My doctor was very pleased with my weight loss. My blood pressure was okay as well being a tad lower than it had been in my daily morning home check.

I managed to get some organ practice in before my appointment. After I came home, I walked over to Evergreen Commons and treadmilled. Eileen met me there for lunch at their cafeteria. Of course, it wasn’t set up for vegetarians particularly. There is a daily entree and a salad bar. it put me in mind of a school cafeteria with one main meal selection. Eileen said the entree (some sort of chicken with mashed potatoes) was good.

The place was packed. Mostly white people. Old white people. I always wonder who these people are. I have to wonder if they attended Holland Christian High School when it was housed in this building. People are friendly. There was a pianist playing the little baby grand when we came in the room. Mercifully he stopped by the time we had our food and sat down.

After we came home and then drove over to say hi to my Mom, I spent the rest of the day trying to relax for a change. It seemed to work.

Today I don’t have too much planned again. I need these days of goofing off. I’m so compulsive that it’s easy to fill them up with tasks. I will practice organ but that’s the only task for today.

More Reading Notes

Here’s some more of the passages in Van Jones’s that struck me.

Speaking of Republicans of the last thirty years or so, he observes they have become  “a party that is anti-liberal rather than pro-conservative.”

He thinks liberals need conservatives to hone their own ideas on. “[T]he promise of America is liberty and justice for all. My fellow liberals are so focused on justice we too easily forget about liberty. Conservatives can be so committed to liberty that you become blind to cases where injustice curtails freedom.”

Chapter four is called “Whitelash: Myths and Facts.” In it, he begins telling his own story and the story of his recent controversial pronouncement that the 2016 election was “whitelash” (more on this a later time)

“My parents were born under segregation. My twin sister, Angela, and I are ninth-generation Americans, but we were the very first people in our family to be born with all of our rights recognized by America’s government.”

It’s hard for me to realize how recent the calumny of slavery and it’s residual presence is in the history of America.

When I was reading this week’s New Yorker, this picture leaped out at me. It’s from a 1964 collaboration between Richard Avedon and James Baldwin, Nothing Personal, described in the accompanying caption as a “collaborative exploration of American identity.” The man in the center of the picture, the old guy, is William Casby of Algiers, Louisiana, “one of the last living Americans born into slavery.”

The caption quotes Baldwin and it’s worth repeating his ideas here: “It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.”

Later in Van Jone’s book, he describes being on the scene of the horrific racist murders in the North Carolina church in June 2015. You recall. The white man wanted to start a “race war” and sat and prayed with people he then killed.

Van Jone’s describes his own fury and despair.

“The next morning, I was still seething. I could barely make eye contact with anyone. I was sitting with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, preparing to go on the air. We were both mic’d up, sweating and sad. The funeral was just beginning.”

“Suddenly we started to hear something—music, coming from across the street, from the church, Mother Emanuel. A big, beautiful, upbeat sound with drums and organ and piano. A chorus of voices, a soaring harmony. Totally discordant with how we were feeling. The camera people began saying, ‘What is that?’ The music swelled around us. It seemed to lift us all from below.”

“It’s amazing,’ Jake said to me, off air. ‘How is possible? They actually sound happy.’

“I smiled a little and sat up.”

” ‘That’s not happiness,’ I told him. I explained that there is a distinction in the black church between happiness and joy. Happiness is dependent on external circumstances, but joy comes from within. Despite the circumstances, we say, “Hallelujah, anyhow.” It’s our way of saying that you’re not going to take away my dignity or my inner knowledge that I have worth, if only in the eyes of my creator. You’re not going to take my humanity. You’re not going to turn me into something other than a beautiful child of God.”

Today I have a check up with my doctor. I have these twice a year or so. I struggle with having high blood pressure readings at the doctor’s office, higher than other places. My doctor thinks it’s “white coat syndrome’ i.e. being nervous around a doctor. I think it’s more about worrying about how much I will weigh this time.

Today should be amusing. I have gained and lost about 10 pounds or so since I last saw the doctor. My blood pressure has been consistently low. Except of course for this morning’s reading which may have been influenced by worrying about my doctor’s appointment. Believe me,  I see the irony in this.

Annotations for Jerusalem by Alan Moore – dateline Northampton

In Alan Moore’s Mansoul, the second volume of his trilogy, Jerusalem, he describes a small gang of dead children in the Upstairs (after life) called the “Dead Dead Gang.” When giving the background on the name of the gang, he says that since they all came from different gangs in the Twenty Five Thousand Nights (another of their many names for when they were alive), they had to think of  a new name for their gang. One of them remembers a book they had to read in school called “The Dead Dead Gang.”

I immediately googled for this book and found the above link to annotations for the Moore trilogy. Cool. Reading through it, I was pleased to see that many of the allusions were not lost on me. But I did learn stuff which I will refrain from sharing here in case any of you three or four readers are reading or listening to  Jerusalem.

Incidentally, I liked one of the dead children’s explanation of their gang’s name: “As for what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All that I could think of was, some people are dead lucky and some people are dead clever, but not us lot. We’re dead dead.” p. 465

NYTimes: What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

I’m working hard on my own echo chamber these days. I have found some critiques of this report on the right. But I think it makes sense that the extreme proliferation of firearms in the USA contributes to this hideous phenomenon.

NYTimes: A Grecian Artifact Evokes Tales From the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’

Year One: Our President Ubu | by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Dozens of these silly retrospectives have been floating around. This one has an unusual take, however.

NYTimes: Willie Horton, Updated for the Trump Era

Race baiting marches on.

