I finished Tar Baby by Morrison yesterday. Next in order is Beloved. I may have a copy of that at home. Despite its flaws Tar Baby is quite good. I found myself looking up the Uncle Remus story onine to clarify some of my understanding of the book.

I took my used worn copy of  Burgess’s book on James Joyce, Here Comes Everybody: An introduction to James Joyce for the ordinary reader along with me to the ocean yesterday. Reading it inspired me to download pretty much Joyce’s  entire opus mostly for free while we were sitting in the Dollar Store parking lot (we needed some sand toys for the beach).

I have read a lot of  Burgess and Joyce. Yesterday I dipped into Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a sort of palliative to the whole family experience because like my grandson I am an introvert.

I identify with both  Burgess and Joyce. Burgess has this to say about Joyce: ” He has left the church, but he cannot leave it alone.” I relate.

I did manage to get a chance to romp in the ocean with my son and grandkids. That was fun. The waves were strong enough that some people were surfing near us. Savannah used a small board to repeatedly surf laying down.

If this post seems disjunct I lost most of a previous one with my inept tablet skills. Watching paragraphs disappear is discouraging. I almost blew the whole thing off but instead forced myself to do this much.

It looks like my readership has fallen off. This makes sense. I’m  only writing about my vacation, can’t seem to put up links, and am having difficulty embedding images. The latter two are due to my lack of skill working with my tablet.

I am pages away from finishing reading Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. It’s an odd, unevenly written book. There are flashes of brilliance both in the plotting and the amazing prose.

Here’s an example:

 At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens—that letting go—you let go because you can. The world will always be there—while you sleep—when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there  is reason to wake. Toni Morrison, TAR BABY , p. 242

There are passages, however, I think needed to be cut or rewritten. Occasionally she weirdly anthropomorphizes plants and insects, suddenly ascribing to them feelings and thoughts. These passages might work better if there were more of them. Instead the reader has to change gears with the switch in prose style from narrative to wispy fantasy maybe five or six times.

Morrison herself was an editor before she began her career as a writer. Maybe her publisher was cowed into bad editting. Who knows?

Despite this small weakness, it’s a helluva tour de force of thick meaning and story that pulled me in and continues to resonate in my thoughts. I’m planning on trying to finish it today despite plans to make a beach trip.

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I finished reading Kafka  by David Zane Mairowitz and R. Crumb. Although they share the byline it does appear from the copyrights  that Mairowitz wrote the text and Crumb did the illustrations.

One of cool things about this book is that Crumb gets a chance to provide illustrations for Kafka’s major works as Mairowitz both quotes and retells them.

I have read a lot but not all of Kafka.

This book inspires me to go back to him.

Last night we attended a outdoor free concert of a   Beatles cover band.

They were a classy little act.

Their first set they did early Beatles and we’re dressed in matching appropriate outfits. In the second set, they were dressed in Sargent Pepper’s outfits and did later tunes.

We sat  miles back from them and  could not really see. Nicholas sat with his eyes closed looking like a typical fifteen year old mortified to be seen with his family in public but sat up and watched and snacked for the second. The younger two of our entourage were game but restless. I did wonder how many of the gathered group were hearing most of the songs for  the first time; songs most of which I remember from when they were first released. Today is Eileen’s 63rd  birthday. She is making breakfast for everyone as I write. Another  beautiful day in paradise in Califirnia.

My body refuses to completely adapt to the time change and persists in being jet-lagged. It’s a familiar pattern for me to be up alone in the early morning quiet. Despite being temporarily  uprooted from my normal environs, I am pathetically  replicating my usual routline of coffee, Greek study, reading poetry (retaining the authors I have been reading by finding their work online: Wendell  Berry and Chaucer).

I didn’t bring any McCulloch with me to read but found a charming interview with him online this morning.

I did bring Hindmarsh’s The Evangelical Conversion Narrative which I continue to find weirdly compelling in the way it is helping me understand my upbringing in a “conversion” Christian church. Besides it’s a library copy of the book that I am not planning on purchasing only reading and taking notes on.

Yesterday we drove into Los Angeles and visited The Last Bookshop. It is a charmingly defiant  creation of a store. Self consciously post-Internet it combines experiences that cannot be accessed via screens in a manner that I found relaxing and enjoyable. These experiences include many whimsical three dimensional abstract collages of book related themes, used books priced reasonably mixed with new books, and scattered old wire paperback racks full of treasures of worn recognizable titles that tempt one to purchase them if only to hold them in your hands once again, all housed in a labrythian site that has many rooms some of which seem to be ancient vaults.

Then there is the second floor which is an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure with an art gallery, a dyed wool shop and a zillion used books all a dollar each.

Before going upstairs, I found a rare old copy of Anthony Burgess’s book on James Joyce called Here Comes Everybody, a collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories and a 2007 book on Kafka illustrated by R.  Crumb.

We were just about to go back downstairs when Eileen discovered two shelves of sheet music in pristine shape. Nicholas and I went a little nuts and went through it as quickly as possible. We found treasures which I will write about later. Now it’s time to stop blogging and do some serious goofing off.

