I’m blogging on Sunday afternoon which is unusual. Usually I do this in the morning before work on Sundays.

Church went well today. My group (Eileen, Sarah and Matthew) toyed with attending but had an attack of sanity and decided not to. I played well, but screwed up one line in the psalm (Anglican chant). I usually go through the psalm in its entirety four times before a service and that seems to do the trick. This morning I only did it two time out of laziness. Not sure if that’s why I screwed up or not. There aren’t any real guarantees that I’ve found for consistent air tight performances other than in depth preparation. Sometimes I don’t have the time and/or energy. You can bet your bippy I will run through it at least four times in the future if I am able.

It’s fun having Matthew around to talk about music with. He has transferred his artistic sensibilities into recording. He is preparing to return to this work that he did when he was a bit younger.

I’ve undergone a bit of change in my attitude toward current pop music. I was losing interest and not finding or noticing top ten type tunes that I liked. This began to change with listening to Walk off the Earth.

I like this group a lot. And I’m finding that several of the tunes they do that I like are arrangements (covers) of other current musicians.

Matthew seemed to know many of the originals. I asked him how he ran across them and he told me that the Brit cable service Skye has several music channels and he sometimes finds them there.

After giving this a little thought, I realized that I had access to current lists of tunes on Spotify. Yesterday when I exercised I made a playlist which consisted exclusively of recordings from Spotify’s top current songs both in the USA and Globally (it’s two lists).

I was surprised that the music wasn’t all banal. How about that?

Microbeads, the Tiny Orbs Threatening Our Water – The New York Times

I put this link up on Facebooger as well. I would like to figure out if my and Eileen’s toothpaste has ingredients that will make Microbeads…. Googling was a bit confusing so far.

Trans Deaths, White Privilege – The New York Times

This is a dramatic article that alternates describing what the author was doing when other Trans people were being murdered.

The title to today’s blog is a quote from the poem, “Betancourt,” by Amiri Baraka, I read this morning as part of my morning reading time. It struck me as ironic that this poem from Baraka’s youth had this line in it. I have been finding more and more poems by Baraka that I admire. I’m attracted to his blend of erudition, politics, beat poet resonance and love of Jazz.

I love these lines:

“… Walking all night
entwined inside, I mean
I tasted you, your real & fleshy
voice
inside my head
& choked
as if some primitive
corruption re-sat
itself in full view
of a puritan flame. And flame
is the mind, the wet hands
mark on strange islands
of warmth.”

Amiri Baraka

I was talking about Baraka yesterday with my student Rudi. Rudi is an odd blend. He is a devout Roman Catholic. But his politics are similar to mine. He also is very interested and aware of a lot of the African American issues and history, being himself a black man raised in the south.

Yesterday I asked him if he was interested in learning some music besides Liszt, Scriabin, and Fauré. I told him that Baraka had inspired me to listen to Thelonious Monk on my tablet on the ride up to the lesson from Holland. I believe Monk’s music is largely the music of a genius. As Scriabin is sort of a pianist’s composer, Monk is a musician’s musician.

Rudi said he likes Jazz but wasn’t interested in learning to play it. This led us to talk about Baraka. With a few reminders Rudi remembered who Baraka was.

I’m afraid that having Matthew and Sarah around has sort of primed the pump of my talking and thinking. I need to work on turning down the intensity a bit, even though I don’t think I’ve driven anyone crazy quite yet. It would be good if I could avoid it.

I finished Chaucer’s House of Fame yesterday. I decided I had enough of Chaucer for a while, having read “The Book of the Duchess,” “The Parliment of Fowls,” and “The House of Fame.” It’s lovely stuff to read out loud, but I think it might be fun to read some Shakespeare systematically, so this morning I began “King Lear.”

It’s fun to read (reread?) this and factor in a bit of Family Systems. You know the Father with the three Daughters, two of which falsely proclaim their love and the youngest of which only will love deeply but not profess it due to modesty. Fun stuff.

Justice Dept. Presses Civil Rights Agenda in Local Courts – The New York Times

Rudy and I were talking about voting rights as well since I’m reading Give us the Ballot. This article is interesting in the light of such voter and other rights repression. I was trying to tell Rudy that while things are dire, all is not lost yet.

Good guy with a gun myth: Guns increase the risk of homicide, accidents, suicide

This is a Slate article from January of this year. I bookmarked it for possible sharing when misinformation abounds on Facebooger.

How Not to Think About Bears – The New York Times

The gun risk link above came from this entertaining article.

The Middle East’s Morality Police – The New York Times

Many countries in the Middle East have a very weird relationship to women. In this case, bellydancers.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Co-Founder of National Front, Is Ousted From French Far-Rig

Family systems in the news. Father founds mad organization. Daughter climbs the leadership ladder of it. Daughter ousts father.

Review: In ‘Grandma,’ Lily Tomlin Energizes an Intergenerational Road Trip – 

This movie looks good.

I took my copy of Diane Arbus’s Untitled with me to work yesterday. My boss had mentioned that she was so intrigued by a link I had put up about Arbus on Facebooger that she was going to look for her work at the library. I offered to loan my books to her.