NYTimes: Martin Amis on Lenin’s Deadly Revolution

My NYT app continues to fail me like so much of tech these days. It offers up a confusing amalgamation of articles from the paper. Somehow I missed this article through the app but found it somewhere else. Bookmarked to read.

I’ve done it again. I’ve been thinking about the postlude I scheduled for this Sunday. I decided to scrap it. It was based on the last hymn and written by Seth Bingham. Bingham  (1882-1972) was a prominent American organist of his time serving a big Presbyterian church in New York and teaching at Columbia. But his music is very dated. I don’t mind performing dated music once in a while especially if it represents the tradition. However, It was very loud. I played a loud 20th century piece for the postlude last Sunday. I had considered pairing a toccata or prelude and fugue by Walther with the pieces I am going to play for the prelude Sunday based on the hymn, “Wake, awake.”

Monday afternoon I rummaged through a bunch of pieces by Walther. I have played one of his toccatas. However, the pedal part on this piece is very stagnant. Instead, I foolishly decided to learn a new prelude and fugue by him for this Sunday. This means it will take more rehearsal time.

But I wrote a bulletin article again about this Sunday’s music. I explained that Walther was Bach’s cousin and that Bach was the godfather of Walther’s eldest son. I mentioned that music from this time sits nicely on our new organ. This fact is actually a motivator for me, so it doesn’t hurt to mention it.

This poem impressed me this morning.

THE SONG SPEAKS

by Tyhehimba Jess

an ex-con finds me
when he’s statue still,
“thinkin’ his heart,”
summoning his bones
the way a gambler whispers
luck to the die he’s clenched
and hurled from his palm.

a professor embalms me
in electrified wax,
then exhumes me a 78 rpm
with needle and wire,
tattooing my breath—
less body into wind.

whether i was born in the soil
or from the heat of muscle
against soil, from body-bent
trees or the river they all drink
from; whether i pass down
from callus or calumny,
goddam or gospel,
my birthing way
is always the same.

i heave memory,
want, and will
against lung until
the soul’s meat
surrenders, makes way
for the knee-buckle
load mined
from each moaner’s
private graveyard
of chance.

sticky with god,
i shove and smooth
my way up gullet,
hauling treasure
chest of fingerpop
and footstomp.
i mount the skull:
starward-tilted,
open-mouthed,
praying my name
as if it were its own
into the book of heaven.

from leadbelly

I almost half way through Van Jones’ book,  Beyond the Messy Truth. It is the most sensible thing I have read about the current madness in the USA.

Reading Van Jones, I am reminded of my late Father’s idea about conservationism and liberalism. Dad insisted that in order to function one needed to be both conservative and liberal, that is to “conserve” some things and protect them and to “free” other things and to liberate them.

Van Jones makes an argument that liberals like himself need better conservatives with which to disagree and work together. He makes a good case.

Here are some of my book notes:

The second chapter is entitled “An Open Letter to Liberals.”

Regarding the extreme invective on the left, Van Jones writes critically.

“We must ‘resist’ Trump—yes—and that task includes resisting the temptation to become more like him ourselves.”

To the liberal question, “why do Trump supporters and others vote against their own self-interest?” He asks,

“[W]ant to know the group of white people that most consistently votes against its own ‘economic self-interest’? Rich white liberals” since they support programs which are just but from which they personally do not benefit.

Regarding liberals blindness to the part of Obama’s presidency which reflected non-liberal values:

“Obama did do things when it came to surveillance, drone strikes, and jailing whistle-blowers that progressives would never accept from a Bush or a Trump.”

Destructive progressive elitist attitudes:

“It is elitist to crack jokes that imply all Republicans are insane. Or uneducated. Or  bigoted. It is elitist to assume that anyone who disagrees with us is either a bigot orf a dummy or both. It is elitist to refer to the red states as Dumb-fuck-istan. Expressing pity, contempt or disdain for red-state voters has to stop being the price of admission into the club of liberalism.”

Democrats need black support but do not appoint them to positions of leadership.

“….. not one U.S senator who is a Democrat has a black chief of staff. Ironically, the only black chief of staff in the entire U.S. Senate works for Tim Scott—that esteemed body’s only black Republican.”

Concerning the current Republican’s attack on fair voting.

“Republicans took a shortcut to power through gerrymandering in 2010 riding Donald Trump’s coattails in 2016.”

Concerning conservatives inconsistency about voting and guns.

“[C]onservatives should be just as skeptical when the state makes it harder to vote as they are when the state tries to make it harder to buy a gun.”

He cites a Republican National Committee report following the 2012 presidential loss which outlines actual issues. His outsider advice from the point of view of conservatives in restoring conservative values to the Republican party to follow these recommendations.

Remember these four recommendations from Republicans to Republicans.

First “Republicans should embrace comprehensive immigration reform and end nativist language.”

Secondly, the report concluded “harsh language and legislation targeting LGBTQ Americans hurt electorally.”

Thirdly, the report “determined that Republicans were engaged in an echo chamber of belief—caused in part by choosing news sources like Fox News and onnly talking to colleagues and friends with similar beliefs—that resulted in a distorted understanding of the empirical reality of certain policies as well as voters’ interests.”

Fourthly, “the report warned that the Republican Party was at risk of becoming the party of rich white guys even as America was becoming browner, younger, and as inequality was growing.”

Van Jones correctly describes the Republican party as one that is “anti-liberal rather than pro-conservative.”

He concludes his third chapter entitled “An Open Letter to Conservatives” this way:

“[T]he promise of America is liberty and justice for all. My fellow liberals are so focused on justice we too easily forget about liberty. Conservatives can be so committed to liberty that you become blind to cases where injustice curtails freedom.”

That’s enough for today.