One aspect of my annual California visits is the ‘jet lag.’ Last night, I was exhausted by 8:30 PM local time. This was probably exacerbated by the trip here which was a bit of a marathon. I did manage some time on the treadmill, so that’s good, I guess.

I’m discovering that there are some frustrating drawbacks to the Chrome Android mobile browser. Every time I go from tab to tab,the new tab reloads. When this is combined with WordPress’s annoying reediting which delete all my hard returns, the result is some of the stuff you have been seeing here: the lack of space between images and text. Or at least that’s how it looks on my screens.

I had the idea of moving between two browsers in the hopes of avoiding this, so I installed a second browser (Firefox Mozilla). Unfortunately this didn’t stop Google from reloading when I went back and forth between browsers. Sigh.

There’s more to getting proficient at my tablet than learning to type on my screen (although I am getting slightly better at that).

Neither David or Cynthia has to work today so we will get to spend more time with the grown ups. Nicholas has his last day of Summer Physical Education today. Yesterday I removed a broken string from his piano which was causing buzzing. He didn’t say much about that but I thought it may the piano less annoying to play.

We’ll that’s all for today’s blog. I think I’m going to skip putting pictures in it even though that is often the fun part for me. More tomorrow. Probably.

  Eileen and I have been coming to California to visit the fam annually for quite a few years now. It’s always interesting. I remember listening to the radio in the early morning hours and being startled when the announcer mentioned the Inland Empire. Wow. This phrase rang out oddly in post 9/11 America. Little did I know that it preceded the current rhetoric at the time about the USA as cruel Crusader against the unbelieving world (i. e. Muslims and other non Christians).

Still it startles me when I  hear or read it.

When  I  try to wrap my head around Southern California, one association that is strong is the work of Raymond Carver.   I’m not sure when I first became aware of his work. It may well have been after seeing the movie “Short  Cuts.”

I admire the movie as a stand alone piece.

It draws together Carver plots from several of his short stories. At some point I read  Carver’s entire opus including his poetry.

His bizarre and uniquely American  (and specifically Southern Californian) take on 20th century life is amazing. It provides a helpful corrective to the noise of American consumerism and the rampant automobile culture that dominates the L.A. area especially.

Then there’s John Muir He was an early American environmentalist and co-founder of the Sierra  Club. He is also author of some lyrical books about the natural terrain in this area.

Years ago I found his The Mountains of California  in a free e-book.  My son’s home nestles in the midst of some of the humbler examples of there mountains.

Seeing the mountains of this area is always something I look forwand to when we visit. I am exhausted after yesterday’s marathon trip. After spending the day in stuffy airports and airplanes it was restful to sit by the pool here in the cool Californian night.

So we slept in and missed our flight to California. We woke up just about an hour and fifteen minutes before the flight left. We madly got up and left, but of course we didn’t arrive in time. Plus I forgot my phone, my glasses and my hair brush. After figuring out that we would have to spend the rest of the day on standby in airports we drove back to Holland and retrieved the items I forgot.

As orf this post Eileen and I are sitting and waiting for a gate desk to open to see if we can get on a flight to Dallas. From there we will try to get a flight to  California. It’s going to be a long day.

On the upside I am getting better at using the onscreen keyboard on my tablet. Also I have good access to the New York Times and plenty of reading material on my tablet. I also bought a couple of real books. I don’t really mind delays like this especially when Eileen is with me. She is an excellent travelling companion!

Yesterday, I  asked the new Church Administrator if she had  a tablet. I was wondering if  she touch-typed on the screen. She does and she does. This inspired me to learn to touch type on my tablet. My administrator and I agreed that all it would take would be for me to practice. So, this morning for the first time I am combining touch typing and the Google microphone function on the screen keyboard. Speaking is obviously much faster. But one has to find a spot one can do this alone so one doesn’t feel too silly. I’ve just spoken this entire paragraph. But I had to go back and put caps at the beginning of most of the sentences. Since I am just planning on taking only my tablet with me on vacation, I want to practice using it for the blog and for typing notes today. This should show me how easy or hard it is to do it that way. This morning I figured out how to select text using the tablet keyboard as interface. Also how to copy and paste both texts and images. So I can do all this now but it takes me much more time since I am still learning. My fingers are old and fat so working on screen is not easy but with patience I can usually convince my tablet to do what I want.

It also helps to put the tablet on a solid surface and tilt it slightly.

Today Eileen and I have a ton of things to do to get ready to leave tomorrow a for California. At this point I’m planning to blog on vacation using this silly tablet. But we’ll see how that works out.

Eileen, Mom and I managed to figure out all her passwords that I will need to use her Ipad to help my students explore possibilities of reading music on it. I put this all aside until I return from California.

Eileen and I had a nice relaxed chat with my beautiful daughter Sarah yesterday. I managed to use my tablet, Eileen her phone, and Sarah her Ipad to do so. Sarah was in Oxford for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland.