I own two collections of Arbus and was planning to loan both of them to Rev Jen. But I discovered that Matthew did not know her work. So I only loaned one to Jen and kept the other so that Matthew could look at it. He was favorably impressed.

I, too, am impressed with Arbus.

I received an email from the real estate agent who helped us sell my Mom’s place yesterday. It did not have the red alert that you see above. This was there today when I went back to it. As you can see I emailed the  mailer saying I wanted more information before logging in (as the link asked me to do) with my Google password.

It looks like that was the right choice.

I was talking to Dawn my cellist yesterday. She mentioned she was looking for ways to lower her intake of sugar and carbohydrates. I told her that Devin Alexander has come up with a bunch of recipes that are both tasty and low in fats, sugars, etc.

I  sent her a link to Alexander’s web site which is quite extensive and even has some of her recipes in it. I also offered to loan her my copies of I can’t believe it’s not fattening and The most decadent diet ever. These are not strictly vegetarian cookbooks and Dawn is not a vegetarian, but there are vegetarian recipes among the meat ones.

I tend to think in very basic ways about food. Less processed is better. I tend to be skeptical of trends and fads in nutrition and stick with what I understand. I learned quite a bit from my undergrad class in Nutrition at Wayne State. The principles have helped me over the years despite changing science and attitudes.

Of course I still need to lose some weight for my blood pressure. This is VERY gradually happening.

Well, it’s happening. I’m enjoying conversation with Sarah, Matthew and Eileen without driving any one of them particularly nuts. Desired effect achieved.

They arrived late last night. Sarah had an awful trip. She was ill for it and had to be escorted in a wheelchair at one point. Matthew texted that she was “broken” but he was taking care of her.

He also mentioned how rude the people had been to him at O’Hare. Sooprise.

They have had a marathon prior to this visit due to the fact that they are moving. Matthew’s father has to move all  his stuff in and out of his current apartment as well. Matthew and Sarah describe weaning their stuff in order to expedite storing it in two different storage sites, one short term, one long term.

They do look exhausted but happy to be somewhere, probably anywhere, they are not having to sort and move stuff.

I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night myself. I did manage to stay awake till the kids got here (read no martini until they were here).

Sarah said they seriously considered taking a room in Chicago since she felt so bad. Matthew felt that if she kept moving she would feel better. Apparently he was right.

Right now they are freshening up. Then we plan to go out for breakfast.

I did get in most of my morning reading this morning. I was pretty impressed with one poem by Baraka. Here’s a taste:

There’s more but you get the idea. I identify with the first person of Baraka’s poem (it’s titled the first line and doesn’t seem to be online other than on Google books where you can read the whole thing.)

My relationship with the internet began with me looking for conversation and ideas and other people. It has progressed to the point now that I don’t expect conversation, but I do get ideas and lots of good info from the interwebs.

The TV Segment That Lays Bare Everything That’s Wrong with Corporate Media 

More on the Amazon/NYT/Beezos debacle. Bad coverage. Thank you CBS.

Why You’re Biased About Being Biased – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

I continue to think about thinking. My son, David, put this link on Facebooger. Bookmarked to read.

The Idealist Versus the Therapist – The New York Times

I don’t remember where I picked this up, but it looks interesting. Bookmarked to read.

Court’s Free-Speech Expansion Has Far-Reaching Consequences – The New York

The more I read and learn about the Supreme Court, the more I think they are not helping the USA. Here Clarence Thomas goes nuts when he didn’t have to.

Shit it’s almost ten AM. I have been goofing off reading and having a nice breakfast with Eileen. My daughter, Sarah, and her significant other, Matthew, are in the air flying from the UK to Chicago. I am looking forward to her and Matthew’s visit.  We will be joined by the Chinese contingent (Elizabeth, Jeremy, and Alex) in about a week. Their visits will over lap.

I am recalling how visiting with my adult daughters and others from their generation that I know (Benjamin and Emily Jenkins) surprises me. What surprises me is to suddenly be in a room with people that talk to me and think (this is obviously besides Eileen). This will be fun.

I finished An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments  by Ali Almossawi this morning. The whole book is available online as well as the next book he is working on: Hans in the Land of Bards.

I am continuing to think about Almossawi’s exposition of bad arguments. I learned quite a bit from this book and also remembered snatches of my undergraduate logic class.

Mostly I was thinking about myself, but the concepts of fallacious arguments does expose the holes in much of what I read on Facebooger and hear on the Tube.

The important concept for me was to remember that what is essential to any argument is the content of the argument as well as its structure. What are the “merits of the original idea?” I ask myself. As I read in the book and then popped on to this website for more reading, I discovered holes in my own way of thinking. Excellent. More vigilance is necessary of course but this has my attention. I am planning to follow up on Almossawi’s bibliography at the back of the book.

The TV Segment That Lays Bare Everything That’s Wrong with Corporate Media 

Speaking of fallacious arguments, listen to the Amazon rep as his logic shreds.

