I was surprised at my now annual hearing test yesterday.

I was expecting the audiologist to find hearing loss in my left ear in the last year.  I had a test in 2012 to establish a base line which showed some hearing loss but not quite enough to start talking hearing aids.

But she said I tested out about like last year.

As a musician of course I fear deafness. I have always told myself that I would turn from music to poetry and probably even more visual art as the space in which I spend my life.

But I have added unanticipated fear about how the end of my life will play out financially. It looks like my work at Grace has a good chance of changing this fall. My boss is running for Bishop of this diocese and she has a good chance of winning.

Usually I think about this in terms of my relationship to the vocation of church music. For me church is a sort of bitch goddess. There are many things about church that have been good in my life. And I do enjoy the work of the church musician. But I do not feel strongly that I need to continue doing it.

But it is a significant income addition for Eileen and me. We are on the brink of adding more debt by renovating our house for our old age. Ay yi yi. If Eileen and I both were to lose our job prematurely I wonder how that would work out.

Anyway, these are the paranoid ravings of a tired old guy on Thursday morning who is seeking to stay balanced enough to survive the rest of Holy Week.

Also I’m very glad about the hearing. I have been enjoying listening to the birds on my walk to work. Yesterday I heard the woodpecker again or at least a woodpecker. I see why Messiaen loved the birds.

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A Don’s Life: Opening Pompeii

I read this blog pretty regularly. The author reviews a new museum show in Great Britain of Pompeii artifacts.

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How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing – ProPublica

Eileen complains every year that there is a fee for filing online with the government.

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It’s Personal – NYTimes.com

Bill Keller talks about the reasons he supports legal abortion.

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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: “The Judge’s Will” : The New Yorker

Well written and interesting short story.

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Israel’s Prisoner X Said to Have Exposed Spies – NYTimes.com

I have been following this story. The man who died seems to have been incompetent.

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Russian Authorities Raid Amnesty International Office – NYTimes.com

This is a real difference between our country and countries where the state will show up and intimidate you.

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Egyptian Women Blamed for Sexual Assaults – NYTimes.com

Always easier to blame the victim no matter the culture. Inexcusable.

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Money Dreaming | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Australian practice of dreaming oneself into reality applied nicely to money. Short thought provoking article. I found myself pondering the implications.

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Biography of Dr. John C. Knapp | Hope College

New president of Hope College. I was surprised he wasn’t Reformed. Business ethics background. Presbyterian elder.

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Yes, music helps your workout routine – Salon.com

True or not I do like to treadmill with music playing.

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On the way to work yesterday I passed a very tall Mailman that I didn’t recognize. He kept his eyes straight ahead and did not acknowledge me  even though we passed very close to one another. Then I spotted the earbuds. O, I get it.

That’s the way it is these days, I guess. Just as he passed me, I heard a woodpecker knocking in the distance.

Bird sounds have been my companions on my walks to work lately even before spring break.

Later on this same walk a young college student approached me, smiling. She was wearing luminescent green tennis shoes.

She stopped in front of me and asked me my name.

I said,” Steve.”

She handed me  a note and said “I’m going to be praying for you today.”

I thanked her.

As she walked away I said, “Nice shoes.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I leave my coat and shoes on the floor outside the dance studio. The dance floor is one that needs special consideration like not wearing street shoes to walk on it.

As I sat down to play, I realized that I was missing the note the student had handed me. I looked all around but couldn’t find it. I put it out of my mind.

After class, I found it laying near my coat and shoes. A $20 bill appeared to have fallen out of it.

Later when I was telling my wife and Rhonda about this, they insisted  that student thought I was a homeless person. “Look at your coat,” my wife said, “it’s ragged.”

Could be.

I turned to Anne Carson’s second essay in Decreation: Poetry*Essays*Opera this morning. It’s called “FOAM (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni.” After yesterdays excursion into quotes it was another example of serendipity.

 “What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.”

Carson is using William Rhys Roberts’s 1907 translation of Longinus’s “On the Sublime.”

Atonioni is Michaelangelo Antonioni an Italian film maker.

Specifically Carson refers to an incident when he was making the film “Story of a Love Affair.”

Longinus’s “On the Sublime” is a collection of quotes as well.

Carson’s essay is a complex dance through the ideas of documentary, quotes, and the violence of argument described (and in Antonioni’s case acted out) as the violence of repeated blows or slaps.

This slap is from Ed Wood’s 1954 “Jail Bait” Antonioni slapped the actress Lucia Bosé while they were filming in order to draw a specific performance from her.

Carson likens Antonioni to Demosthenes as quoted and pondered by Longinus.

“In chapter 20 of On the Sublime, Longinus congratulates the Greek orator Demosthenes because he knows how to make his nouns rain like blows when recounting a violent scene:

     ‘By attitude! by look! by voice! the man who hits can do things to the other which the other can’t even describe!”

So I like the juxtaposition of me quoting Carson quoting Longinus quoting Demosthenes.

She calls this “spillage” (the title of this section of her essay).

“Watch this spillage, which moves from the man who hits, to the words of Demosthenes describing him, to the judges hearing these words [in the context of the original quote], to Longinus’ discussion of it and finally to you reading my account.”

Violence has a bad reputation these days since we are inundated with its carnage daily.

Etymological investigation reveals that there is more to the idea than physical actions. It also means “vehement” and “impetuous” in the original Latin. “Vis” in Latin means “strength” or “power.”

I  have experienced the need for violence in music making sometimes when the music itself calls for this. It has seemed to me as another expression of real human emotion.

Of Carson’s use of repeated blows as a metaphor for irrefutable argument delivered in punches, I am reminded of my one experience with boxing.

I think I was about eleven years old but I may have been older. It was in gym class. I dreaded gym class through high school but am not sure when this dread began. I know that I had some pretty weird experiences with other boys both in Tennessee and Michigan where I attended school.

In one of these classes, boys were paired off to box with each other. I remembered being relieved to be paired with George. He was a class goofy guy. Big ears, huge toothy grin, dull eyes, all surrounded by close cropped black hair. We put on our gloves. The teacher said go and George rained down blows on my head for the entire duration of the time we boxed.

I reflected that I supposed that was the point of boxing afterward as my head still was ringing.

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On Both Sides in Syrian War, Doctors Are Often the Target – NYTimes.com

This makes me crazy. Both sides  killing health professionals. I think it’s mostly government doing it. But reports say it also happens in the rebellion side.

Syrians, Fleeing Home, Crowd in Roman Caves – NYTimes.com

A glimpse of the daily stress on and even under the ground in Syria right now.

