On our way to the lake yesterday, the Subaru started acting funny. I noticed a couple of idiot lights were on: the brake light and the battery. Before long two other idiot lights came on. By the time we had turned around to drive home, the car began sputtering and we rolled to a stop.

I called the shop where we have our car worked on. They said it sounded like the alternator and that I could have the car towed to the shop. Which is what we did.

The tow truck guy was very friendly and cheerful. He dropped us off at the house. Later when I went over to the auto shop to get some stuff out of the Subaru they said they weren’t sure when they could get to it. It looks like we’ll be taking the Mini to visit Mark and Leigh.

I’m afraid this knocked the wind out of my sails for the day and we didn’t go out to eat, which was our original plan.

We did watch the New York Times in depth report on the January 6th insurrection.  How disheartening. The NYT report is the most thorough examination of this incident that I have seen.

I have been reading in John Szwed’s bio of Miles Davis, So What: The Life of Miles Davis. I have gotten to the point in the chronology where Miles Davis is recording two albums that I bought around the time they were released.

In A Silent Way and

Bitches Brew.

I suspect that I bought “In a Silent Way” once again attracted to the cover. I distinctly remember listening to this album in the basement where I lived for my senior year of high school in Flint, Michigan. Since it was released in the summer of 1969, the year I graduated, it is very likely that I bought it new at K Mart where I did most of my recording buying.

Miles Davis was apparently upsetting much of the Jazz world with these innovations. But for me this is where I started with him.

Szwed does a good job picking apart the process of the creation of these two records, especially Bitches Brew.

The most important take away for me is how these albums represent hours of studio improv. I love it that Davis was an early adaptor of tech by splicing parts of recordings together and at the same time captured the spontaneity of live performance.

Chick Corea thought that Bitches Brew was a slower, more conservative version of what they were doing live in clubs.

The more I read Szwed, the better I think I understand Miles Davis. I think he was probably a genius. Here a couple of quotes from Szwed.

Miles was once asked if the time in which he did Bitches Brew was one of most creative periods. It was their creative period, was his response—Joe Zawinul’s, his musicians’. All he did, he said, was to make it possible for them to play together. It was also a creative period for other bands, some of which were normally thought of as merely playing pop music. Between 1969 and 1971, James Brown had one of the most experimental bands in the country, as did Frank Zappa, whose rhythms had gone far beyond rock, and it was the rare younger musician who did not pay close attention to what all three groups were doing.”

These three musicians, Miles Davis, James Brown, and Frank Zappa, were and are very important to my own aesthetic which was formed around the time of Bitches Brew.

Miles on improvising.

Miles said that  he had been writing some simple things, just  one chord and maybe a rest, then another chord, just some skeletons of compositions, and when he began to discuss them with the  musicians he wanted to use, he told them they could do anything  they wanted to do with the  music, but he had to hear that chord.  As simple as it was, when even the three electric keyboards played it, he noticed it sounded different every time, and different everywhere. It was different in New Jersey, say than it was in Hew York. It was nothing you could just write out for an orchestra and get them to play it, he said. When you improvise and the weather changes, it changes your attitude, and your attitude becomes the music. (emphasis added)

I think the three keyboard players he is referring to are  Joe Zawinul, Larry Young, and Chick Corea. Apparently Zawinul had many of the original musical ideas for these two albums. I think I need to find out more.

Again I’m blogging before breakfast with beautiful Eileen. We are planning on spending the day at the lake. Ottawa Beech Inn is not open on Mondays or Tuesdays. But it is today. We will probably wind up there after spending time on the beech.

I read Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli yesterday. It seemed familiar but I didn’t remember the plot. A quick search of my old blogs shows that I read it before in 2009.

Nevertheless I was surprised again by the surprise ending. Excellent little book.

As I read the first chapter of Rushdie’s new collection of essays, Languages of Truth, it seemed very familiar to me as well. I remember reading something by him recently in the NYT that was identical. But I didn’t remember it referencing (publicizing?) his new book. Here’s a link to the essay which is indeed the first chapter in his book. If you have trouble with the firewall, let me know. Apparently I now have 10 free ones I can share.

Finally here’s a video of an old buddy of mine who is still alive and kicking and playing Stevie Wonder. I found a longer version originally a few days ago and it disappeared. I went on one of his other videos and left a message. Here’s our conversation. The reference to my composition refers to the fact that I had sent Grimm a mistransposed clarinet part to one of my pieces. When he played it for me, I was mystified. But my buddies all got a kick out of it. And when it went on a program at Ohio Weslyan, it retained that title thanks to Phil Pilorz.

UPDATE

It looks now like I will be able to go to Mark and Leigh’s the week of the fourth. Eileen hadn’t gotten out of bed when i wrote this blog post. She and Mark spoke last night. They are ready for us to come for the whole week so that’s what we will do if we can get Elizabeth to come and cat sit.

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I read recently that when one is old, one of the things one is sure of is that one did not die young.

I always thought that I would not live this long. Turning twenty was  a surprise, as were all the anniversaries thereafter.

Now I am 69 which is not old by American standards in this century, although that standard is apparently dropping as the life expectancy of white American males diminishes.

I find myself blogging earlier in the day. I have what I hope will be my last staff meeting at Grace this morning. I am actually drawing further away from the life of a church  musician daily.

I have been spending time with the Child Ballads.

I have always loved folk music. Now it interests me much more than hymnody or academic music.  You can define that last term for yourself if you want.

I was disappointed with my local library yesterday. I was sure they would have on their shelves some poetry by Brook Haxton, Kim Addonsio, and Hayden Carruth. These are all poets I want to read more of. There was a Collected poems of Carruth which i checked out. I was hoping for more.