We live in a dark time in America right now. It has been dark before. It is dark again. I am thinking of the open expressions of ignorance and hate which have been enabled by the last election. It is very easy to feel discouraged right now, at least it is for me.

But last night I was reading about slave fathers in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist. He was pointing out how the enslaved would choose “to protect their role as husband and father” instead of “protecting their own bodies alone” through running away or rebelling.

He tells one especially poignant story that he seems to have figured out from documents about Joe Kilpatrick. Joe Kilpatrick was sold away in North Carolina from his wife and two daughters, Lettice and Nelly. He ends up building a building to live in on his enslaver’s cotton labor camp near Tallahassee. He takes in a young five year old boy, George Jones, “orphaned by trade.” Jones grows up, gets married and fathers two daughters named Lettice and Nelly. Baptist speculates on what kind of stories Kilpatrick told to Jones as he raised him. He wonders when Jones decided that Kilpatrick’s two daughters were his sisters. Kilpatrick, in raising Jones “sought redemption for his own losses not in domination, nor in acceptance of despair, but in long-term, patient hope.”

Wow. Baptist quotes the author Todorov who wrote about the concentration camps and calls Kilpatrick’s “patient hope” “ordinary virtue.”

Todorov wrote that people in the camps sometimes chose “transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings—even at the cost of lowering their own chances—they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.” (p. 282 of Baptist’s book where he is paraphrasing Todorov)

Ordinary virtue is a good name for what it takes to stay sane and behave with any integrity in the USA right now. And to my way of thinking, even though times are dark, they are not as dark as they were for people in concentration camps and slave labor camps.

This brings me to my second glimmer of hope.

Introduction to Classical Greek

Many thanks to my brother, Mark, for pointing out this fantastic web site.

I was wrong about there being a wedding at church yesterday. It’s not until next Saturday. I went over in the morning anyway, since Eileen got up late and hurried off to her alto breakfast.  When I got back about 11:30 Eileen wasn’t back yet. Actually she had come back and then took off to get a cat prescription from the vet. But I didn’t know that. I thought maybe she had a long breakfast with the other women. I walked over to Evergreen and did my treadmilling.

Eileen texted me while I was on the treadmill. She said we could have lunch together in an hour which is what we did. For some reason I slipped into a bad mood. I am working on keeping my bad moods to myself these days and managed to do so. By the end of  the day I wasn’t ready to skip my martini, which was unfortunate because my weight had been up that morning.

But this morning I am feeling lucky again since I had my drink(s) last night and I still had low BP and even lost a pound. Lucky me.

Before visiting my Mom I went to the library and picked up a book by Emily Wilson and one by Nicolas Slonimsky.

I read the following linked article while treadmilling and was fascinated by it and Wilson.

NYTimes: The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English

I am on the wait list of her new translation at the library. Here’s a link to the first of it that was published in the Paris Review.  I’m very interested in Wilson’s work.

I love the discussion of the translation of the Greek word, polytropus by Wyatt Mason (the author of the NYT article) . I told Eileen yesterday that something I have in common with the writer Alan Moore is that we are both “word drunk.” I love words and live in a time of consumption and image not ideas. I know that this makes me eccentric but remember I’m feeling lucky. I am happy to be eccentrically word drunk.

I have been reading a few pages of Othello each day out loud. I read poetry out loud if I am able to. Shakespeare’s words are wonderful. I also enjoy my daily dose of Tyhimba Jess, Amiri Baraka and Derek Walcott.

Life is good.

I had my bi-weekly visit with my shrink yesterday. I enjoy chatting with this guy. I do miss conversation with intelligent people (Eileen can only listen so long).

As I left the session, I told him that I found it helpful, but it felt an awful lot like bullshitting. He laughed.

I have been spending a lot of time with Beethoven at the piano. This morning it was Schubert. On Thursday I performed for my Mom’s nursing home. I took three books with me for the “classical portion of our program:” Bach suites, Mozart piano sonatas and Beethoven. I had intended to perform the first movement of Beethoven’s first piano sonata which I know fairly well. However, by the time I had played Bach and Mozart I thought it was time to move on to the pop music of the forties that I usually do in this context.

One never knows how much is being soaked up by listeners when one performs.

They have a newer baby grand at the nursing home which they purchased a few years back. It was out of tune, of course. It was the first time I had performed on the new piano since they fell out of the habit of inviting me when a new activities director was hired.

Today there is a wedding at church, but I’m not the organist. I’m not sure what’s going on, other than the fact that they wanted a different musician (probably a guitarist) for their wedding. Jen acquiesced but insisted that I still be paid my fee. This is done to ensure that people are bringing in their own people for cheaper music.

Anyway, I will have to get in and out discretely today for my usual organ rehearsal and prep for Sunday morning.

I checked Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace out of the library recently. It is a huge book. Last night I read through the six page table of contents.

This book came to my attention after reading reviews of Mike Wallace’s solo authorial follow up:  Greater Gotham. Both books look very interesting. I am looking at the first one and thinking about what I am learning about 19th century America from Edward Baptist’s history of slavery. It is a mistaken notion that only the South was involved with slavery. While the North often held itself aloof, it still invested heavily in slavery. It is weird to read about the history of banking in the 1830s and 1840s when primary collateral behind loans and financial activities were human beings.

Roasted Apple, Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onion Pizza Recipe – NYT Cooking

Interesting recipe. I’m not sure about the use of legumes in it, but could easily revamp to have calories come from some small amount of cheese instead of beans (I’m not a vegan).

I recently finished the first volume of Alan Moore’s trilogy,  Jerusalem. I think I have fallen in love with these books. Moore’s imagination is amazing to me. I have enjoyed his graphic novels immensely. But in the first book of Jerusalem, The Boroughs, he has charmed this reader without pictures. (Post script here: It looks like this novel is also a graphic novel. I ran across this googling for pics here. Very cool.)