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Reading Facebook with the particular set of “friends” I “follow” means that I wade through a ton of quotes and “clever” pictures usually with pointed quotes on them as well.

Since this is the case, I feel a bit sheepish to offer a post of a couple of quotes from my morning’s reading.

But at least they do come from a personal discovery of them.

Small consolation I suppose for the wandering concentration.

Anyway.

John Donne struck me twice this morning with pithy phrases.

“…. the Arts, forc’d unto none,

Open to’all searches, unpriz’d, if unknown.”

When I read these lines I thought of my own feeble attempts at dampening myself in others’ presence. My life has been a seach for ways to move away from exterior expressions of passion which put off many (but not all) of those I came in contact with toward attempting to keep these passions more interior and restrained and as Donne puts it “forc’d unto none.”

The word “search” in the quote evokes the interwebs to me. Ludicrously I know when juxtaposed with Donne’s world (early 17th century). Nevertheless the “open” in the phrase, “open to’all searches,” continues the idea of not forcing anything on others, but rather a wonderful openness in the interweb limited only by one’s imagination.

This is a significant limit. When my wife and I discuss others whose opinions and ideas seem so different from ours, I sometimes remark to her that part of this difference seems to be the small ability of other people to think themselves into situations other then their own echo chamber. For example how they would react in crisis or maybe even how life seems to another person.

Imagination is pretty important to me. I often suspect myself of lacking it when I consider my particular echo chamber of  how I apprehend the world.

The rest of this Donne quote, “unpriz’d, if unknown,” continues my idea of “interiorized” or hidden ideas and passion. It also resonates with rubbing shoulders with people who often seem unaware of the beauty I prize in music, poetry, art, and other things I value.

Both quotes come from one of Donne’s Elegies and is as usual about women and sex. “Unknown” in the original poem has a punning reference to “knowing” in the “biblical sense” as in sexual congress.

“… Change’is the nursery

Of musicke, joy, life, and eternity.”

The title of the poem is “Elegie: Change.” This second quote seems to me to say that the risk inherent in inevitable change can be embraced as the crucible which gives birth to the important things in life (music, joy) indeed gives birth to real life itself which then leads to an embrace of the eternal.

I find it charming that Donne has situated these wonderful little snippets in what is ostensibly (once again his his case) a little diatribe to a lover.

The ultimate metaphor in this elegy is of a moving river which avoids stagnation (Donne calls it “stinke”) by kissing one bank then another then moving on.

The concept of transience to a 17th century poet before he descends into mysticism?

Whether so or not, I do love the way the words click together and hit my own feeble reason.

I received a text message from a person I know at church yesterday evening. She pointed out that I had mistakenly labeled one of the photographs of the stations of the cross I had  put up. I went to work yesterday and discovered that the stations that I believe were made at least in part by children of the parish a few years ago were put up all over the church.

I thought it would be a simple pleasure to photograph them and post them on Facebook where I maintain a “group” for people at Grace. I call the group, “Grace Music Ministry.” Since everyone who worships at Grace technically has a part (an important one in my understanding) in the music we make together, I basically attempt to add anyone on Facebook from Grace.

This means that if I put up the pics, there might be some interested in seeing them.

I did this rather quickly in the afternoon while Eileen pulled me in and out of her self imposed task of doing our taxes.

This is not excuse the face that I left a couple out and incorrectly indicated that the fourteenth station was the twelfth and last one.

In addition, Facebook would not allow me to put more than two pictures (!) in most of the albums. It had been my intention to make a complete album of all the pictures of the stations to preserve their numerical order. This was not to be. So I just put up two at a time. I suppose I could have (and maybe should have) put them up so that they would appear on Facebook in numerical order. This would have entailed cleverly uploading them backwards, since one usually sees the most recent posts first.

In my haste and carelessness, I omitted a couple.

Thank goodness, my friend had the temerity to let me know I had done something wrong.

So even though I was trying to settle in for the evening, I fixed it.

Actually I left the error there and loaded up a couple of albums with the missing stations and correctly labeled. I left a message about it and hoped that if anyone looked at it would make some sort of sense.

Then I noticed a message from my daughter Sarah that she had been unable to see six pictures in a post I had put up.

Since being available to loved ones is a major motivation for this blogging, I immediately set out to figure out what had happened.

Which I did.

It seems that my WordPress interface doesn’t like it when I open a picture from my email and try to “copy image.” All six pics that were missing were created as a result of that process. Instead, it seems to like it when I download pics and save them as jpegs on  my hard drive and then upload them to my blog.

So I did that and emailed Sarah so she could see the pics if she wished.

Whew.

All this for silly stuff, eh?

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Iceland Baffled by Chinese Plan for Golf Resort – NYTimes.com

This is fun. Icelanders understandably don’t quite get the rich Chinese notion that they want to build an “eco resort.” In the middle of difficult terrain and weather.

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This American Life Features Error-Riddled Story On Disability And Children | Research | Media Matters for America

There are so many many miscited facts in the stream of information and stories coming at us these days. I use several web sites that are watch dogs of errors. Surprisingly, “This American Life” and “Radiolab” are caught perpetuating old inaccurate stereotypes.

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WSJ Flip-Flops On EPA After Supreme Court Case Comes Out Pro-Business | Blog | Media Matters for America

Same web site as previous link. This time pointing out blatant shift of Wall Street Journal opinion.

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I notice that in my reading there are several authors I admire and value who are speaking from a clearly Christian context. Flannery O’Connor is one.

I copped her complete stories from my brother’s online collection of ebooks. I already own this book in a hard copy.

I reread “Geranium.”

It is a lovely sad story about a fat white elderly southern man transplanted to New York to live and presumably die with his daughter.

The story is an interior monologue of a confused bigoted sad man. He passes the time noting that the neighbors across the way put out a geranium on their window sill each day to give it light. The geranium is not doing so good. First it reminds the old man “of the Grisby boy at home who polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink.” It’s not too long before the geranium makes the reader think of the old man himself, his age and his girth making him a kind of invalid whose mind is slipping as his body is weakening.

I’ve read the story before but it hit me a bit harder this time.

Not only am I myself closer in age to the figure in the story, but I also witnessed my Father’s slow death from a kind of dementia which debilitated his intellect and his body.

I ran across a passage this morning in Ann Carson’s essay, “Every Exit is an Entrance: In Praise of Sleep.” Speaking of her own father who died of dementia she remembers the experience of “looking at a well-known face, whose appearance is exactly as it should be in every feature and detail, except that it is also, somehow, deeply and glowingly, strange.”

This is a clarifying description of looking into the face of a parent whose mental and physical functioning has deteriorated radically.