Also, my grand daughters are reading a couple of books I don’t know and want to look at if not read: Normal People by Sally Rooney and  The Black Castle by Jeannette Walls. Neither was on the shelf at the library.

So I plan to interlibrary loan all of this, probably this morning if I have time.

I continue to spend time at the piano. Robert Schumann has been very satisfying to read, even though he can be very difficult. Also, I have been reading a bit in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as I think about folk music. There are many settings of tunes from the time that interest me.

 I did enjoy browsing at the library, something I haven’t done much of in the past year. Of course I  managed to find a stack of stuff to take home and look over.

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SEE UPDATE AT THE BEGINNNING OF THIS POST

Elizabeth called last night to say that she can come and watch the cat the first week of July. Unfortunately, it looks like Leigh had rightly assumed we wouldn’t be coming and has scheduled lessons in the guest bedroom where we usually sleep. Hopefully we can go over a bit that week anyway. At any rate, I was thinking of asking Mark and Leigh to meet Eileen and me halfway between our  homes for a meal and some chat. I guess we’ll see how this plays out.

It has occurred to me to use this web site in my retirement. I have been thinking of organizing my compositions for my own amusement at this time of life. Putting them in chronological order. It might make sense to reorganize this web site and put them here. The website sorely needs reorganizing, but we’ll just have to see if I ever get to retire.

Yesterday while my wife was taking her daily walk, my blind cat attempted to leap up and join me on my dead mother’s recliner. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite make it. In the process of losing his balance he caught his left hind leg in the recliner apparatus and flipped over, sprawled on the floor and crying out.  I was afraid he had broken his leg.

I had to extricate myself from the chair without putting it upright position so as to not crush his leg. I carefully lifted my cat and gently took his leg out of the chair. I put him on the ground. After a moment he walked blindly toward the kitchen, no limp, no visible effects.

I was grateful. Now when he leaps up onto the chair, I watch him carefully and block the open mechanism with my leg.

I got up early this morning hankering for a shower. So after cleaning the cat litter which we now keep in the main bathroom on the main floor for the blind cat, I took a shower. Then I made coffee, did stretches, and my daily exercises.

After exercising I turned on the tap to get some water. Nothing. The water had ceased to flow. Yikes.

My wife got up also hankering for a shower. Unfortunately there was not going to happen until service was restored. Some time after i discovered it, a man in one of those orange yellow reflector worker vests knocked on my door and told me it was a mistake. The water should return in a couple of hours.

So Eileen and I had breakfast, played our usual four games of boggle. By that time the water was back on.

Eileen showered. I went to the grocery store and picked  up groceries and some food for our date day picnic by the lake.

The humidity has been dreadful. It has been in the nineties according to our humidity gauge. If it rains does the gauge go one hundred per cent?

Eileen decided that it was too humid to go sit by the lake today for our date day.  So we stayed home. I think we might go out Thursday instead.

I am adjusting to the idea that I am retiring soon. Today it occurred to me that retiring would in many ways return me to the hapless dude I was when I met Eileen. At that time we had lots of time on our hands to do nothing.

I can’t wait until that time comes again.

My retirement from Grace as music director is now public knowledge. I have agreed to continue to play the liturgies and recommend hymns until they either find a replacement or hire an interim musician. The latter is what Jen said she would do if my weekend duties went on too long.

I am receiving nothing but support from Jen and the community on this decision.

In the meantime, I do feel as though a great weight has been lifted from me. I have enjoyed being a church musician and serving Grace, but it’s not something I am passionate about by any means.

And that’s what I’m working on discerning. What are my passions at the age of 69?

I told the trio that I would need some time before I would know whether or not I want to continue meeting with them. Dawn who is retired seemed to expect this.

I had some very hopeful back and forth text messages with my lovely grand daughters. Catherine and Savannah recently. I pulled back from connecting with the California Jenkins branch when my daughter-in-law seemed to have misgivings about a conversation I asked to have with Catherine about a book she and I had both read.

Savannah called recently to ask us if we could loan her some money to buy a car (of course). In this conversation she told Eileen that everyone in her family had had Covid, Cynthia and Nicholas showing the most dire but not life threatening symptoms.

I wondered if this had anything to do with Cynthia’s behavior around my request to talk to Catherine.

Anyway, this past weekend Catherine texted me to tell me what she is going to read next. I asked her (and actually asked all of them) to let me know what they like to read and what they are reading. I was tickled to see she had purchased and was planning on reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Likewise, Savannah texted me (actually using Catherine’s phone) that she is reading Clockwork Orange by Burgess. She and I some text discussion about Burgess, the book and the movie based on  it.

I finished reading the library’s copy of Last Poems by Hayden Carruth. This is a clever posthumous publication. Micheal Wiegers and Copper Canyon press decided to publish the last poem from each of Carruth’s previously published works along with a few  unpublished poems.

I enjoyed most of these poems. See You Tomorrow is one of the new unpublished poems in the collection that I like.  I think the idea that aging people do not approach twilight as they near death, rather

               they are entering the arcade of
Death. Flashing lights and crashing bells
Surround them, and the only darkness is
The space between the soles of their shoes
And the floor.
from See you tomorrow by H. Carruth

Carruth mentions Ezra Pound a few times. This led to me pull out my battered old copy of The ABC of Reading and start it once again.

Pound has had a huge influence on me. I was amused to find a story that I sometimes tell on the first few pages. It’s the story of the biologist Agazzi and a student.  I didn’t remember it came from reading Pound. i thought it was more likely from something like Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

Hah.

I am doing a lot of pondering of how I plan to spend my time in retirement. Maybe I’ll blog more. Who knows?

I’m taking a break between my two morning ten minute sessions of what I call old man running I never used to think I could run to exercise. Then I saw video of Bill Clinton running as president. He did it with a minimum of effort and movement.