Interestingly, he makes several allusions that interest the church musician in me. Basically each chapter of the book is from different people’s point of view. In the chapter, “Blind, but now I see,” Moore tells of a man named Henry who is American but has moved with his wife to England. Henry stumbles ont an area of Boroughs where John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” lived.

“Henry felt stirred up by this in a manner what surprised him. He’d been sincere when he’d said it was his favorite song, and not just trying to sweeten the old lady. He recalled the women singing it out in the fields, his momma there amongst them, and it seemed like half his life had been caught up in its refrain.  He’d heard it sung since he’d been in his cradle, and he thought it must’ve been a black man’s tune from long ago, like it had always been there. Finding out about this Pastor Newton fair made Henry’s head spin, just to think how far he’d come since he first heard that song, only to wind up quite by accident on the doorstep of the man who wrote it.”

Henry goes looking for Newton’s grave. Instead he meets the warden of a cemetery who tells him Newton is buried in London. The warden tells him some of the story of Newton’s history including the fact that Newton chose to be a slave trader after he himself had suffered being “press-ganged into service on a man-o-war where he deserted and was flogged.”

“Henry was all in pieces. He didn’t know what to think…. John Newton had become a slave trader… Even when he’d just got rescued from a slaver, even when he knowed what it was like aboard they ships, he’d gone and got a vessel so he could ply that trade himself. He got rich off it, he got rich off of slaving and then later on he made his big repentance and become a minister and wrote ‘Amazing Grace. Dear Lord, dear sweet Lord on the cross it was a slaver who wrote ‘Amazing Grace.”

I put the excerpts here so you can get a taste of how Moore makes his sentences.

There are many  interesting references in the book. Mentions of people from the history of hymnody like Cowper, Doddridge, John Wesley. William Blake’s Jerusalem plays a part in the story and also multiple references to the hymn, Jerusalem. But these parts are subsidiary to the story that Moore is telling about a place  the reader learns in the second volume is called “Mansoul” and exists at odd dimensional angles to the Borough. This place is populated by people who have died.

One chapter in The Boroughs describes ghosts who haunt the Boroughs. The reader doesn’t understand initially that they are ghosts. But gradually it becomes obvious in ways I don’t want to write about in case any of you ever read or listen to this book.

I’ve already started the second volume. Moore combines qualities of Dickens with fantasy writing that strikes me as virtuosic.

NYTimes: Hear 9 New Psalm Settings for Challenging Times

Embedded settings. I seem to be on a church music kick this morning, eh?

 

My web site was down yesterday for some reason so I skipped blogging (and wrote a bulletin article for this Sunday).

Today I’m tired from yesterday for some reason. Long day, I guess. Eileen and I have already gone to Evergreen for exercise this morning. While I was treadmilling I received a phone call from Resthaven. They are expecting me today to come and play a November birthday party at 3 PM. I said I would be there. There was some mix up on exactly when I was going to do this. I emailed the activity director yesterday but she was out of town. I’m planning on playing Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven for them as well as pop tunes from the forties and end it with a hymn sing.

My trio meets before that. Not sure when I’m going to get my organ practice in today. My student is over at church right now. Maybe I’ll slip in some time before trio and the party.

Whew.

Greek continues to be both challenging and rewarding. I am hoping that Plato is harder than Homer. One of my goals is to read Homer. The text promises to eventually use excerpts from Homer, but I am bogging down a bit at this point since Plato is the source it has been using. The teaching text has switched to more of a philosophical dialogue. Plato was introduced with the trial of Socrates scene. Unsurprisingly, the language in that is not as developed as it is in Plato’s philosophical dialogues.

Eileen had a bit of a scare recently. On Sunday evening she saw a flash of light. She realized that it might be symptom of a torn retina, something I have gone through. So yesterday found us sitting at the eye doctor. Thankfully she doesn’t have a torn retina, just a symptom of a normal aging condition type disease that will go away (I can’t remember the long specific  name of it). She was a trooper about this, but I think she was worried. As we said returning from the eye doctor, how can you weave, if you can’t see?

I’m blogging earlier than usual this morning. I have been begun skipping posting occasionally largely due to the fact that my life is full and so are the lives of my primary audience: my adult children and extended family. I began building websites back in the nineties. At that time I was sorely missing collegial conversation having been spoiled with it for most of my adult life.  My misguided theory was that I could have conversations with interesting people online now that the world wide web was almost up and running. Hah!

Now, I suspect that a few family members check here to see how I’m doing and what’s going on with me. With the onset of two new beautiful grand daughters, it seems that all my extended family members have very full lives and while they might be interested in what’s going on with me (Hi guys!) at the same time I don’t feel like they are checking on me as much for support and comfort.

I hasten to add here that my own life is a full and rewarding one. Not a day goes by that I don’t realize how lucky I am. Lucky to loved by family. Lucky to have books and music in my life on a daily personal basis. Lucky to have rewarding work at church. A place to sleep, food to eat, blah blah blah. You probably know the drill.

This Halloween we are skipping the Jack O Lantern thing. I usually make sure we have pumpkins to carve. But this year has been one of survival and recuperating not only from the recent Organ Dedication Recital but also a culmination of three years of lots of extra (rewarding) work. I am still heaving that sigh of relief. This means doing only necessary tasks until further notice.