On our first trip to England she and I arrived in Oxford late one evening by train and Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was on our mind immediately.

We managed to get kicked out of the courtyard on which the window of Dodgson’s Oxford rooms looked.

Amy and I nailed the Mozart violin movements we played for yesterday’s prelude at church. I found it a bit confusing that people (acolytes I think) were standing nearby and talking loudly. That combined with the fact that musicians from the college were present whom I think see me as a hack produced a sort of “fuck it” attitude in my performance that actually helped it.

When I suggested to Amy that the Largo and Allegro of Mozart’s K. 454 would be a good prelude, she was a bit taken aback. Isn’t it a bit too “party” for church? She wondered. I told her it was exactly appropriate with it’s Mozartian operatic joie de vivre. And indeed that’s how it sounded to me yesterday.

I was thrown off balance because we received some scattered applause after it. I don’t remember this happening before. Plus I had the impressions we weren’t being listened to due to the loud talkers nearby. I told Amy it must have been her playing that inspired the applause since it had never happened before. Heh.

If you’re curious which Mozart sonata this is. Here’s a link to a lovely recording on YouTube. Amy and I played the first two movements of this.

Eileen is off to Whitehall today. She’s lunching with a friend she knew in elementary school and dropping by to say hi to her Mom and sister Nancy.

I’m meeting with Jordan VanHemert the sax player. Believe it or not after exercising last night, I went to church to pick some material to adapt with the idea of using it with Jordan at church after I return from California.

That’s next on my agenda this morning.

My brother generously added me to his CrashPlan back up service and I managed to get that running yesterday. My plan is to leave it running while in California (it will take about that long to back up all my files). I was very happy that I managed to connect my exterior hard drive to this back up. That’s where I have been keeping pictures and recordings (and other files).

On Being White …. And Other Lies by James Baldwin pdf

James Baldwin brilliant 1984 article.

Both of  my students have Ipads. They have asked me how to read music on them, but of course since I have an Android based tablet I’m not sure what to tell them.

My Mom has an Ipad sitting on her dresser where it has been untouched for a while. My daughter, Elizabeth, gave it to her. Mom did use it for a bit, but stopped.

Before I bought my tablet I asked her if I could use it, she said no. That seemed fair to me. It was her tablet.

But since my students were interested in learning and I was pretty sure that it couldn’t be that complicated I thought I would poke around on my Mom’s Ipad during my daily visit to her.

That’s what I was doing yesterday, explaining to her that I was trying to figure it out a bit to explain some stuff to my students. “Take it with you,” she said.

I was surprised. I told Mom that I had asked her before if I could use it and she had said no. She said to me that she could always get it back from me if she wanted it.

I thanked her. I asked her if she remembered where she got it. She did not. I told her Elizabeth had purchased it for her. I also told her that if she could get back in the habit of using it, we could access more books since she is limited to large print in real books. The Ipad would enable her to read any book by enlarging the print.

Talking to an elderly person about tech can be tricky. At this stage of the game I’m trying to watch out for my Mom’s quality of life. It seems to be pretty good for her. She spends her days eating Hershey bars and reading large print books I bring her from the library and purchase for her online (with her money).

Since her last hospitalization Eileen and/or I visit her daily. She doesn’t seem to need us to be around very long, but does seem to value our daily hug. That’s easy.

Introducing or reintroducing tech into her life might not be all that helpful or comfortable to her. It’s not terribly likely she will start using her Ipad again. But I do know that it would open up some books for her that she would like that are not in large print.

I brought the Ipad home and taught it to log on my wifi. Unfortunately it needs an Icloud password.

I will have to get some passwords from Mom before I can figure out how my students can use it to read music on their tablet in a manner similar to what I’ve been doing.

What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson? – The New York Times

Yesterday was the fourth of course. Facebooger filled up with weird jingoistic stuff. The fireworks have been going off here for days culminating in what sounded like a war zone last night until after midnight.

I’m not sure how people are connecting to the idea of the USA as a unified country at this time of such bitter, angry division.

I like the article quoted above mostly because of this sentence which seems to address patriotism in a clear and helpful way.

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.

Finished reading the first 591 pages of Rollin Smith’s Vierne bio this morning. The rest of the book is a catalog of the themes in his organ work and nine appendices most of which I will not read. I will photocopy the two appendices which contain lists of errors in his published symphonies and the 24 Pièces de Fantasie for future reference. I found some missing accidentals in his Communion op. 8, but I didn’t see any corrections for it in Smith’s book.

I will be returning the Vierne bio to the Hope College Library before we take off for California next Wednesday. I interlibrary loaned a book recently to read an essay by Diarmaid MacCulloch. It came yesterday and I’m hoping to read the essay before Wednesday.

I was charmed into pursuing this essay after MacCulloch wrote in a footnote that he speculates “irresponsibly” in it.

The essay is entitled, “The Latitude of the Church of England.”

I am expecting some interesting speculation about how James I and his court might possibly have been secretly members of a Christian heretical sect called “Family of Love” (also known as “Familists”) which specialized in continuing to give the appearance of being good C of E members while secretly believing lots of weird shit.