I think to myself, i can do that. So I have been doing twenty minutes a day of old man running in place for about two years.

I break it up into two ten minute sessions. If I’m feeling frisky I move quickly from one to the other. I am not frisky this morning.

Yesterday I played two services. At each service I performed a courante (Curant) by Scheldt and a toccata by Sweelinck.  The Sweelinck was the postlude. At each service, I was surprised that people not only hung around for the postlude, they applauded. Sweelinck is a bit showy I guess. But I wasn’t expecting such appreciation.

I like this music myself. it fits nicely on the Pasi. Plus the pedal parts are minimal which allowed me to rehearse using my little keyboard on vacation. It paid off. Most of the tricky parts (of which there a few) came off nicely.

I am not a fan of Radiolab. But I happened on to recent series they are doing about Harry Pace.

Harry Pace is part of our American music history of which I was unaware. I had wondered how we got from the awful minstrel show music to early blues and syncopated prejazz. These musics exist simultaneously.

Harry Pace was a prodigy of sorts. He learned Latin and Greek as an eleven year old. Became an assistant to W. E. DuBois in college. Met W. C. Handy while he, Pace, was working in bank. They start the first all black record label.

Although they start out as a sort of expression of DuBois’s concept that the “talented tenth” of the Black population should be evidence to the whites they were not only equal but could excel. Thus, the first recordings were of opera.

Pace stumbles onto Ethel Waters, records her, and Black Swan becomes insanely popular and sells many, many records of the blues.

So why don’t we routinely lionize Harry Pace? Radiolab has the answer. I recommend listening. Here’s a link to the first show in the series.

Back to old man running.

My daughter Elizabeth graciously house swapped with Eileen and me this week, so we are staying in her lovely home in Delton, Michigan until Saturday, then back home.

I have enjoyed being away with Eileen. We have added Scrabble to our daily Boggle routine.

Yesterday was Bloomsday.

It’s a celebration of Ulysses by James Joyce. The reason June 16 is Bloomsday is that is the date of the one day on which the entire book takes place. I have read it a few times, but yesterday I revisited some of the symbolism that draws on The Odyssey. 

I lazily used the Shmoop study guide I have on my kindle since I didn’t bring any of my Joyce reference books with me. It was pretty good up until the 8th episode. Up until then, the guide was explicit about how Joyce connected Homer to his novel.

It was a refreshing way to spend some time on Bloomsday. Plus I am learning more and more about Homer and his stories.

I finished Dances for Flute & Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Insults, poetry from Ancient Greek translate by Brooks Haxton. They are kind of fun. I started another book by him.

I especially liked Thy Name

This poem suggests “Let’s call God Fun.” You know, “In his heart the fool has said there is no Fun.” Anyway it worked for me.

I have been enjoying poems by Kim Addonizio (from Mortal Trash). Here are links to three with some of my favorite lines from them.

Anyway, back to goofing off.

Eileen’s back has been giving her all kinds of trouble. It’s not clear what’s going on, but she is determined to attempt to exercise her way out of it. Yesterday was a bad day. But today she is walking downtown for her “alto breakfast.”

I have been having a fantasy about what it would be like to retire. It began as a little niggle a few days ago and hasn’t gone away. Instead, I find myself asking myself questions about what I am passionate about at this time in my life.

I discovered a new podcast this morning: The View from Somewhere

It was created and is hosted by Lewis Raven Wallace, and produced by Ramona Martinez.

This is from their website:

The View from Somewhere: A Podcast About Journalism With A Purpose features stories of marginalized and oppressed people who have shaped journalism in the U.S. The podcast focuses on the troubled history of “objectivity” and how it has been used to gatekeep and exclude people of color, queer and trans people, and people organizing for their labor rights and communities

These two people have caught my attention. After Wallace published an article about the myth of objectivity in reporting, he was called on the carpet by The Marketplace NPR radio show where he worked. Subsequently he was fired.

Martinez had a similar path. I’m retelling these anecdotes from hearing them once on podcasts. Martinez was a producer for NPR. She quit after she was called on the carpet for posting on Facebook: “SCOTUS you motherfuckers!” NPR was willing to give her a slap on the wrist as it was her first offense of expressing a political view publically. I think she quit.

These are my kind of people. If you decide to listen to the podcast, I suggest you do what I am doing and go back and listen to them from their first episode. Many podcast say this shit, but I do think this time it is a very good idea.

Recommended.

Wallace is co host of this weeks On The Media. It’s a good episode.  In it, when Jay Rosen, the journalist prof, was asked about how to handle the problem of covering misinformation, he replied something like, “Sunlight is the best policy. But sunlight not only disinfects, it helps things grow.” Then he recommended a “sandwich” approach to reporting misinformation: start with the truth, put the lie in the middle, and end with the truth.

I like that. I’m ending with a quote from Ramona Marinez:

Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.

Eileen and I had our first date night in a year last night. It was unbearably hot in Holland. Too hot to sit outside in one of our favorite downtown restaurants. We decided to drive out toward the beach and stop and eat at a restaurant out there if it was cooler. It was. We still are leery of sitting inside a restaurant and eating so we sat outside at Ottawa Beach Inn.

The good news was that I was able to have my evening martini with my meal since they sell alcohol. Eileen has missed eating out a great deal so I’m glad we were able to do this.

Then in the afternoon, I planned the Sunday music for June 20th. I wanted to schedule some literature that would fit my instrument and at the same time have little pedal work to rehearse. As I mentioned in the last blog, we are planning to be away next week and I want to be able to rehearse music that I will perform on June 20 on the little keyboard I  will take with me.