Century of Self – YouTube

Russell Brand mentioned this documentary on Facebooger. I have bookmarked it for future viewing.

I found that my eye appointment in Grand Rapids while not distressing was more fatiguing than I was expecting. The surgeon was satisfied with my healing. He did mention that my long distance sight was continuing to gradually get worse. He mentioned that this is often accompanied by improved near sightedness. I told him that I was experiencing an improvement in my near sight and that this explained it. This is called, according to him, “second sight.”

Eileen was very tired when we got back. I decided that I couldn’t face church tasks including practicing organ at the church or picking hymns or choral music. Instead I worked on rearranging my poetry books. I started by moving some shelves next to the treadmill.

I plan on putting oversize interesting books there. Then I expanded the poetry shelving by adding a row on the top of the blond shelf.

By the time we had lunch Eileen was so tired that she went for a nap. I went to the bank and visited Mom. I took her a fresh peach.

I had a nice message from an old friend yesterday, Peter Kurdziel. I had thought of him as we drove past his church, The Basilica of St. Adalbert’s, on our way to and from the eye guy. Adelbert’s can be clearly seen from the highway in downtown Grand Rapids.

So it was a coincidence that out of the blue I received a complimentary message from Peter around lunchtime. He said he had been talking to someone about mentors this weekend and he thought of me. And how he had never acknowledged my influence and help with work as a liturgical musician. So he wanted to thank me.

This is a high compliment since I think Peter is an excellent musician and church musician. I put it here because I moan and groan too much in this space about not being appreciated. I thanked him back.

With High-Profile Help, Obama Plots Life After Presidency – The New York Times

It will be interesting to see what Obama does post presidency. The library plans sound interesting.

Julian Bond, Charismatic Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75 – The New York Times

I didn’t know that Bond along with Morris Dees founded the Southern Poverty Law Center.

‘A Manual for Cleaning Women,’ by Lucia Berlin – The New York Times

So I spent my treadmill time mostly reading the Book Review from the Sunday NYT. I found several interesting leads for books to read in the future including this one.

Adam Johnson’s ‘Fortune Smiles’ – The New York Times

The reviewer woke up her husband in the middle of the night to read one of these stories. This is a writer I don’t recognize but is on my list now.

Vu Tran’s ‘Dragonfish’ – The New York Times

This is a first novel. The review sold me.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: By the Book – The New York Times

I love this weekly feature and I respect and admire Coates. Many recommendations to check out here.

Today I have to drive to Grand Rapids and have my eye surgeon check on my eyes again. This is another follow up visit for my operation to repair my torn retina. It seems very thorough to be still having this looked at, but I go willingly.

Eileen said yesterday she wanted to go with me. She’s not awake yet. I’m planning to leave around 8 AM. I’ll check on her around 7:30 if she’s not up yet.

Yesterday I finished putting all the books in Sarah’s old bedroom on shelves with their spines out.

This was satisfying. I enjoying messing with my books. And even though it was a Sunday afternoon (a time when my energies are at a low ebb) I spent an hour or so finishing this task.

Eileen came in and looked around. Then she said that while it might not be apparent to most people, “we know” how much progress I made. Heh.

I have been thinking about the Republican pushback on voter registration. Reading the history of the time between the passing of the Voter Registration Act (1965) and today, it is painfully obvious, that the fight to keep people from voting is a racist and classist action.

If a party sides with white supremacists and carries out policies that further their cause, then the party itself is a party of white supremacy no matter how disguised the language used or self deluded people in the party are. This latter category sadly includes more than one of our current Supreme Court Justices.

Inside John Roberts’ Decades-Long Crusade Against the Voting Rights Act 

It’s a sad time in the USA right now.

And speaking of injustice I read a long amazing story about the business culture of Amazon yesterday:

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace – The New York Times

By the time I finished it, I was convinced that that the climate in this company is not ethical. It’s a combination of “metrics” thinking and cutthroat competition gone berserk.

On the other side of the ledger we find people like Susan Jacoby.

Susan Jacoby: A Voice of Reason

Eileen and I watched part two of her 2008 interview with Bill Moyers. The link above is to her web site which is not great, but she is.

Lastly, I have developed a new Facebooger strategy. Thinking about Jacoby’s idea that what we need is reason and clarity, something hard to achieve with shortening attention spans, I have begun to try to fight the hate and ignorance I see on Facebooger with content links.

When I see a “friend” has posted an unthinking distorted thing, I go to google news and find some content that contradicts it. Or I use something from my feed that is either clearly reputable or says something that I know is true.

I know it’s pretty futile to fight hate and ignorance with content especially links that might require more than 30 seconds to read, but it satisfies me and doesn’t feel as reactionary as just yelling back.

Incidentally, I don’t necessarily think these quotes actually came from the people they are attributed to. I just like them.

Eileen was home from the Fiber Fest by mid afternoon yesterday. By the time she and I had visited Mom and I had done my prep for today at church I found myself pretty exhausted. Nevertheless I came home and treadmilled.

We then watched an old video of Bill Moyers interviewing Susan Jacoby.