Another Christian writer I am reading and admire is John Donne.

His poetry has been work that I love. I have been reading his “Satires” which are not religious in character particularly. But I think of him as a preacher and someone for whom the Christian faith was the water in which he moved.

Finally, there is T. S. Eliot.

This poet has had a lot of influence on me. I recently reread entirely through his collected poetry and am now wading through two biographies alternating back and forth between them.

In each biography I am at the point where he makes his famous conversion to Anglicanism.  Put in the context of his work and life this is not as difficult for me to accept and understand as I thought it would be.

Eliot’s turn to Anglicanism is a turn away from the New England Calvinism of extended family. His mother’s religious poetry exercises a weird influence on him. But his own Christianity is in a more prophetic (and to me more acceptable) vein.

In fact, I was puzzled when I  recently listened to a entrenched Calvinist profess high admiration for Eliot. How does that work? I wonder. Eliot’s theology and poetry thunders at the Calvinism of his day. It would wilt the pollyanna Calvinism of people like Robert Schuller.

I have been rereading the Choruses from the Rock and finding that I resonate with them despite their Christian ideas.

Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you.
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

from “Choruses from’The Rock’ ” by T. S. Eliot, I

Lyndall Gordon one of the biographers quoted the line,”The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you.”

I was so taken with it I had to look up its context. Yup. Lovely.

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Forecasting Fox – NYTimes.com

Not Fox the news organization, but a fox who has learned to “to look at a narrow question from many vantage points and quickly readjust the probabilities was tremendously useful.”

David Brooks the author even mentions the book I am reading: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I do aspire to being a fox, but am probably a hedgehog: operating more from the blindness of preconceived notions.

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Obama’s Nixonian Precedent – NYTimes.com

Mary L. Dudziak’s observations in this article fit in nicely with Rachel Maddow’s exposition of the perverting of the executive war powers by all three branches of our government in Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.

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Willa Cather Letters to Be Published as an Anthology – NYTimes.com

I love it when the scholarship starts to utilize newly available materials. I also like Cather and have read several of her wonderful novels.

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Novelist Chinua Achebe dies, aged 82 | Books | guardian.co.uk

Achebe is another writer I admire and have read. Sorry to see him go.

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Yesterday I received an email from a man named Dennis Aubrey. He and P J McKey are photographers who specialize in documentaing extant Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture. They regularly post the pictures and charming commentary on their web site.

I found them via the Linked In Medieval and Renaissance Study group.

I regularly pass links along of their work both here and on Facebook and admire their work quite a bit.

Apparently Dennis back tracked me somehow (easy to do) and found this web site and emailed. I love it when that happens. For me this is the Interwebs at its best, connecting directly with interesting people. So if you’re reading this, Dennis, Hi! and thanks for connecting.

Over the years I have met a few interesting people via the Interwebs. Sometimes an author or composer finds me. I figure they’re googling their names. There is George Tarasuk, an organist in Chicago that I have never met, but we have connected with in various ways online for years.

I hope someday to meet him in person (Hi George! if you’re reading).

Eileen and I  went for what has become our weekly drinks and dinner last night. This is a high point of my week, time alone with my beloved and a martini. What’s not to love?

We talk about our day and play with our new phones. (post blog note: Sarah mentioned that several pics were not loading properly. I think I have fixed it. You should be able to see the next six pics now)

I came home from a funeral I played yesterday and found my Zingerman’s order on the steps.

Mmmm. Cheese and bread from one of their sales.

As you can probably tell, I’m loving my new smart phone. I’m finding ways to use that are not only fun but also helpful.

When I choose organ music I consult a large file of 4×6 cards that I have kept for a very long time. Usually I type the selections into a google doc so that I can access the list with my laptop at work. But Wednesday I got a brilliant idea.

Why not take a quick pic of it?

Yesterday I found time to grocery shop. I could do this because before I left for my errands I took a pic of the list on the fridge.

You’ll notice I’m using the software, Evernote. Very helpful. Recommended. I can keep pics and notes to myself that will automatically synchronize themselves between my computers and my phone.

Daughter Elizabeth recommended the Chrome plug in which enables me to clip a web site to an Evernote doc.

Voilà! I have the citations of books I want to look at in my phone. This is especially helpful with the interface my library uses which annoyingly refreshes every minute or so regardless of whether you are active on the page (i.e. scrolling up and down).

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How the Pope Is Chosen – Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins posted a poem by James Tate that I thought was kind of funny.

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Poet Goes to Building on Fire: Anne Carson’s Beautiful, Wacky, Heroic New Book | Observer

I recently linked a review of Carson’s work. I now have a book by her sitting by the chair and have read the first section. I was delighted to see that Robbins had reviewed her book as well. I plan to read this link soon.

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Gentlemen Prefer Loos | berfrois

Another article bookmarked to read. It purports to connect James Joyce to the book Gentlemen prefer blondes. I’m game.

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friends-of-the-tank

I just listened to this video with my good speakers. Amazing 44 second reverb.

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I had errands to run this morning and didn’t get to my daily blog yet.

I have been thinking about Van Doren’s ideas. He says that while Marx got his political forecasts wrong he still was a genius of sorts and foresaw much about how we live now.

Van Doren is writing in 1991 just a year after the Berlin wall came down. He sees that Communism is becoming a failed system.

But he also sees that Marx pointed out the transition from a non-monetary agricultural society to a society based on capital and money systems. People want the new things. Change is the constant in all our lives and its actually what we prefer.

Van Doren says that Marx was a modern man who could easily be alive in the early 90s he is writing from. Here’s a quote from Marx Van Doren cites:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives….”

Marx died in 1883. This observations are startling in the way they predict the shifting story of our lives.

I also liked the way that Van Doren says that a few years before his writing Marx was a best-selling author surpassed only by Agatha Christie. He points out that despite this fact, Marx was largely unread, his works required to sit on the shelves of Communists throughout the world.

This observation rings true to me.

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Jean-Baptiste Queru – Google+ – Dizzying but invisible depth You just went to the Google…

This is an excellent read. Queru’s use of the acronyms of his field are a little offputting, but I was able to pretty much follow his tracing of the complexity of computer and internet tech.

Thank you to Tony Wesley for posting this link on Facebookistan.

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The South still lies about the Civil War – Salon.com

Haven’t read this yet. It makes me a bit crazy when northerners beat up on the south, but this looked like it had some interesting facts in it.

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Plan That Would Spare Vital Programs Is Expected to Pass Senate – NYTimes.com

A little sense around implementing the sequester.