I have decided not to take my laptop on the trip to California. I think I can use my tablet for my needs. The main draw back of the tablet being that I can’t type fluently on its screen. But the main thing I type is this blog so I think that will probably work out okay.

I continue to find the tablet very useful. Yesterday after giving a piano lesson on the drive home (only messing with at the stoplights!!) I managed to download the piece my student is playing and put it in my music reader. Very cool.

Eileen and I are madly trying to get the house in shape for a visit from my grandson, Nicholas. He will be flying back with us for a week visit in Michigan.

Finished Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison last night. It is an extremely strong piece of writing. It tells a vigorous story with interesting characters with names like Macon Dead, Pilate Dead (a woman), Milkman Dead and Guitar.

The story held me right up until the ending which seemed weaker than the rest of the book.

It begins with a startling scene of a man who has left a suicide note and is making preparations to jump of a building. This jump is witnessed by important characters in the book and is a seminal event in the book. Milkman (the main character) has a fetish about flying.

His mother goes into labor of his birth at the moment the man jumps off the building. At the same time, Pilate (whose name we learn later but is unmistakable in this scene) begins singing a song that ends up being significant to the plot of the book.

Sugarman done fly away
Sugarman done gone
Sugarman cut across the sky
Sugarman gone home

O Sugarman don’t leave me here..

This book reminds me of the vigorous prose and stories of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison.

Morrison is obviously conscious of these influences but easily uses them and remolds them into her own voice and her own stories.

This book is one of those books that I will keep thinking about for a long time. I seem to be reading Morrison’s opus in order. Next  is Tar Baby.

I was surprised to find out I’m almost done with the Vierne bio I have been reading.

This is a very long piece of scholarship. I’m currently on page 570. There are only 591 pages in the text proper, but there are another 200 pages or so of appendices and bibliography. I keep renewing Hope College’s copy. Done with it soon.

Don’t Believe In Evolution? Try Thinking Harder : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

What interested me about this article was the tip off that all people have a tendency to need to think harder. Specifically factors that hold us back are

1. we tend to prefer explanations that offer certainty

2. we tend to prefer explanations that offer a sense of purpose for living

3. we tend to prefer explanations that offer a sense of purpose of the design of the natural world

4. we have an easier time wrapping our heads around theories with clear boundaries

Fires in Black Churches, Possibly Caused by Arson, in Ohio, Georgia, Tenne

I will be curious to see if any of these fires are actually a result of intentional anti-black terrorism. I think the news cycle is working against keeping a clear head about stuff like this. So far I have only read that 2 of 7 or so fires were arson. These instances have not been confirmed acts of hate. The sped up access of events everywhere via the internet can give a confused picture of what’s going on. How many buildings burn in a week in the US? in the world? How many churches? Are there stats like that? Anyway, I think it’s a bit too soon to assume we are witnessing a backlash just yet. Not that is unthinkable by any means.

My self installation kit for my upgraded cable (Xfinity/Comcast) arrived Monday. I set it aside and finally approached it yesterday afternoon. The only reason I subscribed to an upgrade was that it offered double the internet speed for another $10 a month.

I opened the box and read the instructions which were simple. Unfortunately they involved using a TV. We are ready to toss our TV since we do not use it. I restrained from getting rid of it since the sales person told me I would need it to activate my service. Reading over the material I couldn’t quite understand how I would retain my wifi modem service.

I began looking online for the answer to this question. Several times online chat people from the company seemed to be ready for questions. But when I tried to respond the chat interface went into a loop and never resolved.

Finally I logged on to my Comcast website and started poking around. This time the live chat worked. “Live” chat these days seems to be very canned.

I had trouble getting the robot/person to understand my question. They kept responding with canned phrases about  helping me and how excited I will be about my service.

Finally my laptop battery gave out suddenly. It has been doing this lately with what seems like no warning. More on this later. I was trying to revive it  when my cell phone rang. I was surprised that the person on the other end answered to the robot/person i.d. of the chat.

While she and I continued our online chat live. she continuing to misunderstand my question, I idly did a speed test of my connection. It came up around 40 MPS which is roughly double its usual speed.

At this point, I thanked the service rep and told her I was sorry to have bothered her because my internet speed was apparently activated.

At no point in my conversations with these people do I think they understood that I was not going to us my Cable TV despite the many times I told them this. The original sales person told me I would need to activate my new service, but this only applied to the fucking Cable TV. It seems they could not conceive that I wasn’t going to use my Cable.

Sigh.

But now it works and that’s good I guess.

Unfortunately last night my little laptop which I use the hell out of gave off foreboding rattling sounds. Mechanical rattling sounds. This can’t be good. It happened again this morning. Ay yi yi. I like the fact that this laptop was an early version of the Windows 8 and does not have a touch screen. Judging from the frustrating intermittent functioning of my larger, newer laptop, this lack of touch screen speeds up the whole computer and makes its easier for me to use.