Susan Jacoby on American Ignorance | BillMoyers.com

Facebook provides continual reminders to me that there are a lot of people who are largely operating in a fog of confused ignorance. I work on my own ignorance constantly, both trying to learn stuff and examining my own convictions and prejudices. So I understand the concept from the inside.

Jacoby provides some ways to think about this ignorance that are not primarily condemnatory. She blames the shrinking attention span created by parents failing to read to their children and the large amounts of time people spend (inertly I believe she means) in front of screens.

When Moyers asked her about how a public figure would talk about public ignorance without condescension, her replies are revealing.

We as a people have not lived up to our obligation to learn what we ought to learn to make informed decisions.” I can imagine candidates saying, “And we in the Congress have been guilty of that too.” Because it’s not just the public that’s ignorant. We get the government we deserve.

In other words, you wouldn’t say to people, “You’re a dope.” You would say, “We have got to do better in — about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy.” We can’t learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can’t learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themselves on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other, from books. And we all need to do a lot more of that.

Jacoby is speaking five years ago but her observations are still very salient.

I’d like to add a couple of ideas to today’s blog from my morning reading before I quit.

The first comes from David MacCulloch’s book, Silence: A Christian History. MacCulloch is quite clever about his topic of silence and uses it as a foil for things absent and repressed as well more obvious meanings.

This morning I was reading the section, “Silence, Sex, and Gender.” I was struck when MacCulloch pointed out the very very small role Handel’s Messiah gives to Jesus’s mom, Mary. I had never thought of that before, but it is a glaring omission in the story of Jesus. Of course, it represents a Protestant reaction to the Mary cult. But MacCulloch points out in this section the way Christianity rewrites its history from a male point of view continually.

He points to John Wesley’s changes in his diaries from the way he wrote them to the way he published them. In his published version the role of women which was so important in his diaries is downplayed to the extreme of changing names and pronouns to make people male.

Good grief. Some stuff never changes I guess.

But on a more happy note, I ran into some lines of poetry by Wendell Berry this morning that struck me.

“I hear the sounds of wings.
What man can abide the rule
of ‘the market’ when he hears,
in his waking, in his sleep,
the sound of wings.”

Wendell Berry, This Day, p. 278

Notwithstanding Berry’s example of sexist exclusive language, it’s still a beautiful thought.

This entire poem is about birds and I thought that Olivier Messiaen would have liked it.

Eileen is off to Fiber Fest with a friend.

Yesterday I spent some time organizing books in Sarah’s old room. I’m planning to do more of that today. Also Farmers Market, prep for tomorrow’s church and do some planning. Probably too many tasks for a Saturday, but we’ll see.

I just discovered this group. I don’t know what instrument they are playing in this video, but I think it’s cool. Somebody posted the following video on Facebooger.

I really like the energy and playfulness in it and the music.

I know they have been around a while since I recognize some of their tunes after doing a little exploring.

Eileen just walked back in the house with the (very very) early mail which included my copy of Amiri Baraka’s poetry I ordered recently. Cool. Her ride hasn’t arrived yet.

It made me realize that the asides in Finnegans Wake have a debt to this masterpiece. I think I will put a copy near my chair to start reading once I have finished something I am reading now.

I continue to enjoy my daily reading in Finnegans Wake. It’s the first thing I pick up in the morning and I read it aloud. I get a lot out of a cold read. Then I read about the passage in Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Campbell and Robinson and see if I agree with their interpretation. Of course their footnotes are helpful since I know some but not all of the languages and references Joyce makes. Few people would probably get everything.

I seem to be in an ebullient mood this morning. Yesterday I bogged down and lost all motivation for everything but alternating reading, Facebooger and playing piano. I didn’t make it to church. I don’t think I could face church yesterday. I had a fun moment with my piano student. He is studying Scriabin’s 14th prelude in Eb minor from Opus 11 .

He doesn’t play it as fast as this performance. But he is getting the notes and rhythms. The piece is in an odd time signature for the time: 15/8. Scriabin divides the beat in five parts. In the second complete measure, he disrupts the rhythm in an elegant way. I told my student, I think it’s a feeling of abandonment.

He was puzzled, so I sat down and played it for him the way I was hearing it. I told him it was a more direct communication than a word and that it was the kind of communication he makes when he performs a piece.

It was a nice moment.

I have been thinking of the isolation I experience at this time in my life. I find it odd that this is at all important to me. It seems that having few friends contributes to the weird activity of wondering what other people think of you. This is sort of a new activity in my life and I don’t really like it.

I can’t help but notice when friends drop me or when people with whom I feel like I might have something in common fail to notice that I’m around at all.

I am beginning to suspect that this is part of old age in the USA.

Since there is such an emphasis on youth and success, as we age we become less and less relevant, even less visible.

I am lucky to have the love of my wife and the joy of daily contact with good music and interesting books.

I fully realize that my isolation is of my own doing and a direct result of my rejection of so many more conventional paths. The only thing missing in this is that I have very few intimate friends. I have had many good friends over the years. But now for one reason or another, I don’t. I think this contributes to the confusing treatment that I now am more likely to notice at this stage of life.

