blog here for awhile, even though I’m unhappy with the whole design thing.

It is easy. And I like it when people leave me comments.

Thank you everyone who has done that.

I just ordered 3 DVDs. Two of them I will use for sure in my class.

I know this is a bit quixotic, but whotthehell, archie.

The first one is of the The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra performing all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on period instruments in Cothen.

Last night after my second student left (I have 2 new students – one piano, one guitar), I investigated the computer I have on loan from Jeremy in my front room. Lo and behold, just as I suspected it had a DVD player in it.

I made myself a drink and put on my Netflix copy of the above group playing the Brandenburg concertos. I was immediately impressed. They are sort of musician music videos. By that I mean, there are only shots of musicians playing.

I was especially blown away by the horn players. They were playing early French Horns with no valves. These guys are truly virtuosi. Man.

Anyway, I flipped to the music that I teach in my course from these pieces and decided to order a copy (if I could afford it). If you clicked on that link above, do not have a heart attack. I did NOT pay $99.00 for it. It was more like 10.00 on DvdEmpire.com.

I also bought a DVD of Karajan conducting Beethoven’s Fifth. This is another piece I spend quite a bit of time with in my course.

Finally the third purchase was the most expensive ($20.00). I broke down and bought Touch the Sound featuring the incredible Evelyn Glennie. When I watched this I was totally blown away by her (and other musician’s) performances on this DVD.

I know it’s dumb to sink 40 bucks into a course at GVSU when they have convinced me that I am truly not part of the community of musicians there. But I don’t care.

I had a great class yesterday. It was the best first class I ever taught. Some of this has to be this particular group of people at this particular time. But I was very happy with the way I did this class.

The chair kind of grunted a begrudging hello to me in the office. I said, hey.

I have an office in the music building this time.

But there’s no computer in it, as of yet.

Heh.

Class went very well.

On the way home, I heard the tail end of Frank Lutz talking on Fresh Aire. He was very conservative and reactionary. But I liked what he said about conservatives need to listen to liberal media and liberals need to listen to conservative media.

Came home and made an extra page on my google home page. Clicked on The Conservative Voice web site and read this:

We are to be convinced that Iran, with no air force or navy to speak of, an economy not 2 percent of ours, which has not started a single war since the revolution, 27 years ago, is about to give to terrorists, to use on us, a nuclear bomb it may be 10 years away from even being able to build.

I have been thinking about this. I think we are preparing to attack Iran. Interesting to read something like this on the so called conservative media.

Hey. I guess Lutz has a point.

By the way he was plugging his new book,Words that Work: It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. Maybe I’ll check it out.

I’m ready. I have been up for hours preparing lectures and homework for today. I actually am incorporating some of my musings about David Byrne’s blog from yesterday.

He classifies music reproduction in terms of the amount of information: LP most, CD less, MP3 least.

I added Live music to this list as an example of the most information. Mentioned that LPs are analogue and the rest digital. Kind of fun stuff.

Most kids I dare say listen to MP3s. I can predict that the jump from MP3s to live experience will be a significant one for many students.

Ran our new dishwasher this morning. Eileen received her new porcelain crock (kitchen compost canister)for kitchen refuse in the mail yesterday. She told me I could put the whole coffee filter with grounds in it.

Life is good.

Phipps, the GVSU Music chair, left an email in my GVSU email inbox late Saturday evening. In it he explained that he would only be able to offer me one of the two original classes this term. I accepted. Fuck it.

Received this just in time. I was preparing to go over to the Holland GVSU campus and make syllabi for both courses.

I immediately emailed the two students who have asked for closed class permits for this course. I informed them that I would be their teacher.

It’s frustrating because I strongly suspect the faculty person will not teach the theory class well at all. But I’m not the chair. My main concern is the students and the money. As long as I accept these teaching assignments, I will do my best.

I read David Byrne’s post, “1.2.07: Crappy Sound Forever!’ this morning. It is a response to reading a book I sometimes mention here: “Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music” by Mark Katz.

Since Byrne doesn’t have a comments link on his website (not sure I would have the guts to engage him anyway), here’s some of the interesting things he says with my comments.

Byrne remarks that he finds the lighter vibrato of pop singers

“more accessible and less weird than the fuzzy pitching of contemporary opera singers who sometimes exaggerate the wobble so much you hardly know what note they’re supposed to be singing unless you know the tune already.”

This has always been sort of my take as well. I sometimes dread working with so-called “trained” singers knowing that I will have to tone them down considerably in order to get a pleasing sound. And even then they tend to rebel in public and revert to that wobble thing.

Later commenting on the idea that the length of songs was determined by the length of 78s and 45s, Byrne writes:

To me a song length between 3 and 4 minutes seems natural, inevitable; I can hardly conceive that it could have ever been otherwise, but maybe it was. I dunno, though — even folk songs and blues, most of them don’t have too many verses….

Hmmm. I guess he hasn’t looked at many folksongs. I can walk two steps to my bookshelf and come up with hundreds of long folk songs with many many verses.

I liked this:

Artists began to use the studio as an instrument as well

He remarks that he can hear the influence of software like Akai, Pro Tools and Logic in music written in the last 10 years. He is refering to the “uncanny perfection.”

Also

In hip hop, which might be the most radical popular music around, there is no relationship of the composition to the live performance anymore — everything, every instrument, is processed ….

Except of course for the group, Outkast.

Byrne observes that mixtapes are a kind of composing. Or recomposing.

and that MP3s return music to experience rather than being things…

Would that this were so.

MP3s, which is how many of us hear music now, are in a way like virtual music. The compression that allows their smaller file size eliminates what the software decides are redundant frequencies and sounds the ear probably doesn’t hear and won’t miss. Maybe. There is less ‘information’ on an MP3 than on a CD, and less on a CD than an LP. Where does this road end, and does it really matter that sheer information and recording quality is going down?

I love questions like this and think about them myself from time to time.He ends up pointing out that he

first heard rock and soul songs on a tiny crappy-sounding transistor radio

and it changed his life completely….

I confess that recently I bought his weird little book, The New Sins, which is written in both English and Spanish and uses a devotional format for witty and sharp comments on the modern condition.