Both Eileen and I regularly are frustrated by the hiccuping and slowness of our big fancier laptop which we use basically to watch online TV and I use to listen to music.

I will miss this laptop if it dies. But at least these days a lot of my stuff is stored online. I worry about the little exterior hard drive where I store music and pictures. I really need to back that up.

This stuff makes me crazy.

I was amused to discover the word, “steven,” has some meanings I did not know about.

In his poem, “The Book of the Duchess,” Chaucer suffers from insomnia at the beginning the story. He turns to a book to read. Inspired by the story in which a god makes one of the characters fall asleep, Chaucer sleeps and dreams a wonderful dream which begins with the singing of birds on his roof.

Beginning at line 290 of the poem, he describes the music of the birds at length in beautiful poetry (link to poem online).  Lines 305 – 308:

Som high, and al of oon acord.
To telle shortly, att oo word,
Was never herd so swete a steven
But hyt had be a thyng of heven —

jupe translation

Some high and all of one accord
to tell shortly, at one word
was never heard so sweet a STEVEN
But it had been a thing of heaven.

This sent me to my OED to discover that my name means sound and even at times the sound of music. How cool is that?

supreme court decision on same sex marriage pdf

Marcia Coyle mentioned that the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage was not only readable but worth reading. I still haven’t made all the way through, but I’m surprised how right she is so far.

The complete guide to getting the most out of your summer vegetables – Quartz

I like this picture. I seduced me into clicking on the above link and learning some shit.

John Roberts, the Umpire in Chief – The New York Times

Some interesting analysis prior to this week’s final rulings. Some good comments in the comment section (I usually click on the NYT picks to narrow it down a bit when I read the comments).

Harold Battiste, Musician, Mentor and Arranger, Dies at 83 – The New York Times

This obit sent me scurrying to listen to Dr. John’s first album on Spotify.

Apparently Battiste helped Malcolm John Rebennack (Dr John) develop his New Orleans Voo Doo persona. Plus Battiste also helped Sonny and Cher develop their music and image.

The Fight for Health Care Isn’t Over – The New York Times

The many ways the right wing can continue to attack the ACA.

Facebook Rainbow Profile Photos: The Latest Big Data Experiment? – The Atlantic

This was my favorite anti same sex meme on Facebooger. Interesting article in the Atlantic on the compiling of stats of Facebooger behavior.

The Terror – The New York Times

Junot Diaz discusses fears he has experienced.

NPR Music’s 25 Favorite Albums Of 2015 (So Far) : NPR

I have been spotifying these albums. I mention it because I am finding myself falling more and more out of love with current popular music I run across. I like the Alabama Shakes and Bjork (who made the list). I was listening to NPR in the dark in the morning recently before getting up and was appalled at what music is being reviewed. It’s driving me deeper into classical music. Bartok, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Froberger, Frescobaldi. Fuck the duck.

My Murdered Cousin Had a Name – The New York Times

A little heartbreak of a column by Charles Blow.

How Television Won the Internet – The New York Times

I don’t think this author gets it quite right (see the comments for some serious shredding of his arguments). But I like this sentence: “Television is colonizing the Internet.”

The last few mornings I have been reading poems by Wendell Berry from his volume, This Day: Collected and New Sabbaths. The book was a Christmas gift from my brother, Mark (thank you, Mark!). The day I opened the gift I accidentally tore the cover. I was mortified since it is such a beautiful book and immediately hid it from the rest of the people in the room. Despite this, I picked it up this week and started reading.

I have read all of the poems from 2012, the last section in the book. I am curious how sane people like Berry view things from the vantage point of being alive today.

I also read the “Preface” and “Introduction.” I was amused to see Berry commenting on the word, “spirit,” which reminded me of yesterday’s blog on Merton’s sentence on art. I am still reading Merton but finding him less entrancing, more dated. Berry (and another writer whom I will mention in minute) seems a bit of an antidote.

Berry says this about “spirit.”

“In the earlier poems [of the collection] I used the words “spirit” and “wild” conventionally and complacently. Later I became unhappy with both. I resolved first to avoid “spirit.” This was not because I think the word itself is without meaning, but because I could no longer tolerate the dualism, often construed in sermons and such as a contest, of spirit and matter. I saw that once this division was made, spirit invariably triumphed to the detriment, to the actual and often irreparable damage, of matter and the material world.”

“Dispensing with the word “spirit” clears the way to imagine a live continuity, in fact and value, between what we call “spiritual” and we call “material.”

Good point. Not sure how this connects to my little story about all music being “spiritual.” To a musician like myself who is bound to music as an action Berry’s duality might not obtain with quite the same force it does to him. Underlying his poems and stories is always his concern with our lack of stewardship of the “material world.”

Earlier in the preface, Berry indicates that these “poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors. A reader will like them best, I think who reads them in similar circumstances—at least in a quiet room.” He goes on, “They would be most favorably heard if read aloud into a kind of quietness that is not afforded by any public place.”