But speaking of good music and books, my piano trio yesterday agreed to practice the Mendelssohn trio (C minor, Opus 66, mov 1)  we are rehearsing at a much more modest tempo. This enabled me to play many more accurate notes of Mendelssohn’s tricky piano part. The cellist continually points out how much more difficult my part is than the cello or violin part.

Be that as it may, it is a wonderful part and I enjoy rehearsing it. Doing so slowly with my colleagues seems to be satisfying not only to me but them.

I mentioned to my trio yesterday that I have been in a Mendelssohn mood for several years. A funny place for an old amateur pop musician to be. But satisfying. I came home yesterday and continued to read the trio at the piano and also some of his Songs without Words.

I once had a colleague tell me he thought these were pretty bad. But I actually enjoy them and find them satisfying and fun to play.

On the book front, it occurred to me this morning how similar I find the experience of reading Finnegans Wake  aloud and reading Chaucer aloud.

In both cases I have to keep my wits about me to recognize meanings.

I know I’m not catching the entire meaning in either case but with the help of good reference books and notes I am getting enough to enjoy it.

My cellist was remarking how lucky her life had been musically, that she felt lucky. “Me too,” I said.

President Obama’s summer reading list – CNBC

I love book lists. Some interesting titles here.

U.S. Jets Meet Limit as Iraqi Ground Fight Against ISIS Plods On – NYT

I abhor the concept of war. Nevertheless I find the contrast between the US tech and the on the ground fighters’ lack of tech interesting. Also, the description of how US planes are launched and land is wild!

Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police NYT 

Facial recognition tech is moving faster than the law.

DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life – NYT

Tech reading into history. Great story!

I seem to be blogging later and later in the day. My boss emailed me last night even though she’s supposedly on vacation asking what my fall schedule will be like at the Hope Dance department.

It really will be light. Only two days a week with four classes total (2 a day).

I haven’t done this deliberately. The department seems to keep cutting back classes. i think they are under pressure from the college because they don’t give many credits for longer classes. Thus all my classes this fall are fifty minutes. They stopped their Friday classes last semester.

This should work out good for me. I have watched my energy levels diminish due to age. Great. I can still muster the energy needed to my tasks, but boy am I tired after I exercise.

I managed to get another month of hymns chosen yesterday. I’m moving slowly on planning but at least I’m up to Advent 2015 now.

A Great Day In Harlem – Harlem 58 – The Photograph – Part 1 – YouTube

I saw a reference to this famous photograph of a bunch of Jazz buy cheap diazepam online uk musicians on Facebooger yesterday and instantly checked it out on YouTube. Some kind soul has made a playlist of its sections. Bookmarked to watch sometime.

Obama’s Big Gamble – NationalJournal.com

This is an old article cited by Ari Berman in his book Give Us the Ballot. He says the author of this article coined the phrase, “the coalition of the ascendent” to describe Obama’s constituency and the growing nonwhite majority. The target for the many voting restrictions that have been enacted since.

Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork – The New York Times

Not only does bias come into play when setting up an algorithms there are some counter intuitive notions that Dwork talks about like making sure you use what she calls sensitive information (like race or gender) when setting up classifications. In other words a blind calculation (not factoring in race or gender) might be less helpful or accurate.

The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate | VICE News

The CIA asked VICE news not to publish an inadvertently released letter about this story. VICE news said no.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that I’m not exactly one kind of a musician or another. Not a classical musician, not really a rock musician, not a typical Episcopalian church musician.

In addition I have been reviewing some of my old songs. I don’t have as much faith in them or myself as I used to. I still like who I am, but I am reminded of what someone once told me: that I confuse people because I’m one of a kind.

That’s probably a bit generous, right? Funny, I just checked the pronunciation on the Mirriam Webster site and it sounds like “sue I generous.” I don’t think that’s right.

I do see that my musical skills continue to improve with practice. I’m not sure what to do with my old songs. I’ve gotten hung up on rehearsing my piano reduction of the slow movement of my Marimba piece. I did the reduction quite a while ago. I find it kind of hard to play but doable. (link to the online pdf on my music page).

I had the idea of redoing some of my old songs into piano/vocal versions. But when I go through them I mostly bog down and think, fuck it. I may do that yet.

This morning I listened to several of Vulture’s 9 best songs of the week. I wasn’t listening too closely. But it seemed to me that they didn’t have much contrast within the song. I didn’t notice one bridge (that is a contrasting B section of a song).

Well I’m blogging a little late today. I have a date with my beautiful wife to go to the Farmers Market. After that I need to get back to picking hymns for the upcoming year. I’m on November. Then there’s the need to start choosing choral music.

Plus I have all these books to organize.

The tree trimmers are here.

Eileen has bemoaned her growing shady back yard which prohibits successfully growing many plants.

Hopefully this will help.

I decided this morning I want to read the entire SOS Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka, so I ordered a copy from Amazon.

I also ordered Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Baraka. I feel like I have a lot in common with this poet. I like the way he weaves Jazz and erudition together with my kind of politics. It’s a breath of fresh air to me.