I have contracted with a harpsichord  builder to finish refurbishing my harpsichord. I received an email from him in which he mistakenly was expecting me to bring my harpsichord to his Northville Michigan shop this past Monday (yesterday). I replied that we had agreed that I will bring it to him on Nov 27th. Maybe he got his months confused. At any rate, I will rent a vehicle large enough for my instrument and make the 2.5 hour drive over on that date despite the fact that my quasi son in law Matthew will be returning to England that day.

Alex Vitale on The End of Policing | FAIR

I listened to this podcast recently. Vitale outlines a history of policing I didn’t know: that it began in England with officials emulating the occupying force in Ireland. I like analyses that ask the basic questions of what is trying to be accomplished and where did ideas come from.

‘I don’t expect him to have much impact, but the truth often doesn’t. But it still matters.

I finished Tales from Earthsea last night. I enjoyed most of it. At the end Le Guin has a bunch of supporting essays about the world she created. I found this not so interesting but plugged through it. I have the next volume, The Other Wind, in an ebook, but ordered a hard copy yesterday.

I finished an ebook copy of Harold Bloom’s collection, Till I End My Song. Bloom can be helpful, but needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. Most of the poems he put in this anthology were interesting, though not all were specifically the last poem created by the poet. But as usual he left out a lot of poets. Still it was fun to read.

It was good to get away for a couple of days. I breezed through the last two days returning to my life in Helland. It occurs to me that I am going to have to change our All Saints anthem due to erratic rehearsal attendance. It’s slightly frustrating because I know if I could see people a bit more regularly we could accomplish more musically. But that’s the way it works for me these days in this place. Ah well.

I managed to pull the choir sound together yesterday. Despite the usual negativity emanating from a few of them, they did a good job as a group. We ended the service with the congregational hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” The prelude and postlude were both based on this hymn. And although it was “bishop visit Sunday,” it was satisfying to play the hymn and the pieces based on them. After church a woman came up and introduced herself. I recognized her as someone who has been attending recently. She told me she was a RCA minister and was grateful for the nod to the Reformation.

Any given Sunday, it seems, there are wounded people in the room.

I can’t think of that hymn without thinking of an old satire I heard once on it which began “A Mighty Fortress is our Church.”

After church and lunch and boggle with beautiful Eileen, I grocery shopped. Then back to church for a session on the bench. No drinky poo last night. I gained a couple of pounds during my attitude adjustment vacation. Blood pressures remains okay.

I had some serendipity this morning reading Amiri Baraka. I stumbled onto a bitter little poem entitled “Othello Jr. (One Moor Time.” It doesn’t seem to be floating around out there on the interwebs. Baraka draws a bitter little parallel between Shakespeare’s play and the O.J. Simpson trial: “Marsha Clarke    Desdemona.”

I have been reading the play. I did so this morning. Living in such a “white” world, it helps me to read Baraka’s angry poetry. Also Tyhimba Jess and Derek Walcott. I’m also plugging away on Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (on p. 274 of 420 pp.)

There was an amazing section in a poem called “Morningsport Moan” in Jess’s Leadbelly I read this morning.  This is the voice of Leadbelly as imagined by the poet.

the band of whites wanted their songs virginal, full of salvation they would army on its skin like the whip marks burned into my back. but i knew the back door way of that tune, how it snuck its way out of the parlor and spread its legs wide in saloon. i sang it back to them low down and bent up, the slow somber way you tell a man the truth about his wife, where he can really find her when he’s working his hands till they’re brittle as hay.

Once again the poetry is an antidote to living in an insular unreal world.

Since I haven’t posted for a couple of days I thought I should today. Eileen and I are spending a few days in Chelsea, Michigan, staying with my brother, Mark, and his wife, Leigh. We arrived Thursday about 1 PM or so. I had planned to duck out and go practice organ at a local church, however I was enjoying visiting with Mark so much I deliberately let the time slide by and didn’t go. I called them at 3:30 to see if I could play a little later than 4 PM the originally agreed upon limit. At 4 PM there is a violin lesson and the church has asked me to stop playing at this time. I was wondering if there was a lesson on Thursday as well as Friday. It seems there was so I didn’t bother going over that day.

I’m feeling pretty good about the scheduled organ music for this weekend so I didn’t mind skipping it Thursday. I did get over on Friday afternoon.

Afterwards, I stopped at a little used book shop in Chelsea called Serendipity Books.

It was a rainy afternoon, a perfect ambiance for a short visit to a used book shop. I managed to find a few books.

I have been reading an ebook of Tales from Earthsea by Urusula K. Le Guin. I found a copy at this shop. It was fun to figure out I’m on page 153 of 280 pages. As the bookstore person said when I confessed I was reading ebooks, when you are reading a real book you can see so clearly where you are in the book, much better than an ebook.

My friend and former teacher Craig Cramer mentioned the fact that Frank Zappa was friends with Nicholas Slominsky, “composer, conductor, and advocate of new music” (from the blurb on the book). Slominsky was not on  my radar. I had never heard of him. He sounded interesting. I was delighted to find a book by him at this little shop and snapped it up.

Charles Baxter’s name has gone past me recently. I’m not sure where, but I remember him being referred to as a “writer’s writer.” This little collection of essays looked very interesting. The title essay is very pertinent to our present perilous political situation. He insists that the devaluation of public rhetoric has a direct impact on the art of words. Ain’t it the truf!

Though I have read the big collection of Amiri Baraka’s poems, there are many poems that are not in it. I found Funk Lore on the shelves at my local library in Holland. This morning I  read a section that I needed to jot down somewhere to remember.  Here’s as good a place as any.

we only live
where the flag
is not
where the air is funky
the music
hot
Inside the hole
in the American soul
that space, that place
empty of democracy
we live
inside burned boundaries
of a wasted symbol
X humans, X slaves, unknown, incorrect
crossed out, multiplying the wealth of others

from The X is Black (Spike Lie)

This is from a longer work called “Incriminating Negrographs” in which Baraka takes Spike Lee to task about his movie about Malcolm X. I haven’t seen the movie but have read about Malcolm X. The “X” is a name taken to show the lack of identity of a slave heritage. This little section reminded me of the book on Slave history I am reading. The lines about the hole in the American soul empty of democracy hit me hard. That’s where we live now.

Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times: Conservative Media and U.S. Politics – Shorenstein Center

“They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing” Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party – Shorenstein Center

This is a link to a pdf of Calmes’ 2015 paper

Yesterday my time at the organ bogged down as my tech refused to do what I wanted it to. No doubt it is user malfunction. However, I was unhappy to spend so much of my alloted time to practice yelling at my computer because it was refusing to tape me.  I wanted to make a recording so my brother could sort of tell what “Mental Floss” sounded like on the Pasi. I can tell from watching the video above that I am thinking more about the recording process than the music. This is one of the problems I have being so isolated at this point. I sometimes describe it as my skill set, a skill set that I intentionally limit to doing the music itself not other things like recording and publicity.

Mark rightly pointed out in a comment to yesterday’s blog that I had embedded the wrong recording. Sigh. I now do not have the patience to mess with that. Let the above stupid video stand for now.

Before recording this I attempted to record Sunday’s prelude (Buxtehude’s chorale prelude on “A Mighty Fortress”). This totally refused to work. I kept getting error messages when I went to see how well it recorded. Good grief.

Anyway I’m blogging early just to get this out of the way today.Here are some links.

 U.S. Clears Bill Browder to Enter, Rebuking Russia – The New York Times

I have been following this story.

Chasing the Spirit of a Fractured Spain Through García Lorca – The New York Times

Poets in the news. I love Lorca.

Tillerson in Kabul? Two Photos Lead to Many Questions – The New York Times

Clumsy photoshopping.

The Misguided Student Crusade Against ‘Fascism’ – The New York Times

I agree with this college president.

Your Guide to the Met Opera’s ‘Exterminating Angel’ – The New York Times

I have to check out this dude’s compositions.

If I’ve done this right, you should be able to click on the above recording and listen to a bootleg quality version of me playing my composition, Mental Floss, at the Dedication Recital.

In order to embed this I had to download and install Audacity which is a music file editing program I have used in the past. I still have in mind making a better recording of this piece soon.

Oddly enough listening to this bad recording reminded me of some goofs I made that I had forgotten making. Still I’m very satisfied with my performance that evening.  However, it’s funny what one remembers from a performance and what one forgets.

Tyhimba Jess says that the sections in his book length poem, Leadbelly, take their titles from Leadbelly songs, but I can’t find a song to fit the title of the first section, “what kind of soul has man?” I suspect it’s a line from a song. Spotify has the entire Library of Congress recordings. I’m listening to them right now. I have heard these before. YouTube has a couple volumes someone has collected of theses.

So today I have a day of stuff to do. I prepped for this morning yesterday. Church probably won’t be hard. But after church I have a “dress rehearsal” of Stewardship the Musical. Ever since finding out I had a solo to sing in this I have been pondering it. Based on “Piano man” by Billy Joel, it’s a satire about a piano man (me) who works for Rev Jen Adams. It gets many things wrong such as having me sing lines like “I’ll sing you a hymn, I’m the piano man.” But it also gets Jen’s role very wrong: The Senior Warden “knows it’s she they’re coming to see.”

I have tinkered around with changing words in the song to make it a bit less incongruent with participatory ideas about worship (“I’ll teach you a hymn, I’m the piano man”), but it feels forced. I’m thinking “fuck it” I’ll just do it like the parishioner has written it. It’s less work to go along and not cause any waves.

I played through all of the music Craig Cramer played Wednesday. It was a partita by Georg Bohm on “Freu Dich sehr” or “Comfort, comfort, ye my people.”  I must have been asleep at the wheel Wednesday because I don’t remember it being as cool as it is. I will learn some of these movements for Advent when we sing the hymn.

Also, I am seriously considering learning and performing one of the pieces that Rhonda played as well, the one based on “A Mighty Fortress”  by Buxtehude. Jen and I have not discussed alluding to the Reformation on its 500th anniversary. A couple of parishioners, however, have told me they are looking forward to seeing what I do with this hymn, this year.

I am thinking of suggesting it for a closing hymn for next week. Of course, that means a lot more practice on my part. And I’m thinking of getting out of town and availing myself of my brother’s offered hospitality later this week (Hi Mark!). Scheduling this piece would mean practicing during my time away.

I haven’t figured out a prelude yet for next week. I am still reading and learning about Frescobaldi, but I don’t think I want to schedule pieces until I am more sure of my interpretation of them.

BPW will be shutting off our power for 24 hours this week at church. It would be a good time to be away. I won’t be able to practice on Thursday (and possibly Friday) anyway.

Mental Floss Oct 18 2017

Here’s a link to the pdf of my final version of this piece. Working on making a recording of it.

Simon Schama: By the Book – The New York Time

I love these”By the Book” articles . Schama has some fascinating ideas and recommendations. I have read books by him and think he rocks.

I am being drawn into a renewal of interest in music I have been neglecting. A couple of collections are instrumental in some of this. The first is an excellent historical edition of Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali.

Studying under Ray Ferguson, I learned to enjoy discovering idiosyncratic historical performance practices of music by Bach, the Couperins, and the French Noel Composers (Daquin, Dandriue, and others) and many others.

Since then I have made it a point to read up on historical performance practices and have spent time with original sources like CPE Bach (Johann’s son) who wrote an extensive work called Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. I am convinced that this particular work helped shape Glenn Gould’s wonderful eccentric approach to performance.