This reminded me of my practice of reading poetry aloud. I haven’t been reading much poetry lately. So this morning I read Berry aloud in to my “quiet room” and early morning solitude.”

At the end of the introduction, Berry comments that his “thoughts have returned again and again to the practice devotion to Nature in the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope.”

All of these poets are ones I admire. I had the impulse to pull out Chaucer. This morning I read several pages aloud of his poem “The Book of Duchess.” This is a larger poem and not from the Canterbury tales.

The mention of Chaucer always seems to evoke a dusty, stiff academic atmosphere. But then reading him one remembers the strong charming personality of the poet that seems to shine through all his work.

For sorwful ymagynacioun

Ys alway hooly in my mynde

from The Book of Duchess by Chaucer, 14-15

This edition has copious helpful information in it about the poetry. A footnote informs the reader about Chaucer use of the word ymagynacioun: “Jehan le Bel, a contemporary of Chaucer… explains imagination as the faculty which retains what is perceived by the senses; here equivalent to memories, thoughts.” from  Chaucer’s Major Poetry, Albert C. Baugh, editor

I’ve been reading Merton’s collection of essays, Disputed Questions (1960). The last two I have read have left me a bit cold. They seem lodged in a moment of time that has passed. Even though I love Merton I found them a bit muddled and dated in their grappling with Communism and the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

I am reading this collection because it contains an essay that was influential in shaping my thinking for years: “Sacred Art and the Spiritual Life.” I think I have mellowed over the years. This is not surprising. Merton has a phrase in this essay that stuck with me since I first read it. “One does not offer lollipops to a starving man in a totalitarian death camp.”
There was a time when I could tell you what I thought the modern “lollipops” of art were. I can remember struggling to perform “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” at a funeral. I did not see the tradition in the song. I heard it as a bit of trivial art. Now I do not.

I can remember riding in a car with one of the editors of the Episcopalian Hymnal 1982 (Alec Wyton). I told him that he and the other editors had included music in it that was insipid (lollipops) and that he could avoid their use at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But those of us in the parishes would be forced to use them. Now I am very happy to use anything in the extended resources of the Episcopal Church.

I say all this because this morning I read a sentence in Merton’s essay on Sacred Art which got me to thinking.

“The work of art must be genuinely spiritual, truly traditional and artistically alive.” Merton

It struck me how this sums up for me neatly some things I think about in a way Merton may or may not have approved.

spiritual

Not too long ago I was hired to play for a local Winter Solstice party. The giver of the party was a self conscious anti-church atheist from what I gathered. Kind of a hippy dude. At one point the group was talking and he directly addressed me with a question, “Is the music we have asked you to play spiritual?” To his apparent surprise (since he had me pegged as a church guy who did church music) I replied automatically, “All music is spiritual.”
This even surprised me, but I think it said something that I may think true at a very basic level.

I think of spiritual partly as authentic human meaning. Definitely music is that for me.

traditional

I have been disappointed to find so many musicians stuck in a narrow place in music. I am thinking here of people who are entrenched in popular musics. Musicians who don’t read music. Musicians who are interested only in the music they are skilled at. Musicians who ignore music history.

I think its important to widen ones horizon. Personal and professional curiosity is for me one of the joys of life. To ignore vast swathes of one’s own area limits possibilities tremendously.

alive

Conversely, one needs to be aware of the entire present moment. I always thought that’s what Zappa meant by including Edgar Varese’s quote on most of his album covers: “The Present Day Composers refuses to die.” Probably not, but I still maintain a vital interest in music that is being written now.

I also think this applies in church music which brings me back to Merton’s essay on Art and Spirituality. I lurk on many Facebooger church music and organist groups. While there are many commentors who surprise me by sharing my own eclecticism, there are many others who trouble me with a narrowness that confuses me.

At Obama’s funeral speech, the AME organist apparently punctuated the speech like a sermon with organ music. There were comments on Facebooger about the lack of inappropriateness of this. This struck me as possibly narrowness on the part of commentors.

There are parishioners at my church who have said to me how they appreciate singing hymns from their old denomination. Often these hymns are tunes that at one point in my life I would have shuddered to include in liturgy. At another point in my life, they were what we were singing regularly in my Dad’s church. At this point in my life I find it satisfying to include them and other kinds of music with as much stylistic and vigorous integrity and interpretation I can muster.

It feels more alive.

I like to drink. I was raised in an emphatically teetotalering environment (nice word, eh?…. teetotalering). I know this has something to do with my pleasure in booze. I myself was pretty much a teetotaler until my early twenties. I remember after I had left my first wife romanticizing about Dylan Thomas and drinking and drowning my immature troubles with whisky pretty much in Thomas’s honor.

Thus I developed a taste for hard liquor. I had a doctor years later ask me about the drinking. “I fell into the habit around the time of my divorce,” I remember telling him.

But it has been something I have enjoyed over the years and at the same time wondering when it would take a serious toll on my health. I think I read where Anthony Burgess pondered late in life that he was going to have to give it up for health reasons.