I started out looking at some pieces by Gottleib Muffat (1690-1770). Gottlieb is son of Georg (1653-1704) who is also a composer. Their music is a blend of the German Baroque and the French Classical. Their styles differ. The father, Gottlieb, reminds me of Frescobaldi. The son is more standard French Classical in style.  I find both of them quite charming for different reasons. Unfortunately, the volume of Gottlieb’s music I own is basically harpsichord music. I am certainly not above performing this kind of literature on my Pasi. But it didn’t seem quite the right thing.

So I pulled out some Sweelinck and Scheidt. With a little searching I found a prelude and postlude. The prelude is a dance by Scheidt. The postlude is a Toccata by Sweelinck. They sound wonderful on the Pasi and are stand alone charming pieces in themselves.

I recently finished The Singapore Grip by J. G. Farrell. It’s the second book of his I have read. About eight years ago  I read Troubles by him. I liked it enough to read another. I also sent my brother a copy of this book for his birthday.  He might enjoy it. I know I did.

These two books are part of a trilogy he wrote which is called “The Empire Trilogy.” The Singapore Grip takes place  in Singapore just before it falls to the Japanese army in WWII. The main characters are English businessmen. The whole book drips with satire and dark humor.

It reminded me of descriptions I have read about the fall of Saigon at the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. In the afterword, Farrell thanks Mr. Lacy Wright and Miss Thé-anh Cao “who kindly showed  me Saigon in the last few weeks before it became ‘Ho Chi Minh City.'”

Farrell died young (44). The books he left us, especially these three, are widely acclaimed as masterpieces. I like to think he could have produced an equally acerbic book about US involvement in Vietnam if he lives.

I found his Seige of Krishnapur, the third book in the trilogy on the shelves of my library. I don’t remember reading it and don’t think I have. But now I will.

Secrets That Were No Secret, Lessons That Were Not Learned by Andrew Bacevich

Bacevich is a writer and thinker that I respect and read. I found it clarifying when he pointed out to how the Pentagon papers had failed to teach us anything when you think about the following (taken from the linked article):

More such episodes of questionable legality and logic were to follow, even after the South Vietnamese government finally fell. Among the most prominent: the Reagan administration’s illegal sales of arms to Iran to illegally fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua; clandestine U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; Bill Clinton’s ill-conceived assault in Somalia culminating in the infamous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993; the George W. Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence to create a pretext for invading Iraq in 2003; and Barack Obama’s embrace of “targeted killing” as an executive power.

Capping off this entire sequence of events was the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran. Much as the Kennedy administration concluded in 1963 that President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam had become expendable, so too President Donald Trump decided in January 2020 that General Suleimani should die.

On Saturday, Eileen and I had lunch with her sister, Nancy, and her husband. Walt. It’s the first time we have eaten out in a year. We ate at the Curragh. It was very windy. So windy, in fact that a couple of the umbrellas were lifted off their stands. The Curragh has expanded its outdoor seating considerably: two or three times more than it used to have. It was a lovely meal and we came home and had home made ice cream and blueberry buckle in the back yard. It was fun to chat with people in person.

I have been neglecting this blog in favor of reading and practicing.

I recently ran across this reading of a new play by Ishmael Reed.

I am a fan of his and it amused me to no end that this play is mostly about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cool cool.

I heard about this play on the podcast: The Cyborg Jillian Weise and Ishmael Reed in Conversation

Great quote from Reed on this podcast: “Words built the world.”

I also recommend a recent United States of Anxiety podcast called “The Big Bang Theory of Jazz.”  It taught be about a musician who was instrumental in spreading Jazz to Europe around the time of WWI.

The musician’s name is James Reeses Europe.

I was very interested to learn about this composer. He looks to be instrumental in beginning the love affair between American Jazz musicians and France.

I was keenly disappointed that he does not have an entry in the Groves Dictionary. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Here’s a link to his Wikipedia article. He is important for many reasons. Here’s some quotes from the Wikipedia article regarding his Clef Club Orchestra.

The Clef Club Orchestra, while not a jazz band, was the first band to play proto-jazz at Carnegie Hall. It is difficult to overstate the importance of that event in the history of jazz in the United States – it was 12 years before the Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin concert at Aeolian Hall, and 26 years before Benny Goodman’s famed concert at Carnegie Hall. The Clef Club’s performances played music written solely by Black composers

It’s insane that this guy is not better known. Gunther Schuller mentions him in his seminal book on Early Jazz.

Europe’s genius apparently was to gather large groups of Black musicians together to perform.

He ends up in France leading a band of musicians who were part of the Harlem Hellfighters (the all Black 369th Infantry). He was a lieutenant in this unit which was the  most decorated unit of all WWI American units. Unfortunately all of the decorations came from the French, none from the Americans.

In February and March 1918, James Reese Europe and his military band travelled over 2,000 miles in France, performing for British, French and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Europe’s “Hellfighters” also made their first recordings in France for the Pathé brothers.[19] The first concert included a French march, and the Stars and Stripes Forever as well as syncopated numbers such as “The Memphis Blues”, which, according to a later description of the concert by band member Noble Sissle “… started ragtimitis in France”. (from the linked Wikipedia article)

Next Sunday afternoon, Eileen and I will drive both of our cars to Elizabeth’s house. She will return driving one of them and stay here to watch the blind Edison the cat. Jeremy is driving their car to visit his father who is quite ill. Eileen and I will have five days of vacation at their home.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to this.

For the first time in ages, Grace Episcopal celebrated a full Eucharist together in person yesterday. It was out of doors and the weather cooperated. Rev Jen kept some restrictions while guiding the community through this transition. She began with her mask on but she preached and the readers read  unmasked.  We all only received bread during communion and did so as we have been doing in small plastic sealed bags.