Thanks, Elizabeth, for commenting about him.

And a big thank you to my brother, Mark, for helping get better at adding the weekly pointed psalm to the bulletin. HUGE timesaver!

Patter and Patois – The New York Times

Sunday’s NYT Book Review (which I usually get to on Monday) buy diazepam 5mg online used the anniversary of Katrina as a sort of a theme. This article by Walter Mosley is fun.

Walker Percy’s Theory of Hurricanes – The New York Times

Percy’s “theory of hurricanes” falls under his rubric that we do worst in the best of times and best in the worst of times.

Tyler Drumheller, Ex-C.I.A. Official Who Disputed Bush, Dies at 63 – The New York

Nice quote from this guy in his obit:

“The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful,” he continued. “They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn’t do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks.”

Despite having an exhausting weekend, I managed to cook my mussels and clams last night on the grill. They pretty much failed. The mussels cooked properly, but many of them had very little meat in them. Very few of the clams opened. If they don’t open, you’re supposed to discard them, which I did.

I ascribe this failure primarily to the fact that I didn’t have the grill flame high enough. I misinterpreted the knob and couldn’t see the flame for the container of the shell fish. It may be that they weren’t as fresh as they could have been as well. But I don’t think they were dead. If they are dead, you’re not supposed to use them.

It seems that not only Cicero is an antidote to the mediocre (Fox news and Facebooger for example), Amiri Baraka also helps.

It probably helps to remember stuff like the history of jazz and recent debacles in US history. He nicely ridicules people I don’t like: Rush Limbaugh becomes Rush Limp Balls,  Clarence Thomas becomes Tom Ass Clarence and so on.

He mentions many jazz musicians by name in his poetry.

from  “Four Cats on Repatriationology”:

I’m still processing attending Eileen’s 45th reunion of her high school graduating class last night. I’m a bit exhausted this morning. I started my day randomly listening to the NPR show The People’s Pharmacy as I cleaned the kitchen in order to make my morning coffee.

Show 1002: How Bowel Bacteria Affect the Brain – The People’s Pharmacy

Note that the podcast of this show won’t be available until Monday. This broadcast caught my attention enough for me to finish listening to it as I was waking up and sipping coffee.

I do know that the science around gut bacteria is evolving, but the claims (both explicit and implicit) by Perlmutter in this show were mind boggling and a bit confusing.

After the show I googled him and found this little article.

The Problem With the Grain Brain Doctor — Science of Us

I read enough of this article (admittedly by an assistant professor of religion) to think that it might not be time to swallow Perlmutter’s ideas whole (so to speak).

For what it’s worth, I took an undergrad class in nutrition years ago and integrated several ideas from it into my life style such as the less processed something is the better and that body weight is directly related to caloric intake.

Whew, MY brain is on the fuzzy side this morning due to large extrovert type input from last night’s experience and a bit less sleep than usual.

That being the case I think I will use the rest of this blog to point out some books I ran across at the library yesterday afternoon.

My eye fell on this book on the new shelf. I think more and more about faulty logic. This is increased by my Facebooger use as I try to make sense of people’s posts and point of view.  Eileen instantly sat down and read this book after we got back from the library so I haven’t had much of a chance to look at it.

She and I talk quite a bit about the holes we see in the reasoning of people on Facebooger. I have given up going at this directly due to the fact that people parrot the language of coherence in a confusing uninformed way.

It reminds me of Trump calling our leaders stupid. Since Trump himself says spectacularly dumb things it’s clever to lead with the very words that might accurately describe his own behavior.

I stopped by the library primarily to pick up Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. I’m almost done reading his Lies of Locke Lamora.

I purchased the ebook a while back while visiting my nephew Ben and his partner Tony. Tony reads fantasy and turned me on to this book. I was surprised to find out how long this book was when I checked out a real copy of it recently. Ebooks can be deceiving that way.

I was also happy to find out that Lynch does bring the plot to a close and not do a cliff hanger at the end of this book. I found this out reading the flyleaf of the next book. I will probably review the first book here after finishing it but will say for now that it is an uneven read, but did interest me enough to think about reading the second in the series. I think he’s a better writer than George R. R. Martin. Martin can make sentences but annoys me with his labyrinthian approach to plot piling story on story and introducing new characters.

Lynch’s prose is leaner and the story is cleaner so far.  But he does get a bit predictable. But more on that later.

I also noticed this book yesterday (I was waiting for Eileen to finishing chatting up old colleagues at the library). I recently read an article in the NYT which quoted from it and remembered the title. I read a few pages in it yesterday and it looks excellent. One of its insights is that as soon as the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, opponents of it began a campaign against it which can be traced to the recent weakening change in it the Supreme Court made. Scary stuff.

This was on the new poetry shelf. Baraka died in 2014, I checked it out primarily to read his later poetry but have followed his career all my life.

I think my oldest daughter Elizabeth has either met him or heard him lecture.

I have to admit I’m a helluva lot more interested in Shirley Jackson’s unpublished work (of which this is a volume) than Harper Lee’s.