Anyway, yesterday morning I had a particularly high blood pressure reading. These have been happening in the last six months. But usually if I take it again within a half hour or so, the reading falls back down to acceptable levels. Yesterday this did not happen for the first time. Also, the scales told me I was gaining far too much weight.

I have been having a martini and a few glasses of wine almost every night for a while. This leads to snacking. Snacking I think is a big part of my weight gain, since my vegetarian diet is not particularly high in calories.

Yesterday Eileen and I were looking at the calories in our snack food (mostly crackers and peanut butter, sometimes cheeses).  The crackers we eat do have tons of calories.

So, if I lay off the booze for a while, I am hoping it will be easier not to snack at night. This might help me to lose some weight and bring the blood pressure down in my aging body.

This also will probably help me sleep better, since I routinely awake after the alcohol wears off and have to fall back asleep.

Who knows? It’s worth a try.

I finished reading Sula by Toni Morrison last night. Before turning to her novel, I read a short story by Harlan Ellison.  Ellison’s hallmark is to try and shock the reader in some way. The short story I read was”The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” in his Deathbird Stories. It uses the famous case of Kitty Genovese.

She was murdered on the streets of New York in 1964 as many of her neighbors supposedly looked on in apathy of fascination. Ellison posits that his similar incident was part of some gruesome evolving new urban supernatural religion that thrives on watching violence.

It’s kind of brutal.

But in her novel Sula Morrison makes him look gentle. Sula is a grim American story of two black women who were childhood friends. It tells what happens to them and their families.

The story of their lives is full of grim startling mayhem and rings brutally true. It is a disturbing sad novel. 

As I was finishing it up last night, I felt a difference in quality between it and the glib sci fi shock that Ellison seemed to be going for. Morrison’s work was disturbing but much more satisfactory as a work of art to me.

MARGARET ATWOOD WRITES FOR THE FUTURE

The theme of this week’s On The Media show is “Digital Dark Age.” It is a frightening idea that that we are vulnerable to the eradication of the knowledge and information we now store and access digitally. If it were to all go away, we would be back in a significantly nontech world.

Who better to ask about this than Margaret Atwood. Brooke Gladstone interviews her about a specific project of writing a secret book to be published in a 100 years, but Atwood is great to listen to for anything.

Last night I realized that I wanted to read the next novel by Morrison after Sula. I poked around and found Song of Solomon hiding in my mess of books.

After listening to On the Media this morning, I thought that having a hard copy of something I wanted to read next might be handy if the Digital Dark Age were to come this week.

Happy thoughts from Jupe on Sunday morning.

The startling turn of events this week culminated yesterday in the Supreme Court ruling on the legality of same sex marriage yesterday. The family of the victims of Charleston race killings displayed astounding courage and character as they publicly forgave the murderer of their dear ones. I call this walking the walk instead of just talking the talk. And the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act  happened. Combined with yesterday’s ruling this all left me with a dizzy sense of history happening before my eyes.

Not everyone noticed apparently. As I took my pizza from the pizza guy last night he asked how I was. I said, ecstatic. Why, he asked. The Supreme Court rulings. He said, How so? I tried to fill him in a bit but was a bit taken aback that he had no idea what I was talking about. Blissful ignorance, I guess.

For what it’s worth he was a person of color with several pierced ear rings. I know. I know. It’s superficial to think that would have anything to with anything. But it was a cautionary reminder to me that people I might think would have some awareness of issues like race and LGBT stuff might not.

I had a pleasant rehearsal with my friend, Jordan VanHemert who I know reads this blog from time to time (Hi Jordan!). We ran through a little Sax version of Vaughan Williams organ piece, Rhosymedre. It’s basically a straight transcription of the organ piece giving the sax the important lines. it sounds cool. Jordan is an amazing player. He has a gig tonight.

We then read through a couple movements of Franck’s A Major Violin Sonata again transcribed for Sax. Wow. Some difficult stuff for both players. I had trouble keeping up, but it was fun. And I liked the piece, especially the last movement. Jordan said he thought the piece was one of Franck’s best. He could be right.

My organ student was having physical problems yesterday and asked if instead of our weekly lesson we could sit and talk music and tech. I said yes but I wasn’t going to take her forty bucks for doing so. It’s probably silly of me not to charge her but I know myself well enough that I would probably bullshit for free about this topic.

She is a former teacher at Hope and has managed to retain her faculty online privileges. I urged her to check out the resources available to her this way. Specifically Naxos and the New Groves Dictionary of Music. Also the International Music Score Library Project is a great resource. She asked if she could walk through downloading a piece to my tablet’s music reader. So we did that.

Another good day in the life of Jupe.

Putin Breaks Silence With Call to Obama Touching on Ukraine and ISIS – NYT

Putin called Obama this week. I have been watching Putin and Xi Jinping. The world stage is fluid right now, to say the least. Russia and China are doing some weird shit (as is the USA). Like a lot of countries, both China and Russia use the USA as a whipping boy to seduce their populations into compliance with public policies. It looks like Putin lost the last round with NATO but only slightly and is still causing a lot of concern and confusion with their actions in Ukraine.