So now with my last project done (the Organ Dedication Recital), I find myself drawn to learning more about Italian 17th century organ performance practice as well as 18th century keyboard Spanish performance practice.

Calvert Johnson has done an amazing thing his edition of Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali. He has brought together a great deal of information about the composer and the work which is helpful to the performer. In his edition, there are about 60 pages packed full with information (as opposed to about 120 more pages of actual music). History, background of the usage of the pieces, ornamentation and fingering are all clearly and thoroughly presented. I know that Frescobaldi’s work fits nicely on my little Pasi organ at church. I have already done some playing. But I know I have much to learn. I anticipate finding gems in Frescobaldi’s work to learn and perform at church.

In addition I acquired an interesting collection of Spanish Keyboard Music. In her Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Spanish Keyboard Music Susanne Skyrn has assembled selections from seven Spanish composers who apparently were students of or writing under the influence of the my beloved Domenico Scarlatti.

I will remind readers that Scarlatti was Italian but spent most of his artistic life as a highly regarded court musician in Spain and Portugal. His music is like no other music. It incorporates his own understanding of many music practices of his time and is thought to have even been influenced by street music in Spain.

I have played a few pieces from Skyrn’s book and they are delightful. They will fit nicely on my refurbished harpsichord and they also would make nice pieces for church.

So that’s mostly on my little pea brain this morning: release from the steely discipline of having to learn music thoroughly enough to perform under the eyes of other recitalists and musicians leaves me with a new sense of excitement about what to do next.

Life is still good for me. Toujour gai, Archy, toujour gai.

I am feeling more rested today. As I review this past week, anticipating my conversation with my therapist this morning, it occurs to me that it’s been an intense time. It’s even been hard on Eileen. But now we are in a different phase. I did get my exercising in yesterday. After the funeral, I even spent some time playing the Pasi just for fun. I haven’t been able to do much of that. I would have gone back in the afternoon but I was too tired.

My brother Mark asked for a Finale recording of “Mental Floss.” Finale  can make these silly recordings of it playing whatever it has in written document. They are goofy. I am thinking instead of making a little mp3 of this piece. When I do, I will post it here along with the corrected version of the music itself.

I received a very nice email from Craig Cramer. He complimented my playing, mentioning that the Hampton was a handful.  I admit to feeling a bit better about my playing after this little experience.

I think I’m going to close here and work on updating my Finale doc of “Mental Floss.”

The Supreme Court Justices Need Fact-Checkers – The New York Times

I wonder if better fact checking at the court will happen in an age of willful lies.

I’m glad to arrive at this morning with last night’s concert in the past. It went well, of course. Eileen began the day saying that she had had too much input on Tuesday. That is definitely how I feel this morning: too much input.

There were some surprises for me. Huw Lewis emailed me and asked me to pull stops for him. This was certainly a surprise to me. But Huw continued to surprise me, not just with affability but when at the end of the evening the first words out of his mouth were about bringing his students to Grace to play the Pasi on a regular basis. This is something I have been trying to get him to agree to do. Will wonders never cease?

Another surprise was how many people seemed to like my little composition, “Mental Floss.” Some qualified it by saying they like the middle section better.

I was surprised that all three of the other players “worked the crowd.” Rhonda did an especially nice job of taking the listeners into her music with her explanations. Shit. If I had known that other three people were going to talk, I might have talked myself.

Unsurprisingly, everyone of us organists played well, myself included. I always wish I could have played a little better, but I was very satisfied with my performance and happy that I was able to come up with a reasonable rendition of “Mental Floss” despite it only being in a playable form for about two weeks.

In addition, I kept adjusting it right up until yesterday. Now I think it’s in a finished form and I will add my changes to the Finale doc and then put it up here and pass it on to people like Rhonda who have expressed interest in it.

Speaking of Rhonda, I think she played brilliantly last night. I’m glad that she is in our little town. (Hi Rhonda!)

Today I have a funeral at 10:30. I ‘d like to get some treadmiling in. Rev Jen has convened a “staff development” meeting this afternoon at Applebees for Dollaritas tm. Eileen is going with me.

Basically I’m feeling very spoiled this morning when I look around at where I am in my life at this time. The pieces I played last night representing a stretching of my abilities. It’s good not to have fucked them up too badly. Life is good.

Nicolas Slonimsky on Frank Zappa – YouTube

Craig Cramer told me a story about Zappa bring Slonimsky on stage at a concert. Who knew?

Her memoirs look interesting. Lots of quotes from them in the obit.

The Booker Prize’s Bad History – The New York Times

I keep learning about the horror of history.

The Seeds of Media Self-Sabotage | Crooked Media

Bookmarked to read.

Craig brought me a box of used music I purchased from him and I received my copy of Leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess in the mail as well.  I read several pages in the latter this morning and it unsurprisingly amazing.

It’s a series of poems that postulate the wonderful Leadbelly. I especially like the ending of the poem speaking in the voice of the city street in Shreveport, Louisiana, “fannin street signifies.” I think Jess is saying that experiencing the city as a youngster implants music in Leadbelly.

i cut a hole in his heart,
nail in a dozen metronomes,
each timed to the rhythm
of a newfound sinner’s sigh.

i line his throat with a church-
load of moonlight, smear blues’ afterbirth
of bible and baal across his skull.

i stuff his ears with 1000 bales
of barrelhouse folklore,
plant his tongue in the cunt of song

from “fannin street signifies” by Tyehimba Jess

 

I saved my book and my box of music for after a day of church stuff. I went over and grabbed a few minutes on the organ before Craig arrived. Martin Pasi showed up before Craig. I asked him about the registration on “Mental Floss.” He approved. Then when I told him it was the piece that I had written for him and Jen, he told me he liked it. I replied that I liked it too, but he and I may be the only ones who do.