Eileen wanted to watch the Republican debate on Thursday but couldn’t get it going online (I was in bed by then).  Yesterday morning I pulled it up on YouTube for her. Later she commented that she thought I had gone to work at the church to get away from it. There was some truth to that, but I’m also trying to get a bit ahead at work and had planned to take advantage of having a free Friday morning to choose the prelude and postlude for Aug 23. My morning was free since my sole organ student quit.

I did do some reading about the debate online and asked Eileen for her impressions. More and more I find that information presented to me in images on a screen is inadequate.

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious – The New York Times

I think Krugman’s take on this is pretty accurate. I bemoan the loss of the possibility of TV journalism. Last night, we were watching PBS Newshour. Judy Woodruff bristled when Mark Shields referred to her as an example of the liberal elite through the eyes of the brain dead conservatives. Good grief.

More and more I think Newshour lost the opportunity to restore some integrity and intelligence to TV reporting under the leadership of Woodruff and Gwen Ifill. Maybe these people represent as smart and as educated as public pundits get these days, but it’s a sad commentary from my point of view.

I tried to get Gwen Ifill’s Washington Week up on the computer before I went to bed so that Eileen could stream it.

Don Oberdorfer, 84, Top Diplomatic Reporter for Washington Post, Dies – The New

I mentioned this obit to Eileen (which I have recently linked in a blog) as an example of the previous possibility of having intelligent journalists functioning in our media. The obit describes him as “calm, knowledgeable, unbiased, armed with the right questions….” In other words everything TV journalists are not these days. Granted Oberdorfer was a print journalist and there are still some pretty good ones out there.

But as I watched the beginning of the GOP debates on YouTube, it struck me how much it functioned as spectacle emptied of content. The contestants were introduced much like super star football players. Oy vey.

Enough of that. I found myself deep into Wendell Berry’s poetry this morning. It’s a routine thing for me to read poetry in the morning.

Here are two passages that struck me.

” … when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this is
the hearts choice, not  the mind’s;
to be true to the heart’s one choice
is the long labor of the mind.”

Wendell Berry, This Day p. 142

Pondering my life I often think about the choices I have made that have led me to this point. I have made some bad choices, but they were indeed dumb and made with the heart. Now I use my brains to track down my heart and understand it as much as I can leaving aside regret since I value my living and my loved ones so much.

On p. 292, Berry ponders the afterlife. “O saints, if I am eligible for this prayer…” he begins. Then goes on to describe a Heaven that would be enough for him. One where he can revisit his life, but “redeemed of our abuse of it and one another.”

“… It would be
the Heaven of knowing again. There is no marrying
in Heaven, and I submit; even so, I would like
to know my wife again, both of us young again,
and I remembering always how I loved her
when she was old. I would like to know
my children again, all my family, all my dear ones,
to see, to hear, to hold, more carefully
than before, to study them lingeringly as one
studies old verses, committing them to heart
forever…

“A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know
by it how far I have fallen short. I have not
paid enough attention, have not been grateful
enough.”  p.292-293

I had the urge to cook yesterday. Eileen accompanied me on a little morning excursion to buy some local cheese, bread, and other ingredients to make these two recipes:

Zucchini Flan Recipe – NYT Cooking

Corn and Jalapeño Muffins Recipe – NYT Cooking

The “flan” is not what I think of as a flan. I think of that as an Hispanic desert which Eileen has made in the past. This is more like a crustless quiche.

I substituted Poblano pepper for Jalapeño since I had some aging in the fridge.

My goal was to back the Zucchini dish and get the muffins in the oven and empty and fill the dishwasher before my rehearsals.

This didn’t work out so good. It might have worked better if my oven had preheated properly. Like any good cook, the first thing I did was set the oven to its temp. But when I went to put the Zucchini dish into the oven it was cold. The pilot light had gone out.

This is particularly problematic because my oven takes a long time to heat up. So I lost a half hour there or so which caused the Zucchini to still be in the oven when it was time for me to go to rehearsal.

I did manage to get the muffins ready to go in the oven, waiting their turn before leaving.

I didn’t however get the kitchen clean at all. Eileen good naturedly picked up the slack and cleaned the kitchen and watched the dishes in the oven.

Unfortunately, the kitchen heated up as the day progressively got hotter outside. Poor Eileen!

She texted me that the next “we” want to bake, “we” could do it in the morning before she gets up and it’s cool.

I bought this cookbook as a Kindle book yesterday. It was on sale for $2.99. It’s regular price is $9.36 so I saved a bit on it. The author is opinionated and fun to read.

Howard Schultz: America Deserves a Servant Leader – The New York Times

Ironic that this article was in yesterday’s NYT. I haven’t read yet about last night’s circus of a debate. I cannot believe people are so disenfranchised with government that they would vote for someone like Donald Trump. I read yesterday that he is a “post-policy” candidate since his candidacy avoids content. He is definitely an example of the sad “cult of personality” driving so much our culture.

