I am working from the large laptop this morning. My smaller laptop which I prefer has started humming louder and louder. I fear its imminent demise. This will be inconvenient for a number of reasons. I have software installed on it that I rely on (Finale, RiteSong). It also moves quicker than the larger laptop even though both are using the idiotic Windows 8. A lot quicker.

I find myself despising Windows 8 and wondering if it takes so long to do things because it is trying to accommodate touch screen, mouse use, touch pad and keyboard input.

My older laptop has Windows 8, but no touch screen and it moves appreciably quicker.

At any rate I thought I would use this laptop because it may soon be the only one I have.

I was thinking yesterday about how I pour my heart and mind into my improvisations for ballet. I know they aren’t particularly profound. I stick with pretty predictable chord progressions over which I improvise melodies and riffs. I also use a lot of rhythms that I think the dancers will recognize from pop and rock music.

Despite this I find that three a half hours of improvising in this intense way is both exhausting and satisfying.

I am drawn more and more into Bach’s Klavierübung III. This is a book of organ music that Bach wrote mostly based on Lutheran chorales that form an interesting unity. Last year I played through all of them. This year I scheduled two of them for last Sunday based on the chorale, “Christ unser Herr sum Jordan kam.”

Then this week after listening to the video below I was inspired to dig deeper into this piece I have played since grad school.

Also I have had my eye on revitalizing the equally challenging settings of “Jesus Christus, unswer Heiland, der von uns den Zorn Gottes wandt,” BWVs 688 and 689.

I am finding this music to be  very attractive to me.  I not only practice it on the organ and piano I listen to different recordings on Spotify for the sheer pleasure of it.

I was looking at adding some anthems to the list we are going to learn this winter and spring. On the third Sunday in Lent (March 8 this year) the Old Testament reading is the Ten Commandments.

There are two settings of the Lutheran chorale based on the Ten Commands in Bach’s  Klavierübung III.

First I looked at having the choir sing a Bach Chorale arrangement of it, but decided that it might not be one of the more interesting settings. I noticed that the Lutheran Book of Worship doesn’t seem to have this important Lutheran melody and text in it. Maybe because it’s a dog, eh?

At any rate, the Klavierübung organ settings are very attractive to me and I began working on them yesterday.

Man, this laptop loads so slowly I don’t know if it will ever serve as my main laptop. I have consider buying a cheaper used one with Windows 7 or earlier on it.

I have also fantasized about purchasing a Mac.

But of course that would be an extravagant purchase with our present income.

Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93 – NYT

This guy sounds like an author I might enjoy reading.

State in India Plans to Help Gay Youth ‘Get Over Same-Sex Feelings’ – NYTimes.c

I think it’s illegal to be gay in India. Madness.

Newspaper in Israel Scrubs Women From a Photo of Paris Unity Rally – NYTimes.com

It is amazing that someone from the paper is quoted as saying that those of us from the outside cannot understand the importance of removing women from photos and that they are not trying to change history or anything. Honest.

A very cold dark morning in Michigan and I’m running late. I discovered yesterday that I had reconstructed most of my “Pentecost Suite for Marimba and Organ.” My files show that I had requested that Peter Kurdziel send me a copy of the piece since I couldn’t find my own copy. He did so. Working from that copy and maybe some older files I prepared a performance copy for Rhonda. It looks like I put most of the piece back into Finale files with the exception of the marimba part for the last movement. I carefully prepared the marimba part for the first two movements yesterday and sent them to Rhonda. I’m planning to finish preparing the last movement tomorrow since today I’m pretty busy.

Loretta Lynch Said to See Her Role as That of Traditional Prosecutor – NYTimes.co

If you are paying any attention to the reporting about our government you might have noticed that Loretta Lynch is President Obama’s candidate to replace Eric Holder as the Attorney General. I think she looks phenomenal. Some good stuff in this article.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

Many thanks to my wife Eileen for pointing out this article to me. She said it reminded her of me. I am flattered.

My friend, Rhonda Edgington, dropped by yesterday with some music for me. She has been using an old copy of my piece, “Pentecost Suite for Marimba and Organ” to cut and paste a working marimba part for it.  Composed in 2004 as the result of a commission from Peter Kurdziel it may be one of my last more involved compositions.For some reason I haven’t been able to find the Finale file for this piece. I guess since 2004 I have had to switch computers and update software enough that my original working computer files were lost. Rhonda has been systematically working from a score I obtained from Peter a while back.

In the last decade I have felt pretty isolated in my approach to music. Rhonda’s interest in this piece (and her general collegial approach to our friendship) has from the first struck me as something I have missed and am very grateful for and value.

I feel a little guilty that she has gone to such lengths to prepare a performing copy of this piece and am seriously considering revisiting it with my current software and equipment to prepare a clean score. It is a three movement piece and would take quite a bit of time but there’s no time like the present to restart this little project (I began work on it when Rhonda originally expressed interest in it).

I finished Stoner by John Williams. For me it wasn’t a very satisfactory read largely due to Williams’ treatment of the main character’s wife, Edith. She is the villain of the book and I find his pairing of Stoner for whom he is engaging our sympathy for a life of struggles with the cold, fucked up wife a bit dated and sexist. I gave it two stars on GoodReads which translates as “it was okay.”