Now I have to include Rhonda’s nice comments on yesterday’s blog where she says that she likes it as well. It feels a bit like I was fishing for compliments in my blog I guess. Of course that’s not what I think is going on, but what do I know? I certainly didn’t ask Pasi what he thought.

Craig showed up with my box of music in hand. Jen and Eileen joined us for some spirited talk about the organ. Then Craig, Martin, Eileen and I went off to have lunch together (Jen was busy). After lunch Craig spent some time on the organ. I went off and treadmilled. Craig had arranged to meet Chris Dekker, a doctoral candidate at Notre Dame, at 2 PM. I returned around 2:30, chatted with Mary Miller about the program for tonight, asked Craig’s opinion on the listing of pieces. He took the quotes off the titles. I guess I’ve been thinking of titles of poems and short stories as needing quotes and generalized that on to music. At any rate, I figure Craig knows the deal and we went with his recommendations on how to title all the music.

The program (as the recital itself) is more under the guidance of my boss, Rev Jen. I feel this is appropriate because in my mind the organ project really is her baby. She knows I’m conflicted about the formality of this evening. I probably would have organized it a bit different but am not sure how. I am so bored with the academic approach to concerts and the way so many of them play music for people and seeming to disregard the realities I experience in our time. However, as Rhonda has pointed out to me this evening is a solid representation of the variety of the performers involved. I concur.

I asked Craig and Chris to sign the Pasi Guest Book. As I left to go practice, Craig told me to be kind to myself. That was a lovely little thing for him to say.

Ever since speaking with Rhonda on Monday I have been attempting to strengthen the way I play the ending of my piece. I have played the weak spots I discovered under Rhonda’s eyes on Monday one hundred billion times since then. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I was kind to myself in my rehearsal and feel like I have done solid prep for this evening. I want to get one more session in today but know that (except for the weak spots in my piece) I am as prepared as I want to be.

Huw was due to come by around 4 PM or so. I didn’t wait for him but did ask Craig to leave the door open for him. I also put the Guest Book on the music rack with a note asking Huw to sign it.

I came home and not too long thereafter Martin and his wife, Jen, dropped by to look at Eileen’s looms and talk with her. Eileen has remarked to me that she wishes we had people like Martin and Jen (and Marcus) around to chat with. It was a delight for me to watch how much she enjoyed talking to Martin and Jen. As they left, since I knew Martin planned to go over and tinker with the organ a bit, I asked him to lock up after Huw.

I left my glasses at church but could not bring myself to go back so I need to go look for them today.

It’s a light day for me. This is often the case for me as I approach a performance like this. By the time it rolls around if I’m not ready there’s not too much I can do at the last moment other than live through the whole deal.

I have just gotten up from my fifty dollar synth. I use it to play harpsichord literature. This morning was Bach suites. Also I page through the two volumes of the Fitzwilliam Virginal book and play pieces. This is a solitary delight. I think Bach imagined solitary players delving into his musical ideas and enjoying them. Possibly the virginalists composer did likewise even though their pieces often seem directed toward listeners and situations that clearly posit an audience to the music( “The King’s Hunt”).

There is an odd feeling of gentle consolation at playing through such wonderful music alone. It is a pleasure to know that no matter what, as long as I can move my fingers I will have this experience for myself.

Today I’m meeting Craig Cramer. He is on a day trip up from South Bend. He will look over the instrument, then he, Eileen and I will have lunch. I have a distinct feeling of being in over my head regarding tomorrow night’s upcoming concert. I am prepared as I can be given the limits of my ability and situation. I will continue practicing the music carefully in the few hours I have left for it.

But it feels very much like I am heading for a collision of worlds.

The crash will be silent and probably mostly if not only in my own head. I know the acquisition of the Pasi organ is significant, both for our church community and the organ community at large. I am pleased by its modesty and beauty of sound. At the same time, I wonder how I quite fit into all this elegance.

I am happy with my composition, “Mental Floss.” It says very  much what I want to say. I  can render it so that it can be heard. At the same time, it seems to languish a bit trivially in the ears of other trained musicians. I emailed it to my friend Nick, but no response. Rhonda was very helpful about it, taking it on its own terms, but I couldn’t quite tell what she thought of it as a composition. It is eccentric and a bit trivial, I guess, like its creator.

This morning I found myself reading Keats, Erica Jong, Richard Wilbur and the other usual suspects. These then are my companions (besides my lovely wife). Along with Bach, the English virginalists and others they hold me in conversation and thrall. But when in a room with others I find myself lost in a torrent of conflicting emotions and observations. Thus it has been my whole life, really. There just used to be more breathing alive people on my list of companions.

I know this is not unusual for older people. But the stereotype is that they have out lived friends. In my case, it’s more like my friends have left me in their past where they are more comfortable with me. A few people keep a bizarre notion of me in their heads which is not terribly informed by who I am now.

Eileen was so surprised when the hostess of our recent Sunday evening meal was so affectionate to us, treating us like old friends, hugging us as we arrived and being very charming and solicitous  all evening. I pointed out to Eileen that she  and I were probably a large presence in this person’s life, but one uninformed by actual contact with us.

Seventeen Warnings In Search Of A Feminist Poem by Erica Jong

After having recently listened to Jong read poetry by Updike and herself, I turned to my worn copies of her poems and read the ones marked as interesting. I was delighted to find this one also online.

Miso-Ginger Dressing Recipe – NYT Cooking

This looks like a fun useful recipe.