The piano trio played and did okay. I suspect  my violinist of having some misgivings about performing. I’m not sure what. I know she was having some issues with a last minute broken chin rest or something. Whatever it was she was able to borrow one to use yesterday. She seemed to play much softer out of doors than she usually plays at our weekly rehearsals. The only comment she made was that she deliberately played softer on the postlude because she was badly out of tune, but I and the cellist noticed it throughout the service.

Later when I was pondering our performance, it occurred to me how many people remarked to me personally on the music for the day. One of regular readers came up right after service and told me that the music was all good but he especially enjoyed the piano playing on “It’s a sweet, sweet spirit.”

The piano I use outdoors is one that is unusually loud. When I use it indoors I try to play softer. Yesterday I was conscious that even though I had the piano tuned specifically for this Eucharist, it still didn’t sound all that great, so I held back. My cellist said that she thought piano was not too loud and she is quick to tell me when it is, so I believe her.

The person complimenting me asked if I had improvised the accompaniment. I said yes  and that was the style.

One of the staff was very complimentary. And as I said several other people commented to me.

I mention this because it wasn’t until later in the day that I realized how many people had commented on the music. My emotional space is fragile after a performance and like many performers I think about how it could have been better.

But, it occurs to me that many of my parishioners are more like me in their musical taste than not. By that I mean, we all listen to a lot of music and probably like some of the same styles of music. Recently one of our readers replied to one of those Facebook silly challenges to date oneself by naming a concert you saw live. She surprised me when she said she had seen Zappa live. Cool.

The insight for me from all this is that it’s important for me to listen to people who listen to my music and like it. After all, it’s something we have in common since I strive to play music I like, even at church.

Today, I stumbled across an amazing performance on YouTube of Bach’s Cantata BWV 32. Gorgeous stuff. Here’s the link FWIW.

Edison, my cat, continues to adapt to being blind. So far, so good.

Dear Diary,

I know it’s been a while. A lots been going on with me. My cat is now functionally blind. He’s been like this since Monday. I need some time off, but feel duty bound to care for this animal in person at this stage.

My boss has told me I can take two Sundays off in June. My brother and his wife have consented for us to visit them a bit. However, I think I want to see how Edison (the cat) adapts to his new condition. He is eating well and purrs at me every morning when I pick him up. Eileen says it’s a bit lie having a roomba for a cat.

I finished Kindred by Octavia E.  Butler. I thought it was better than the “Sower” series which I liked. Her Lilith’s Brood came in at Readers World and I have already started reading it.

For some reason I have a real jones for Haydn right now. I am reading the Groves Dictionary article to refresh my memory about him.

Franz Joseph (Guiseppi) Haydn

I have been listening to symphonies and string quarters and piano trios by him.

Speaking of piano trios and being overwhelmed.  My piano trio rehearsed for this upcoming Pentecost Sunday yesterday. My boss decided to pretty much do a full Eucharist out of doors this week. She and I put our heads together on Wednesday and I madly prepped for my trio (hymns, service music). We had scheduled two Mozart Church sonatas with me playing the second violin part with my right hand on the organ and the right hand of the keyboard with my left hand on the organ. That’s how we have been rehearsing it.

Now, since we are outside, we will do it with me on piano covering these parts. This is more different than you might think. But yesterday’s rehearsal went fine.

Except at the end of an hour, I asked if my cohorts would want to run through the two movements of the Haydn piano trio before they left. Not so much. I don’t understand this because the music is as good as anything we have done. But maybe that’s my Haydn jones coming through.

I was gratified to see my Notre Dame prof, Ethan Haimo, in the bibliography of the Grover article on Haydn.

Ethan Haimo

I have picked up his book on Haydn again and am working my way carefully through it. It helps that all these scores are now online. The title is Haydn’s Symphonic Forms: Essays on Compositional Logic. It is brilliant. I took a course from him on Hadyn in grad school. I came away with a new appreciation of Haydn.

I googled Haimo and discovered he is living in Israel and teaching there. He impressed me at Notre Dame. He was a bit of an outlier being a pretty devout Jew and a quiet, brilliant guy. I keep thinking I will email him and let him know that at least of his students is still trying to understand Haydn.

Today’s project is to bibliography the twelve books I have interlibrary loaned. They are mostly, but not all, related to my Greek studies.

Eileen and I have been eating outdoors. The weather has been lovely. Last evening it took a turn for the warmer. We ended up putting on the air conditioning for the night. This morning we sat outside again and had breakfast. Eileen has the yard fixed up beautifully and there are Cardinals and other birds around. Very idyllic.

I continue to read poetry regularly. Also Shakespeare. Charles Burney, the great music historian, compared Haydn to Shakespeare. This is from the Online Groves:

Never, perhaps, was there a richer musical treat. It is not wonderful that to souls capable of being touched by music, HAYDN should be an object of homage, and even of idolatry; for like our own SHAKSPEARE he moves and governs the passions at will.  Charles Burney,  11 March 1791

I recently started another volume of Mary Karr’s poetry, Abacus. I really click with the way she uses language and images. I especially liked a poem called “Courage,” which begins

“This much is clear. You have to be alone
with your grief….

and then later:

“The songs will make it worse. You have
to be alone. Someone you loved is gone,
not dead, but step by step away from you
on purpose, no accident….

The dang thing doesn’t seem to be online or I would link it in. Well, enough. Time to go bibliograph some books and return them to the library.

I see myself as an outsider and a  lot of that is the influence of my Father and his Father. I am comfortable with who I am at this point in my life (69 years old). But I enjoyed listening to a poem called “The Old Man’s Lazy” by Peter Blue Cloud on a recent Poetry Magazine podcast.

Here’s a link to the pod cast (the poem begins around 17:38) and here’s a link to a blog post with the entire poem on it.