China Aims to Move Beijing Government Out of City’s Crowded Core – The New York Times

Kind of odd that China is moving the Beijing Government out of Beijing proper to make more room for the National government. We went to the Forbidden City when we visited Beijing. The Government headquarters are right there. Interesting to see China designing new cities.

Burundi Students Enter U.S. Embassy as Political Tensions Escalate – NYT

So Burundi’s President is ignoring its constitution and running for a third time. That’s what these students were protesting. Odd image of people clamoring over and under walls  of the embassy to get away from the police.

I follow news events pretty closely.

Yesterday was unusual in that there were reports that did not depress me.

The Roberts Court’s Reality Check – The New York Times

This article by Linda Greenhouse summarizes what happened in the Supreme Court’s ACA decision yesterday. Although she is supposedly retired, this article appeared on http://www.nytimes.com/. I know I link up a lot from the New York Times and they only allow so many free articles a month to non subscribers. I don’t know if the nytimes.com blogs (of which Greenhouse’s insightful article and artful take down of Scalia) is one, but it’s worth a read.

I was surprised by this decision. I think the Supreme Court is very partisan with its right wing majority. I lost respect for the conservatives when they handed the presidency to George W. Bush violating their own basic philosophy of the importance of states rights (Florida to be specific) to hand the Republicans an election they actually lost by count.

oba

So i thought that the rich secure justices of our supreme court, so out of touch with reality, would not hesitate to throw the country into turmoil by striking down our functioning health care law.

As one cartoon put it:

But I was wrong.

And I am very glad.

Charleston Families Hope Words Endure Past Shooting – The New York Time

I’m not sure people realize how earth shattering this story is. In an age of uneducated, unprincipled clamoring Americans, a handful of black people quietly showed us what we need: integrity and true grace under pressure by forgiving the racist who killed thier loved ones. Amazing and encouraging.

I recently private messaged a reactionary family member. He had complained publically on Facebooger that the news had left him bewildered and upset. I took the oppurtunity to ask him privately how accessed the news. His response was unclear and did not exactly answer the question.

I think he like many people accesses stuff online (that’s what he said, although he did not mention any particular sources that he consults). Watching what people pass on and their presumptions, I am convinced that they are not adept at understanding bias and the need for reporting and information in order to understand our world.

I’m not sure that they do what I do when I run across a story on a web site I do not recognize. I instantly check the site’s own “about” section for stated objectives. I look at their funding if reported on their site as it often is.  I also google some of the important writers and funders if I don’t recognize them. I compare what they are saying to journalistic sources like the New York Times and the Guardian and others.

This is a far cry from the polemic and noise of many if not most web sites trying to get clicks and shape opinion.

Fooled by ‘The Onion’: 9 Most Embarrassing Fails – The Daily Beast

I love it when a public figure is caught out (as they are pretty regularly) using a bogus source. It’s easy to do especially if you don’t understand how to read a URL and don’t do some serious googling of the personalities and funding involved.

Here’s How to Prevent Fake News from Spreading on Social Media | VICE | United

Checking is time consuming but worth it.

It’s helpful to remember that one can be very intelligent and still be caught up in anti-intellectual confusion. Thinking clearly and logically is a skill that needs constant honing and improvement. So much of our technology encourages us to be lazy in the way we think. I have a strong suspicion that many people who seek news and information on the web are unclear about the sources they are consulting as well as the distortions in many of them.

This has led me to read more carefully what people I disagree with are putting up on social media. Since I’m connected to these people I have found it tricky to respond to them directly since the parameters of coherence and calm discussion do not seem to obtain in how they communicate online. Instead I have been lately doing a bit more sharing on Facebooger. Not only do I continue to share what I think are substantial pieces of thinking (often that’s what I link here as well), but I have begun to pass on more propaganda type pieces. The propaganda I choose is stuff that is putting forward what I understand as sorely needed coherence and reason to balance what I am seeing others sharing online.

So now when I read something frustrating wrong and incoherent (often admittedly extreme right wing stuff put up by people I know and care about), I now allow myself to immediately link in and share stuff that I see as an antidote to anti-intellectualism and mediocrity.

I have found it interesting who responds to these links. I do get quite a bit of response which makes me hope that it’s helping dilute some of the misinformation rolling past me on my screen.

I can dream, right?

Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves |

This is an example of an “antidote” link and I have shared it on Facebooger.

Kiese Laymon, the author, has disowned the headline (which he did not write). But the article underneath it is amazing. Laymon goes to his grandmother (whom we have met before in his writing) to talk to her about the recent killings in Charleston of 9 black people in a prayer meeting.

Her words and his writing are important to read and think about at this time in the US. I have been giving in to a small bit of  hope that something might actually be changing around the issue of institutional racism especially as evidenced by some discussion and change in our warped imprisonment of so many black men.

The Confederate Cause in the Words of Its Leaders – The Atlantic

I haven’t finished this one, but it’s another one I passed along on social media.