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Quest for Illegal Gain at the Sea Bottom Divides Fishing Communities – NYTimes.com

Sea cucumber fever.

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Attacks in Baghdad Kill Dozens Before Iraq War Anniversary – NYTimes.com

Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington – NYTimes.com

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Pakistan Arrests Militant Suspected in Daniel Pearl Killing – NYTimes.com

Remember this incident? The suspect didn’t wield the knife that cut off Pearl’s head but he did facilitate.

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I managed to fall on the ice yesterday and bruise my arm and leg. As an old person, I’m glad I didn’t break anything. I had planned to coast through putting off Holy Week task until today. I succeeded.

I was helped by playing Schumann on the piano. Also my friend Rhonda Edgington who stopped by for a chat before getting on a plane for a funeral in California. That was fun and unexpected.

I have had a weird jones for Schumann lately. I have been playing over and over through his “Kreisleriana,” albeit way under tempo. I first got interested in  him when I quit my Roman Catholic church job and filled up my days with practicing. Now I realize that I am attracted to him and Mendelssohn in a similar way: they are both classical romanticists whose keyboard music I find fun to play.

I continue getting up and reading to relax. I have added John Donne to my morning poetry for some reason. Yesterday I was poking around and downloaded and purchased some Goethe. The reason is a book by Charles Van Doren I have been dipping into.

In A History of Knowledge: The Pivotal Events, People, and Achievements of World History, Charles Van Doren draws on two legends and works of art based on them to make a point. The legends are Don Juan and Faust. The works are Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Goethe’s Faust.

Van Doren reinterprets the two stories as Western Civilization’s turn away from Christianity. Moreover he sees them as part of an attack on intolerance of different religions and espousals of pursuit of knowledge. He sees Mozart’s music as integral to this. He calls the opera a “brilliant and savage attack upon religious intolerance.”  Don Juan is a “tragedy of a man whose only religion is knowledge.”

This might seem far fetched if one only considers the popular notion of Don Juan as a womanizer. But Van Doren thinks that La Ponte (the librettist) and Mozart are up to something else as well. Don Juan is a curious man who is seeking to know women. He does this through seducing them, though Van Doren sees them as willing accomplices and thereby vindicating Don Juan’s total responsibility. So Don Juan is a “seeker” in the modern parlance. He lacks sentimentality. He continues his search for knowledge in Hell.

Interesting take on the story.

Faust he sees as a harbinger of a new world coming. His pact with the devil is the modern bargain.

Western civilization trades the bargain it made with God and religion for one with the devil of modernity, of truth seeking.

I also serendipitously ran across the devil in The Brothers Karamazov which I am systematically plodding through.

After the murder of the elder Karamazov, the father of the three brothers, Ivan goes a bit mad. He is the ostensible author of “The Grand Iquisitor” section of the book. There is also an entire chapter where he has a passionate discussion with the devil.

I often think of the fact that Trappist novices to be are asked (or used to be asked) to read Karamazov as part of their “discerning” process. Dostoevsky definitely has some ideas about religion and life. And sin as well. I’m enjoying the translation I am reading.

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The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson – NYTimes.com

This looks like a writer I am going to have to find out more about.

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Scottish Bagpipers Urge Cleaning to Prevent Infection – NYTimes.com

Important to clean your instrument regularly. Very important.

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White or Pink Beans With Beet Greens and Parmesan — Recipes for Health – NYTimes.com

A recipe that looks like one I might try.

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The Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans

A historical archaeological to graves of slaves to reveal more  about our country’s history.

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The Hermit Sings (Dennis Aubrey) | Via Lucis Photography

I love this site. This post is about a priest these two met in their travels to photograph and learn about church architecture.

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Shop the World’s Most Creative Businesses & Free Online Store Builder on Storenvy

I’m thinking of buying Susha Chia’s China Comics: Observations of Daily Life in  China. So far I can only find it on this site. I hope it’s legit. Please let me know if you know anything about it.

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Finished reading Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow yesterday. This book considerably updated my understanding of China. I have two views of China, one from a life of reading about it and translations of its poets and philosophers, another from getting on a plane with Eileen and visiting Kunming in Western China a few years ago.

I guess I also have  more life long views of Chin that have been evolving as my daughter Elizabeth and her significant other Jeremy Daum have learned Chinese and become more and more involved with this country, now living in Beijing.

Elizabeth recommended this book. She has met Pan’s wife. I spoke with Elizabeth on the phone yesterday. She agreed that it’s a good snapshot of much of what it’s like in China now.

She said that she had heard criticisms of it that it’s too negative, but I didn’t get that. Instead it taught me how one could be living in China now and have a coherent idealism about one’s own life and place in China. This idealism is admittedly qualified by an authoritarian government which has its fingers in every aspect of life.

Curiously however, this government since Mao seems to have been adapting more and more a rhetoric of democracy. As the government espouses values it doesn’t quite live up to (like freedom of speech and a just judiciary), citizens are provide an idealistic rhetoric to attempt to bring the structure of the government away from despotic corruption and inch towards something new.

“Inch” is probably too strong a word. At one point, an idealistic lawyer who is defending authors of an expose of mistreatment of peasants says his goal is to give officials pause, that there is a moment when they might wonder if their actions contradict the ideas that China has put forth in its constitution and some of its subsequent propaganda.

There is a looming pessimism that is sort of a given for this sort of book in this time and place.

The chapter describing the trial mentioned above (of Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, the authors of the expose) ends abruptly with no denouement of a verdict. The fact that they will lose seems to be assumed as Pan moves on to describe another series of events about an entirely different topic. Later in the epilogue, Pan points out that the verdict will never be announced. This is the sort of surreal victory that might be hoped for in this odd country.

The book is extremely readable. Elizabeth said that Pan now heads the New York Times China bureau, presumably from Hong Kong or somewhere since China has been refusing to renew visas of NYT’s reporters since their recent excellent reporting that has been critical.

Recommended.

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I was poking around online this morning and ran across this interesting sit. O’brien is self described as “a content strategist and an information architect.” Fair enough. On The Media says she is one of the few journalists who are following and faithfully transcribing the Bradley Manning trial currently underway. She also has a wide poetic and visual streak. Fun.

This video gives a nice sense of her. I like it.

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US Day of Rage – Main

Obrien links into this excellent web site. I especially like their theme song:

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Gideon’s Muted Trumpet – NYTimes.com

Our population is less than 5 percent of the world’s but we have nearly 25 percent of its prisoners.

*****

Today is looking pretty good for some goofing off. Nothing scheduled. I have told myself I can have the morning off to read, play piano, whatever. Then at some point I plan to sit down and do some busy week for the upcoming Holy Week bulletins, maybe do some organizing of bills.