It’s in a new anthology, When The Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through edited by Joy Harjo. I have interlibrary loaned this book. It is the first Norton Anthology of Native Nations poems. Crazy,

“The Old Man’s Lazy”  is about a Native American who confronts an Indian agent and a white neighbor about fences. The narrator of the poem (the old man?) says that the agent complains about the broken down fence. In response, the narrator puts up a small shield with hawk feathers on it. But unfortunately, the agent only sees the feathers and does not look inside himself for his hawk.

The narrator goes on to say that someday he might tell the agent that he didn’t build the broken down fence. The white man who used to live next door did.

The narrator describes the fence new as a pretty fence. Here’s the section I like a lot

             It was 
a pretty fence, enclosing
that guy, and I felt lucky
to be on the outside
of it.

Later in the poem, the narrator’s children tell him he’s lucky to be living way out in the sticks.

I’m lucky to be on the outside as well.

I finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower yesterday. I started Kindred by her. Time to go read.

I had coffee with my illustrious colleagues, Rhonda and Jordan this morning. It was fun. Since its raining we met at Rhonda’s church under an overhang there and brought our own coffee.

I tried to listen at least as much as I gabbed. I found it amusing that after living in this town for over forty years, I am still spending time listening to people complain about Hope College. Some things don’t change that much. I had to share that with them.

Yesterday afternoon was a beautiful day here in Holland. I sat  in the backyard and read. Eileen put her hammock up and finally lay and listened to the waterfall she has put in her pond this year. This was a goal of hers.

I finished McBride’s Song Yet Sung. It’s a story about a young enslaved woman on the run. Like Harriet Tubman she has suffered a head wound, but in her case this seems to have given her visions of the future (which of course are wonderfully accurate and chilling). McBride draws three dimensional characters in a well told story. I enjoyed it. I think he writes beautifully.

Now I’m madly trying to finish Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I am anxious to start some other novels but would like to finish at least this one before beginning a new one.

I’m about half way through The Singapore Grip by J. G. Farrell. It is a merciless satirical critique of colonialism largely from the point of view of the hapless white people.

Using the word “hapless” reminds me that I recently heard Jon Meacham describe himself as a “hapless Episcopalian” then mutter that this was a redundancy. I do like him.

The Farrell is a New York Review of Books Classic and that’s why i chose to read it. So far, I have found that all of the books in this series are very readable and worthwhile.

I am also about half way through reading The Complete Enderby by Burgess. It is my go to read when I want something delightful and fun.

Plus my brother (Hi Mark!) surprised me with a  book in the mail which I am looking forward to checking out, Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar. Thank you, Mark!

Excuse me I have to go read.

Eileen and I slept in the master bedroom last night for the first time in over a year. Our second family unit has sought other digs. We are still early in the process of getting the house back into shape for two old people to live together in. But we have never slept in the bed that Eileen ordered and installed until last night. Such luxury.

Elizabeth and Alex will be here tomorrow since Alex has a check up scheduled. I don’t think they will spend the night, but we try to be as flexible as possible to help out.

I have been thinking about writing. George Saunders is teaching me to read better. I am enjoying going back and forth between Russian stories and Saunders explications in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life. 

Saunders has some clear insights in how a writer becomes present in his/her work. In a little chapter called Afterthought #3, he uses the analogy of going out on a date with someone to talk about writing as conversation. What could go wrong in a piece of prose?  He asks. Quite a lot. To emphasize this, he imagines taking along 3 x 5 cards to remind oneself of good ideas to remember during a date. “You know: ‘7:00 P.M. inquire re childhood memories’: ‘7:15 Praise her outfit.'”

He points out how this over thinking leaves the other person out of the process. The cards are the “conversational equivalent of a plan.” He quotes Donald Barthelme: “The writer is one who embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.”

And he comes up with a lovely quote from Gerald Stern: “If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking—then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.”

I quite like that.

Honest writing and revision can be understood as “a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. ”

I continue to read a decent amount of poetry.  I finished two books of poetry today: Winter Stars by Larry Levis and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth.

Both books are by dead white guys. I have two more titles by Levis and plan to read them. I started his posthumous Elegy.\

I requested another book by Carruth from the library.

Childhood Ideogram by Larry Levis | Poetry Foundation

This poem is in Winter Stars. 

The Two Trees by Larry Levis

This is in Elegy.

The prelude and postlude were improvisations today at church. i should probably schedule something besides improv for next Sunday. I made the prelude rhythmic and the postlude thoughtful just for the heck of it. It seemed to work fine. I resisted basing them on hymn tunes. But I did end the thoughtful one with a very small quote from today’s hymn, “Savior, like a shepherd lead us.”

I have fallen in love with this group. I find their arrangements very interesting and attractive to me to the point of compositional envy. The last two mornings I have spent a good part of my morning routine listening to them. First, the Library of Congress concert and secondly their album.

I love finding new music.

I have also been thinking about music I have loved since i was a young man. I am thinking specifically of Satie and his nocturnes.

These came back on  my radar recently when I recommended them for consideration in an AGO virtual presentation.

I fell for this music in my late teens. I learned one of these when studying at Ohio Weslyan with Richard Strasburg. Here I am, almost seventy, and much of the music I loved then, I still love.

While I have not had the benefit of a true  mentor in my life, I have been privileged to somehow connect with Satie, Bach, Bartok, Miles Davis, and other music (not to mention poetry and fiction). It’s not clear to me how I arrived here, but I am grateful that this stuff keeps on drawing me in.

I continue to work with the Bach F major invention. I basically have it memorized. But I continue to learn from working with it.

I have noticed in my playing and conducting that often I understand music as elegant gesture. This relates to my love of dance.