Reading Cicero this morning I was musing that there are many things wrong with our public leadership these days. One of them is the legal bribes of lobbying that go on and create laws that are immoral. Also I am unimpressed with the Supreme Court (especially its right wing). It saddens me that one party is convinced that the way to get more power is to limit (!) who gets to vote.

I wish that fair voting had a more non partisan effect. I think it’s part of what’s hurting us in our endeavor to be a democracy. It feels like the third wave of hate from the Civil War/Slavery debacle (The second wave being the Jim Crow, segregation thing).

As Schultz puts it: “Too many of our political leaders are putting party before country, power before principle and cynicism before civility. The common purpose that created this great nation, which has united us in difficult moments, has gone missing.”

I made pesto last night. It was quite good. Basil leaves were pretty cheap at one stand at the farmers market yesterday: $1.50 a bunch. I bought four bunches which turned out to be a generous amount to make my recipe.

The market is full of excellent seasonal foods this time of year. We have been enjoying tomatoes (heirloom variety) and other great veggies.

The NYT had two great articles with links to recipes yesterday.

Zucchini, Tomatoes and Corn: Ripe for the Cooking – The New York Times

This article links to six recipes. I don’t always follow recipes but I love to read them and think about how they apply to my ingredients. I was particularly intrigued that the author of the article had tomato salad for breakfast. Why not?

I was so inspired writing this blog that I decided to have veggies and pesto for breakfast.

Smoky, Juicy Mussels and Clams Pop on the Grill – The New York Times

This looks very interesting as well. I read these articles on my tablet but looked at them online via my laptop this morning. This article includes a short video in the online version. It had me salivating this morning before breakfast.

I also figured out how to get my tablet screen keyboard to make umlauts yesterday.

It was a personal victory. You just hold the letter and options appear to select. Cool beans.

I managed to get two months of hymns chosen yesterday. I have been behind on this for a while. I’m not only choosing hymns but am specifying where the pointed psalm can be found and recommended a specific tone for use. This is much easier than the weekly regimen of preparing the psalm from scratch. Also much less likely to result in mistakes.

I also need to begin choosing anthems for the fall. This is a parallel project to the hymn choice. I’m more likely to do hymns for the entire season (up through next Spring). I will choose anthems only up until just past Christmas.

I find this flexibility is important because I’m not sure what the choir situation will be. It seems that as a director I tend to attract the self actualizing kind of person rather than the adoring dependent kind (thank goodness). This limits recruitment a bit. I have to make it public that the choir is available if people want to make this kind of commitment to something they think is rewarding. But there are always only a few people in our community who seem at all willing to do this. Since the number is small I need to stay flexible in which anthems I choose and can’t realistically predict what the choir will be like in January 2016.

Are you asleep yet?

Trials and tribulations of the anachronistic situation of doing church music, I guess.

Speaking of this, I received some encouragement laying in bed this morning listening to an old BBC book club show on Jeanette Winterson.

I was struck by the obvious strength of her mind in the exchange between her and questioners on this show. I was impressed with her notion that imagination is more important and less limiting than our experience.

I guess I live in my imagination. Winterson says that imagination is not limited to the moment of living, the time clicking on the clock, but that it frees us up into all kinds of time. She suggests that this might be thought of as “real time.”

I like that quite a bit. Predictably I spent some time this morning trying to find books by Winterson in my library. They weren’t in the “W” section but they were grouped together. I know I have more by her. They will probably surface as I  continue to organize my books.

Yesterday I put the electric piano on the porch. I’m planning on shifting some shelves to the spot where it and my useless record player were sitting in my living room. The electric piano can’t stay on the porch in the winter (due to lack of heating) but by then I think I will move it to the master bedroom. I don’t want to put it there because we are expecting company (daughters and significant others in August).

I like having it somewhere where I can play it day or night. You know, escape into the real time of the my imagination.

I continue to deal with my moods.  Yesterday Eileen and Barb gently urged me to join them a beach trip despite the fact that I had been saying I wasn’t going to go.

Finally my better self won out and I joined them, grateful that they had thought to reinvite me just before they left.

I sat on the beach and read MIcheal Grant’s introduction to his Cicero: Selected Works. Cicero seems to be an antidote to Facebooger for me. At least all the unthinking hate, ignorance and reductivism anyway.

I’ll try not to bore you too much with insights from Cicero. But Grant says that Cicero’s insight that “virtue joins [humans] to God” can be boiled down to two concepts:

“all human beings, however humble, must count for something, must have some inherent value in themselves”

“secondly, this spark of divinity supplies an unbreakable bond of kinship between one [human] and another, irrespective of state, race, or caste, in a universal Brotherhood of [Humans].” Michael Grant, introduction to Cicero: Selected Works p 12

Writing in 1958, Grant does not neglect to mention Cicero’s attitude toward slaves in a footnote to this passage saying that while Cicero accepted slavery as a societal institution he worked toward humane treatment of them.

Probation May Sound Light, but Punishments Can Land Hard – The New York Time

This is a long sad story illustrating how bad some of our law are.

Northern Ireland Town Embraces Beckett Festival – The New York Times

Yay Beckett!