In the meantime, I have already had a very pleasant morning reading and having breakfast with Eileen. She left a bit ago to go to work early.

This video was on Facebookistan this morning.

I love it that the South Park guys did this. I’m a long time admirer of Watts.

Yesterday after church I was surprised when one of the sopranos introduced me to  Johannes Müller-Stosch, the conductor of the Holland Symphony. I recognized him from attending one of their concerts.

A while back I had looked him up after the concert I saw him conduct largely because he mentioned being a church musician. His church is in Long Beach California.

I feel a bit goofy at my own satisfaction at his cordiality to me. After realizing that such a fine musician is present for one of my services I think back  over the service and wonder what kind of an impression it might have made. This is a foible of my own egotism I know, but I don’t know how to stop it.

I was very satisfied with the service yesterday. The congregation sang well. The choral anthem, a beautiful dissonant composition  by Gerald Near, went well. I thought I played well. I was glad that this guy came on a Sunday that sort of represents us at our usual pretty good quality.

At the same time I can feel myself distancing myself from all things religious.

Well not all things, but organized religion for sure.

I continue reading in the two bios of T. S. Eliot. I kind of figure that he was sort of a prig. A genius no doubt and creator of great poems. But as I read about him, his own frailties become very obvious. Some of it is the time he lives in. Some of it is my own prejudice against the dangers of self centered delusional intellectual life.

His attempt at converting from being an American to a Brit is sad and by the terms of one of the biographers (quoting his contemporaries) unconvincing.

As always he is in that part of my brain where I keep Ezra Pound who went through a similar disenfranchisement of all things American. I can understand being angry with America or even seeking broader platforms and ideas from which to operate, but I cannot reject so much about America that I admire and is woven into my own personality.

When I think of the musicians and writers I admire Americans dominate my list:

Ellington, Miles Davis, Mark Twain, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edison, and many others. The people just keeping popping into my head. They have a lot to do with how I think about being American.

It’s sort of like a kind of music that plays in my brain.

**********

Smart Drones – NYTimes.com

Soon drones themselves will decide who to kill.

********

Veterans on Iraq War, 10 Years After – NYTimes.com

I’ve never object to soldiers. I admire people in general. It’s war and the military that makes me crazy. In the meantime here are some pretty cool stories from the ground.

******

I’m having difficulty finding that place in myself where I can very calmly read, study, practice. I see this as indicative of a kind of mild burn out from my schedule and my need for solitude being unassuaged.

Yesterday I didn’t manage to settle down until after a flurry of morning activity including grocery shopping, talking on the phone to the car insurance people, forcing myself to go to the church and prepare for this morning, making myself check the air in the tires of Mom’s car, stuff like that. Nothing earth shattering.

As usual after I forced myself to sit on the organ bench and rehearse upcoming organ music for work, I became immersed in playing organ. I have been playing my way through volumes of Bach I own. I finished the transcriptions. I often return to the organ trios. I love these works. I admire their construction. I love the baroque contrapuntal trio. And I find them fun to play.

My title for today’s post, “spying on myself,” comes from a book of poetry I finished this morning In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern.

I’m also reading John Ashberry’s new book of poems, Quick Questions. I mention it because I find myself more drawn to Stern than Ashberry. Ashberry seems to wander in his poems. The point of view is confusing to me. The narrative doesn’t sustain itself. Stern was the opposite. His poems are cranky eccentric looks at life.

I finished Louise Glück’s 1980 collection Descending Figure yesterday. So far I like her later work better.

Yesterday I was sucked in by the Kindle Daily Deal. I purchased a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I also purchased a book I had never heard of until it was offered as a Kindle Daily Deal, Troubles by J. G. Farrell.

It’s a prize winning book (that is not a guarantee that it will interest me) recommended by The New York Review of Books. I think the story is what drew me in. Written in 1970, it takes place fifty years before. A shell shocked soldier is on his way to Ireland to meet and marry a woman he hardly knows but has corresponded with during the war.

He arrives at huge decaying resort where the woman and her family live. The family is several steps past eccentric. The story is about the resort itself which is presented in a charming adult Lewis Carroll sort of way. According to my Kindle I have already read 8% of the book.

Last night before falling asleep I read a sad little book (comic? graphic memoir?) called Why I Killed Peter.

I sometimes pull books off the library graphic novel shelf in a sort of random manner. This was one of them.

The book is told from the point of view of a little boy growing up. Peter is a priest. From the moment I picked it up, I suspected that Peter was a pedophile.

The book moves from childhood to the present. We are drawn into the life of the narrator. He eventually decides in a Proustian twist to write about his childhood experiences, in fact to write the book we are holding.

At one point he and his illustrator are driving back to the summer camp where he was molested. The pictures change from simple drawings to photographs in a telling switch of style. It reminded me of Eddie Campbell who uses photographs in his works. The narration and dialog  above is in French the language the book was apparently originally written in.

Reading this book is like listening to someone work out their stuff. It did have a charm. But mostly I found it sad.

*****

The Dying of the Monarch Butterflies – NYTimes.com

Disturbing reports of dwindling populations of Monarchs.

*****

Court Says C.I.A. Must Yield Some Data on Drones – NYTimes.com

U.N. Official Denounces U.S. Drone Use in Pakistan – NYTimes.com

Drones in the news.

*****

Eileen had the day off yesterday. We ended up doing tasks most of the day. We took the cars over to the shop that we are dealing with.

This involved jumping the Mini since its battery was dead.

In the midst of this I began to feel as if my brain was dead as well. I have more memory slips when I am tired and it makes me wonder if I am in early alzheimers.

This kind of paranoia is exasperated by the experience of watching my father lose his mind.

We did the cars thing, having to take both vehicles to the shop for estimates. I called and filed a second claim with the insurance for the Mini.

Then we went to the stupid stupid bank.

Like everything else it is revamping and changing its policies. One suspects these changes are at the least useless and at the most for the benefit of the bank not the customer. Part of the change was that the customer was to present him or herself in person to indicate what kind of stupid stupid checking account they  now wanted.

This we did.

Then I thought maybe the bank officer could tell me how to scan those little thingies  that people scan with their phone to get information since the bank had one on its pamphlet.

No  such luck.

My ghost in her mouth said to us, I have a dumb phone (this is something I used to say but can say no longer)

She had no clue.

She walked us to a young teller who only understood Iphones.

By this time I was thanking them and trying to extricate us from their grasp.

I told them I could figure it out.

This I did at lunch at the 8th street grill. Pretty simple really. I just had to download an app.