I have been going over the F major invention several times a day. It’s short so this takes only a matter of minutes daily. I notice that sometimes I stumble in odd places and early in this process I would sometimes have a memory lapse. Both of these things give me something to think about.

What I have discovered is that the more I relate to what I am playing from memory as musical gesture the better I play it and of course remember it. This is much more concrete in my mind than I am able to convey with words.

I see it as another valuable lesson I am learning from memorizing.

Did they mention the music? | John Rutter

Rutter reviews Prince Phillip’s funeral music. A bit pompous, but interesting.

When in 1944 Miles Davis told his brother-in-law he was going to New York, his brother-in-law apparently replied, “So what?” I wonder if Davis thought of this when he entitled the composition of that name.

When I was 17 years old, I distinctly remember thinking I could become a musician or a writer. At the time, I was co-editor of my school newspaper and also very involved in the school music program. I was listening to Octavia Butler biographer, Lynell George, talk on a YouTube video this morning. She said that began as a reader who was a writer, but not as a writer. I still feel like that.

Here’s a link to the video of George discussing Butler with reporter Julia Wick. Also, George’s description of Butler’s papers made me think of my life as a reader/writer. At this  point in my life I have vivid “conversations” with what I am reading and listening to. I find it a rewarding way to live. Apparently, Butler lived in a similar manner, writing extensive marginalia in response to her reading.

I keep thinking about my personal musical language and preferences. I am thinking of improvising the prelude and postlude for next Sunday. This time, it’s not only to give my self some needed breathing space while burned out, but because I am looking forward to improvising. Last Sunday, as I usually do when we do Eucharist, I improvised after the offertory hymn to give Jen time to get completely moved from the chapel and set to go on with the Eucharist at the altar in the church. Matt the tech guy remarked on this improvisation after church.

Also, I received a nice email from a parishioner who “shared” our Easter Sunday service with someone she was visiting. They remarked on the organ music (which was all improvised that day).  I emailed her back and told her she made my day. I did  not tell her that I remember being slightly puzzled when I ended the postlude on Easter Sunday. I was proud of the improv, but no one seemed to notice it. However, everyone did look like “Thank God, Holy Week is over.”

What I’m thinking about is my own style of improvisation. It seems to appeal much more to regular listeners (and myself) than it ever did to people I knew when going to school. In fact, the only reason I did not receive the AGO Associate certification was one little four measure interlude that was required. All judges gave me low grades and one gave me a zero. I had passing scores to this extensive examination. But one of the rules was that you could not flunk any one of the many sections. They have since made this certification process a bit more realistic and even sent me a letter years ago suggesting I retake it.

Maybe it’s better that I didn’t get that particular certificate. I like being a renegade.

My Subaru is in the shop so we are not doing our usual Tuesday date day today. But we are having a pleasant day together.

With all my other reading, I have also been reading a ton of poetry lately. I finished Tropic of Squalor by Mary Karr and liked it enough to interlibrary loan another of her books.

Ditto for They Lift Their Wings to Cry by Brooks Haxton.

I’m about half way through Hayden Carruth’s Scrambled Eggs and Whisky. 

These three were recommended by George Saunders in an interview with Ezra Klein. 

I think of all of them teach at Syracuse University.

Finally, I was surprised that I liked Garrison Keillor’s poem for today’s Writers Almanac, I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU JOHN KEATS by Kim Addonizio

I especially liked the ending:

Please take me away in my tight corset & wedding dress of sand
I don’t want to stay in this world watching Truth bound & gagged on the
railroad tracks

feeling like a fish trapped in a European pedicure spa while the tiny,
whining violins of privilege play
& Beauty slowly backs away

from I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats by Kim Addonizio

I finally got around to listening to Jordan VanHemert’s new CD, I Am Not A Virus. I like it quite a bit. The video above is only the first track. i have been listening to the entire thing on Spotify and recommend it. It is also on YouTube.

I’m still working on my own burn out. This Sunday afternoon finds me exhausted despite only having done the usual Church stream thing this  morning. Eileen and I have had a couple of days alone while Jeremy, Elizabeth, and Alex are off gallivanting. It was a pleasure. I like having them around but it was fun to have just the two of us here for a change.

I finished Caste by Wilkerson and The Parable of the Talents by Butler.

Wilkerson does an excellent job of understanding America as a caste system. Surprisingly, once you start looking into this, the idea of U. S. slavery as an expression of caste is quite old, dating back to the 19th century. It is a clear way to think about the experience of living in the US right now. Wilkerson points out that we who are alive now did not invent this situation. We inherit and perpetuate it. She compares it to buying an old used house. This metaphor is a good one, because it clears away some of the accusations of historical culpability and reframes the idea that our caste system arbitrarily based on skin color is like a flooded basement in an old house. We ignore it at our peril. We who are alive did not create the problem but it is up to us to fix it. Highly recommended.

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is my new hero. The Parable of the Talents is the middle book of a projected trilogy. Unfortunately Butler only completed two of the projected project before her death. I am now reading the first book, The Parable of the Sower.

These books were written in the 90s and projected into future beginning around 2020. Butler gets a lot of stuff right. As Gloria Steinem writes in her introduction to The Parable of the Sower, “If there’s one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it’s one written in the past that has already begun to come true.”

Butler is a huge talent. Her abilities easily rival Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ll probably read all of her work before I’m done.

Speaking of good clear prose, Elizabeth and I are reading George Saunder’s new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life.

Saunders has been using Russian short stories to teach advanced writers at Syracuse U for twenty years. This book is the fruit of that work. It is teaching me to read better. I am a fan of his work anyway. Here are some cool sentences from this book:

“We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts.”

“To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done.”

This morning I was reading in Richard Rutherford’s enlightening Homer (2nd edition). He mentioned an essay by T. S. Eliot called “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I waddled over to my T. S. Eliot section and pulled out his essays and read it.

Believe it or not, it helped me think not only about music, but about the evolution of what Herbie Hancock calls Jazz. I have wrestled with Jazz as a living art. But I am evolving a different understanding of how Jazz can still be art being created at this moment. For further explication, listen to Herbie Hancock’s music and Jordan VanHemert’s new CD. Jes sayin’

This was made by my granddaughter Lucy. I talked to her today as well as Sarah and Alice. We did an unscheduled video chat.

Yesterday Eileen and i had a lovely day at the beach. People were not socially distancing or wearing masks but we managed to find an isolated place next to the channel to picnic, play boggle, and do some reading. It got chilly so we went back to the car just in time for it rain. These date days are a a god send. They leave both of us more relaxed.

Today I seem to be in some sort of reactive exhaustion. I am more tired today than I have been since Sunday.

I finished James McBride’s Kill ‘Em and Leave ‘Em: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. I thought it was excellent. McBride is both a musician and a journalist as well as a good writer. Combining these skills and points of view makes this an invaluable book for understanding many things about music in America today.

This morning when Elizabeth asked Alex what she wanbted for breakfast, she said, “Popcorn!” I thought of the above tune.

Here are some very fine passages of McBride that I made a note of.

“The legacy of caring, insight, trust, and sophistication that makes up black American Christian life and culture is fragile compost for the American storytelling machine, which grinds ol stereotypes and beliefs into a kind of mush porridge best served cold, if at all.”

“Here’s how music history in America works: a trumpet player blows a solo in a Philly nightclub in 1945. Somebody slaps it on a record, and fifty years later that same solo is a final in a college jazz department, and your kid pays $60,000 a year to take the final, while the guy who blew the solo out of his guts in the first place is deader than yesterday’s rice and beans., his family is suffering from the same social illness that created his great solo, and nobody gave two hoots about the guy when he died and nobody gives two hoots about his family ow. They call that capitalism, the Way of the World, Showbiz, You Gotta Suck It Up, an upcoming Movie About Diversity, and my favorite, Cultural History. I call it fear, and it has lived in the heart of every black American musician for the last hundred years.”

“Talent is just dessert in the ear-candy business anyway. It’s about who can stand the ride, the merry-go-round that forces you to toss off self-esteem, decency, and morality and pull out your gun on the competition—beat ’em down with the barrel instead of killing ’em outright, then pick them up afterward and say, ‘Get up, let’s do it again.’ A life of making ear candy can kill off every dream you ever had.”

“…[T]he information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while, you get to believing, as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it.”

“…{A] lot of American church music has become like Broadway shows, all cowboy hat and no cowboy, lots of lights and sound, the drummers basically conducting the thing from beginning to end, with massive choirs hollering lyrics you can’t understand. It’s a lot of puff and smoke.”

Like I said, I like the way he writes. i have a couple more novels by him on my to-read stack.

Well, I’m exhausted so I think I’m going to leave it at that today. See you on the screen of life.

By my count, I improvised five organ pieces last week. I was most satisfied with the prelude for Maundy Thursday and the postlude for the second service on Easter Sunday. Improvising was a good idea. I have been thinking about Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and their understanding of improvisation. Hancock quoted Wayne Shorter: “How can you rehearse the unknown?” The sentiment is one that reflects my own interest in being spontaneous when I improvise. On Maundy Thursday, I began thinking about what the improvisation would entail as I sat on the organ bench waiting for time to play. But just before performing, I changed my mind and did something entirely different and it turned out very well.

I have chosen organ music for this upcoming Sunday. I will be using selections from Dandrieu’s Noel on O filii et filiae. I have been sneaking in rehearsal of these when I was at church this past week. They are lovely and fit nicely on the Pasi.

I am tired today but that makes sense after doing the usual services for Holy Week. I continue to be drawn to the music of Bach and Bartok. I have added some Ravel to that as well. Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis seem to like Ravel. I have several piano pieces by Ravel and spent time with the first movement of his Sonatine yesterday afternoon.

I also pulled out Walcha’s version of Bach’s Art of Fugue for organ. In the past I haven’t used it much. But, for some reason I have been enamored of the Art of Fugue lately, playing movements on the piano. I only own the Czerny Dover performance version which is crappy as far as editing but sits nicely on the piano. I have a study score but it’s not practical for playing.  Walcha solves the difficulty of Counterpoint IX on the organ by  making it manuals only. This ends up being a nice, clear version to play through.

I’m considering scheduling some Art of Fugue for preludes and/or postludes in Easter, but we’ll see.

So  Holy Week is over. Here’s a poem I think about sometimes this time of year by James Dickey.

SLEEPING OUT AT EASTER

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All Presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
Where my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

Put down those seeds in your hand.
These trees have not yet been planted.
A light should come round the world,
Yet my army blanket is dark,
That shall sparkle with dew in the sun.
My magical sheperd’s cloak
Is not yet alive on my flesh.
Put down those seeds in your hand.

In your palm is the secret of waking.
Unclasp your purple-nailed fingers
And the woods and the sunlight together
Shall spring, and make good the world.
The sounds in the air shall find bodies,
And a feather shall drift from the pine-top
You shall feel, with your long-buried hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking,

For the king’s grave turns him to light.
A woman shall look through the window
And see me here, huddled and blazing.
My child, mouth open, still sleeping,
Hears the song in the egg of a bird.
The sun shall have told him that song
Of a father returning from darkness,
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

All dark is now no more.
In your palm is the secret of waking.
Put down those seeds in your hand;
All Presences change into trees.
A feather shall drift from the pine-top.
The sun shall have told you this song,
For this is the grave of the king;
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

—James Dickey

Back by Easter | The Point Magazine