What I needed was the term QR (as in Quick Response code).

Later the garage door guy came to the house as planned and looked at our broken garage door, took measurements and discussed with us our options carefully omitting talking of the cost. Our contractor guy contacted him. It all sounds expensive and I’m not sure our home insurance will actually pay for any of it.

Today I veg by god.

*******

CERN Physicists See Higgs Boson in New Particle – NYTimes.com

******

Detroit Gets Kevyn Orr as Emergency Manager – NYTimes.com

Former bankruptcy lawyer.

*****

Iran Pursues U.S. Drone Over Persian Gulf – NYTimes.com

Drones. Secret drones. United Secrets of America, eh?

*****

Muslim Brotherhood’s Words on Women Stir Liberal Fears – NYTimes.com

Yikes. Even Morsi is distancing himself a bit from these idiots.

*****

Algae Blooms Threaten Lake Erie – NYTimes.com

Cleaned up Lake Erie is back in trouble. This time it doesn’t seem clear how to fix it.

*****

Spring break at Hope College has begun.

I am weirdly ready for some time off. It is odd to me that I am so busy after having made a resolution some years ago to spend more time on the things I love to do and less time on structured commitments like work.

Anyhoo, I am hoping I will be able to find some ways to recuperate.

My two ballet classes yesterday were actually yoga classes. I spend most of the two and half hours improvising in one meter (3/4) and one tempo (a bit slow). By the end of the time I felt like I was channeling George Winston,

even though I prefer to channel Keith Jarrett.

I composed a new setting of the opening rite of Palm Sunday.

My boss was enthusiastic about it. I had gone back to the rite in the Prayer Book and attempted to use the materials there. I wrote the Hosanna we had been using years ago to use at a Roman Catholic Parish in Trenton. This was a bit of a corrective and uses the texts suggested for the Episcopalian rite.

The idea is that it encapsulates the acclamations in the rite and then uses the little refrain to process by (since the rite begins outside and processes to the church). I wrote several verses based on Psalm 118: 19-29, the suggested text.  Wednesday the Kids Choir began learning the tone chime accompaniment (four chords on the refrain). The Chamber Choir learned the singing part. It should work.

I am facing a list of tasks I need to get done for upcoming Holy Week Bulletins. They are mostly busy work like submitting anthem texts and psalm settings. I will probably allocate some time on Monday for this stuff.

In the meantime, I plan to do some vegging.

*****

The Impact of the Bradley Manning Case – NYTimes.com

“The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”

Justice Hugo L. Black

And what could be more destructive to an informed citizenry than the threat of the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole for whistle-blowers?

*****

Domestic Politics, Pyongyang-Style – NYTimes.com

Some interesting history of Korea and China.

*****

I find that fortunately and unfortunately I am a sensitive soul. Over sensitive. It often feels like my insides are on my outside, so that the people who brush me leave indelible marks in my psyche.  They persist for a while and disturb me. Then fade.

One thing that helps them fade is reading.

I read Daniel Clowes funny little collection of comics, Wilson, yesterday.

Wilson is a 21st century curmudgeon/asshole. His idiocy made me smile. Refreshing, up to date juvenile humor for old people I guess.

Then I turned to Maurice Sendak’s interesting book, My Brother’s Book.

The words in this book take a few minutes to read. The pictures are a fascinating combination of signature Sendak, William Blake and surrealism gentle rendered in washed out water colors.

Blake

I was confused by the first reading.

Sendak

I didn’t know enough Shakespeare to sort out Sendak’s story from the reference to A Winter’s Tale in the introduction by Stephen Greenblatt.

A couple of readings later, I could understand a story about the lost Jack (Sendak’s brother’s name) and Guy (whom I thought of as Sendak himself). Read that way, the story is an ironic opening into Sendak’s wonderful pictures most of which are referential to Blake.

Here’s a link to an analysis that I found helpful: Annotating My Brother’s Book: Some initial thoughts on Sendak’s use of Blake’s pictorial language. A guest post by Mark Cro

Yesterday I also read a few chapters in Rachel Maddow’s Drift: Unmooring American Military Power. It has just recently been issued in paperback and some of the notices made me think about her again.

Maddow’s TV career began after I gave up on TV and Radio journalism. When the left began to emulate the hate radio of the right, I lost interest. Then the screaming liberal heads on TV started joining their fact free right wing brothers and sisters.

I wasn’t interested.

But recently I heard some family members talking about Maddow. I got the impression that her book was a memoir. But reading about it recently made me think that there might be more to it than that.

My brother has thoughtfully linked me to his big collection of ebooks. I looked through it and sure enough there was Maddow. I guiltily downloaded it to my Kindle and read it.

The introduction and chapter one are sort of an extremely user friendly recap of some military history…. Vietnam. Despite the annoying colloquialisms (provided no doubt for Maddow’s TV fans), I learned stuff from these chapters.

Then in chapter three she turns to Reagan.

At that point I began to feel like I was trapped in my own liberal echo chamber. I didn’t learn anything about Reagan from Maddow. I lived through Reagan and remember him clearly through my own experience of the reporting of his life at the time. I always thought he was a calculated projection of some kind of persona, an actor who took his chops to the political arena. He was a rabid weird creature of the modern right. I hesitate to actually call the right conservative because of the history of the last few decades where the emerging right wing in America is so radical it gives the old Students for Democracy (the real crazies of the sixties and seventies) a run for their money only from the other extreme.

Maddow interestingly makes a plea in her introduction for being conservative with a little “c.” I quite like that. I decided to tape her TV shows to check them out.

My late father used to typify himself as a progressive conservative. He (and the meaning of the words themselves) left me personally attracted by both notions: conserving (under which I put not only the wisdom to carefully examine change, but also PREserving a connection to the wisdom of the past) and liberality as in freedom, generosity and tolerance.

Silly fucking me, eh?

*****

A Nation of Nonreaders – NYTimes.com

This is a link to letters to the editor regarding a recent article about reading in Mexico. I read the original but did not bookmark it. I agree with the letter writer that the comments about Mexico’s forlorn lack of literacy and its effect on people’s understanding of government is simply in the same in the USA.

*****

In Uprising, Syrians Find Spark of Creativity – NYTimes.com

This is an old link. I heard  a passing reference on BBC radio this morning to a protest in Damascus where the protesters wrote words on ping pong balls and then rolled mass numbers of them at police. I liked that and looked up this reporting of it.

*****

Officer Is Found Guilty in Cannibal Plot – NYTimes.com

This is such a bizarre story. As far as I can tell, the person convicted didn’t actually do anything except violate some police procedures by looking at records. But his fantasies once found out may have doomed him.

*****

Waking From My Moral Coma

Warning! This is a liberal blog, not journalism. I found the way the writer attempts to reframe political questions in terms of killing not economic metaphors very attractive.

*****

Two Catalan Lintels (Dennis Aubrey) | Via Lucis Photography

I love this blog. The writers travel Europe, take pictures, do research and put up the results. This entry has some beautiful fascinating stuff in it.

*****

I recently walked out of the library with a stack of “graphic novels.” The Hive by Charles Burns was one of them.

I like Burns’s work. The Hive is the second book in what looks like a trilogy.

Later I went back to pick up the first volume Xed Out and re-read it.

There are two story lines that runs through these books.

One seems to be about a young man in a world that is much like the real world.

The other takes   place in a surreal world where the main character looks like the mask the young man in our world wears when he recites at rock concerts.

Both worlds overlap in the odd images Burns finds to replicate.

There is a lovely subtext in the fact that in both worlds, the characters are preoccupied at points with comic books. Burns faithful reproduces panels from these comic books but gives them a odd cool twist.

Burns makes reference to many artists and musicians through the conversation of his characters.

Lucas Samaris who has used (like the main character) has  used polaroids in his work.

Louis Bourgeois who died a few years ago is also mentioned. I have seen her wonderful spider sculptures.

Burns uses a drawing of hers which he faithfully reproduces in his comic.

There is more. All I can say is that I await the next volume (they seem to be coming out every couple of years). In the meantime if you can, read him for yourself.

I read another book Monsieur Leotard coauthored by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best. This one didn’t work as well for me. It tells a fantasy story about circus performers.

But I enjoyed The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes whose work I read when I can get my hands on it. I do love graphic novels.

“What are  you doing?” The woman asked me.

“Taking pictures,” I say. “Why?” she says.

“Many people ask me that question,” I say and continue taking pictures.

I try to explain how I noticed the piece of plastic, the fact that it was hollow and had little stuff in it, and that it played off the piano surface which often grabs my attention anyway.

“Look how the lights play off  the surface,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

******

Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall – NYTimes.com

The wall between Mexico and the USA, that is.

*****

Private Manning’s Confidant – NYTimes.com

The author of this article, Bill Keller, was editor of the paper for a while. Interesting to hear him talk about journalistic ethics and responsibility in a democracy.

*****

China Streamlines Its Cabinet – NYTimes.com

The shuffling of the weird and complex ruling system in China fascinates me.

*****

Reported Drone Strike in Pakistan Kills 2 – NYTimes.com

This inhuman, extra-judicial killing continues.

*****

Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers – NYTimes.com

The new secret weapon to make algorithms more efficient? People.

*****

I recently picked Eddie Campbell’s The Lovely Horrible Stuff off the graphic novel shelf at the library and took it home to read. Graphic novel is such an unsatisfactory term for these books. This is nonfiction. It’s part memoir and part observation.  Campbell’s wikipedia entry says that he is Scottish now living in Australia. It also describes The Lovely Horrible Stuff as a “graphic novel” which “playfully investigates our relationship with money.”

I guess that’s right.

I have an odd relationship with the concept of money. So I was interested in this book. And indeed it helped me refocus a bit more clearly on the promissory nature of money.

I also liked the way he took photographs and converted them into cartoon. Or just left them barely unaltered.

In addition I enjoyed the occasional idiom I didn’t recognize. While reading, I figured these were Australian idioms, but now I have to figure that the author/illustrator is also Scottish so maybe they haled from there.

Wikipedia also mentions that Campbell is “Probably best known as the illustrator and publisher of From Hell (written by Alan Moore).” This I knew from looking for other titles by him after finishing this book.

I don’t want to give the wrong idea about this little tome. Campbell episodically includes witty chapters on pitching a TV series in Australia and seems obsessed toward the end of the book with the large stone currency of Yap.

Often the huge stones do not move from place to place but simply change ownership. Campbell sees the parallels to the “civilized” approach. He doesn’t take the next step but one ponders the gradual disappearance of money via credit cards and electronic transactions. What’s left is the idea of value. Very cool to see this as a common idea between the Western Civ and a small island in Micronesia.

I am continuing my morning poetry read. Finished Rae Armentrout’s The Money Shot this morning as well.

Near the end of the book was a poem that reminded me of The Lovely Horrible Stuff.

Money Talks

by Rae Armentrout

1.

Money is talking
to itself again

in this season’s
bondage
and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button
and this is what you get,

money pretending
that its hands are tied.

2.
On a billboard by the 880,

money admonishes,
“Shut up and play.”

This is what more rude customers used to shout when I played in bar once in a great while. It angered the band. I like Armentrout’s use of fresh quirky phrases that have seeped into our daily usage like “hit the refresh button.”

She seems to clearly think about reality and death and what it means to be alive right now in  her situation. She also does it lyrically with few words.

Along

by Rae Armentrout

A scatter
of cold cases

makes two
separate strings.

Rival news hours
mime discovery.

*

For so long
we’ve been practicing—

unwrapping
our surprise.

*

In heaven
the soul is sheltered

from the expanse
of time.

It contracts
to a point
of light

or spreads out
“all along”
like a wave.

*

The real is what
can’t escape
*****

She describes a preoccupation with novelty as “unwrapping our surprise.”  After all the novelty and what the “discover” that  “rival news hours” are miming, the final line in the poem sums up a frightening conclusion: that the real is what is left, what can’t participate in the usual mindless “escape” of our daily lives.

*****

The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks – NYTimes.com

I also picked up Mark Van Doren’s The History of Knowledge: The Pivotal Events, People, and Achievements of World History. I have read about half of it in the distant past and have now added it to my morning reading.

quote from this morning that applies to the way all states hide from their publics information that helps them control them.

Referring to the rise of democracy, Van Doren writes “Now, democratic man, no longer protected by traditional institutions, found himself in danger of being exposed to the absolute tyranny of the state that he himself had created.”

*****

The Surreal Side of Endless Information – NYTimes.com

Disturbing observations about mindless (literally) approaches to marketing and living.

*****

As Time Goes Bye – NYTimes.com

“Time” as in Time magazine. A witty and interesting little report from Maureen Dowd who worked there for a while.

*****

The Liberals Against Affirmative Action – NYTimes.com

Against it when it fails to reflect the inequality of class. Makes sense.

*******

Suicide, With No Warning – NYTimes.com

Another hopeless plea to limit access to means of death.

*****

At the end of Wednesday night choir rehearsal, we traipsed down the ste ps to sing through the anthem with organ accompaniment in the church. We were rehearsing the anthem for today, “Now We Are Ambassadors” by Felix Mendelssohn.

It’s an adaptation of a Tenor/Bass duet in his St. Paul.

It is also a quote from the epistle for today.

At the very end of this rehearsal, a soprano asked me about the pronunciation of the last syllable in “ambassadors.” We had discussed this upstairs during the rehearsal a bit. I wasn’t satisfied with how I was asking people to pronounce it. The soprano pointed out that we were singing it inconsistently throughout the group. She was right. I had already dismissed the choir and decided I would look it up before this morning so I could suggest a more clear way to pronounce the “ors” in “ambassadors.”

A good source for this sort of thing, one that I return to over and over is Madeline Marshall’s The Singers Guide to English Diction. I pulled it out this morning.

In it, I learned that the syllable in question is a diphthong like in the word “no.” I was surprised.

I haven’t been trained in solo singing, only how to coach a a group of singers. I can do the latter with a degree of success so that my choirs tend not to be as bad most church choirs I hear.

Anyway, I hadn’t realized that we were singing a diphthong.

The two sounds are o and u, respectively the “o” sound in the unstressed syllable of “obey” and the “u” sound in “full.” It’s number 4 in this chart:

This morning I will point this out to the singers and ask them to elongate the first sound for the sustained vowel closing to the second at the last minute.

This should work.

********

UPDATE

So Eileen got up and we were talking about this pronunciation thing and I looked up the word, “Ambassdor.” It turns out I was wrong. It’s not the diphthong sound. It’s only the o (as in the unstressed syllable in “obey”). But since the pronunciation properly ends in in “r” sound, in singing we change that sound or omit it. Here’s a link to a pronunciation of it if you’re interested.

FINAL UPDATE

Before we left for church, I consulted Madeline Marshall again and decided that the syllable in question in what she calls the “unstressed” syllable. I had the choir say the word, the way it’s pronounced on the link, then say it without the “r” sound, then sustain it. Voilá. They made a good sound.

As the instructor arrived at the ballet class yesterday morning, I was playing a Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words,” the one in E major.

I was playing it slower than this recording. It is the one I was playing when the other instructor had asked me if I was preparing for something. Presumably she meant a recital or something. To which you may recall  I said no.

Anyway, yesterday the instructor eventually explained to me that she had danced to this music. She said that she had played the “child” in the piece.

This indicates to me that it might be a set piece she danced in. Often there are sort of classical set pieces that are part of the furniture of the classical ballet dancer’s and teacher’s mind.

When I searched online to see if I could find a video of it, I found this:

This uses two other Songs without Words by Mendelssohn. I was fascinated by this video. In the first section, the ballerina dances alone. The coordination of her movements with the music interested me. She is on the music, and her dance has the musicality of the piece. Then in the second section (a break is edited out while she changes into point shoes), she is joined by the choreographer himself.

The contrast between them is striking to me. She is pretty much a quintessential ballerina. But him. He is old for a ballet dancer. He has a pot belly and moves a bit slower but still with dignity.

For many years dancers had to quit dancing when they began to age and lose any of their agility. This has changed in some areas of dance. A change for the better in my estimation. The older male dancer in this piece adds a fragility and beauty that could not be done in the same way as a young man.

There you have it. I notice that no credit is given to pianist.

Music stands in odd relationship to dance. Its is necessary but secondary in an extreme arena of performance.

In class yesterday, the instructor gathered small groups of dancers to talk with us about their assignment of creating a series of combinations at the barre emulating a dance class. Specifically we discussed how the combination is given a musical introduction, how the instructor outlines what they want in the dance which implies how the music might fit it, how the instructor will cue the musician to begin.
This was lots of fun and a bit unusual. Pianists play that role mentioned above. Maybe it’s like being heard  but not present really. There is an etiquette of respect in the dance world for the musician. Yesterday the teacher mentioned that she “worships” her musicians. And indeed she does treat me politely to the point of deference.

But at the same time, the music must take its place in service to the dance. It’s an interesting conundrum.

Later in the day, I recorded myself playing the Mendelssohn organ piece I plan to play Sunday. I learned  a great deal from this. I need to make my tempo steadier (worked with a metronome) because once again I am rushing in places in an attempt not to drag. If I set out at the beginning with a specific tempo in mind the piece falls together better.

I also learned that my phrases and little bits of accompaniment felt choppy.

Here the answer was to think more about the floating nature of my hand technique. That helped.

Boy, recording oneself is helpful if painful.

*****

In Defense of Telecommuting – NYTimes.com

This is about the Yahoo thing of course. You know, where the new CEO forbids working from home. I especially liked the phrase, “The Dilbertization of Yahoo.”

*****

The Market Speaks – NYTimes.com

Krugman always makes sense to me.

*****

The Orthodox Surge – NYTimes.com

David Brooks writes about the notion that the Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn combine a modern Whole Foods type life with keeping Shabbat.

I liked this:

Meir Soloveichik, my tour guide during this trip through Brooklyn, borrows a musical metaphor from the Catholic theologian George Weigel. At first piano practice seems like drudgery, like self-limitation, but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs. Life is less a journey than it is mastering a discipline or craft.

*****

In Supreme Court Debate on Voting Rights Act, a Dubious Use of Statistics – NYTimes.com

Nate Silver continues to illuminate the best way to think of statistics.

*****

Is Facebook Suppressing Un-Promoted Posts? | Here & Now

I heard part of this report on the radio yesterday. I was unable to verify some of the more outrageous claims but did find a couple more links online.

Facebook Under Fire For Suppressing Unpaid Content – ReadWrite

It looks like Facebookistan is attempting to “monetize” but one wonders if they will do the standard business approach to the interweb and kill the goose that lays golden eggs. If not kill the goose at least discourage it from using Facebook as much.

*****

Bob Woodward’s Tantrum, Bradley Manning’s Torment | The Nation

Disturbed by footage of a deadly aerial attack on Iraqi civilians in 2007, he [Manning] said, “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.” Such a sober meditation on the human cost of US military force is precisely what was missing from the press during the run-up to both wars.

*****

How Does the Brain Process Art? | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

I found this article when I was image searching for yesterday’s blog pics.

******

The Good, Racist People – NYTimes.com

Save me from the good racist people. Good take on this.

*****

Ad Campaigns Fight It Out Over Meaning of ‘Jihad’ – NYTimes.com

This article eventually gets around to pointing out that one side of the fight is coming from hate groups.

*****

FactCheck.org : The ‘Obamaquester’

I found this article helpful in understanding the background of the sequester.

*****