F.B.I. Is Broadening Surveillance Role, Report Shows – NYTimes.com

Obama to Call for Laws Covering Data Hacking and Student Privacy – NYTimes

These two articles were back to back on my New York Times page. That can’t be an accident. In the first one, the NYT is suing the government. In the second one they quote the President:

“If we’re going to be connected, then we need to be protected. As Americans, we shouldn’t have to forfeit our basic privacy when we go online to do our business,” Mr. Obama said Monday. “Each of us as individuals have a sphere of privacy around us that should not be breached, whether by our government, but also by commercial interests.”

The first article is about the privacy of foreigners which I suppose makes a difference to many (but not to me).

Religious Bias Issues Debated After Atlanta Mayor’s Dismissal of Fire Chief – NYT

I’ve been watching this story where a Fire Chief of 30 years experience was fired because he handed out a book he wrote which villifies gay people. I think it was probably poorly handled. Firing him seemed over the top to me unless there’s more the story than is being reported. Why not censure him in some less drastic way that helps retain freedom of expression on his part and retains the rights of those who work under him?

The Color of Food Leadership | Mark Winne

Thank you to my son, David, for linking this on Facebooger.

Andraé Crouch, 72, Who Infused Gospel With Soul, Dies – NYTimes.com

I was talking with one of our new curates last night. He confessed that he has gone from actively disliking church music to being indifferent to it. He said he doesn’t have any CDs of organ music that he listens to. I am always interested in what music works for people. I mentioned to him the following line in Crouch’s obit:

“It’s a pity that a lot of great messages have been wasted because they have been paired with bad music. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of traditional church music. That’s why most of it bores me.”

Andraé Crouch

I went a bit early to church so I could play slowly through my prelude, “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam” BWV 684. I hear this piece like a cantata movement. On my meager organ I registered the running left hand on the organ’s sole reed. I thought of it as a bassoon on a continuo part.

I registered the right hand duet with the fakey flute stops at 8 and 4 on the Great. There is one four foot stop in the pedal and that was what I used for the melody. It made me think of a quiet french horn playing away on the slow cantus firmus.

The technical challenge for me on this piece was maintaining the accuracy of notes throughout. Little mistakes crept in very easily with any wavering of concentration. My solution was to practice more slowly and carefully.

For the most part this worked. I did have one bad moment near the beginning but it wasn’t a part that I had trouble with during any of my rehearsal (of course).

I like playing this piece on the feast of the Baptism of Christ. I think Bach had running water in mind with his running bass part. I toyed with putting an article in the bulletin but finally didn’t.

It was tricky to be thinking about rehearsal technique yesterday morning and then go into the performance. I find it helps me to think of the imagined instruments as I play. This can calm my inner dialog to some extent.

It’s ironic that I put so much work into this little piece on my lousy organ. But it’s satisfying. I had two compliments during communion, but they were both on my piano playing rendition of our baptism hymn, “Wade in the Water.”

The prelude piece was from Bach’s Klavierübung III. In this work, Bach pairs a big piece with a smaller piece  on the same chorale. I played the other piece on this choral as the postlude.

Later Eileen and I watched the disturbing but brilliant movie, “The Act of Killing.”

We watched a DVD from the library but I just checked and this movie is on Netflix as well.

Josh Oppenheimer the director of “The Fog of War” goes to Indonesia and convinces the people who were responsible for the deaths of many of their countrymen in 1965 to make a movie about it.

The subsequent movie Oppenheimer made documents this process so that we see the killers above making decisions about how to stage a movie about their historical involvement in atrocities.

The result is an enervating confrontation between the reality that we are watching people who did unthinkable things in real life explain to us and themselves these acts and their own understandings of cinematic fantasies that they cite as inspiration (Marlan Brando, Al Pacino). The term, surreal, doesn’t come close to covering this.

It’s an amazing film which will be stuck in my gut for ages.

Getting Grief Right – NYTimes.com

The writer of this article gets it right I think. I have had to watch parents bury children. It is a wrenching experience. I still bump into them years later and admire their ability to function afterwards.

The Backlash Against African Women – NYTimes.com

Wide spread difficulties, danger and accomplishment. Did you know that Rwanda has the largest number of women in their parliament (64%) of any county in the world? 20% for the USA.

It amuses me how my relationship to Christianity keeps popping up like an annoying little theme in my life.

The last two mornings, the poems I have read as part of my morning reading were about Eucharist and Creation.

They were “This Bread I Break” and “Incarnate Devil” by Dylan Thomas. I have been reading my way through his “Collected Poems” and these two poems were back to back on pages 45 and 46. By the way, I find it sort of hilarious that the poem links above are accompanied by a video recording of the robotic voice of an automatic reading of the poems. It does something funny to them, even though I didn’t listen to them all the way through.

I wonder about my attraction to Thomas as a young person. I was unaware I am sure that his wonderful use of words owes so much to the Bible and Christianity.

As I grew up, my life was deluged with Bible talk.

Besides listening to my Father preach from the King James three times a week, the people in my life often talked in a sort of Biblical way, calling each other Brother and Sister and once in a while using “thees” and “thous” or peppering conversations with Biblical quotes.

It was in grad school that I began to realize what a gift this weird childhood was when my familiarity with Bible became an asset in thinking about Gregorian Chant and countless other things in music history like the Mass and Oratorios.

I continue to throw myself into Christian Wyman’s My Bright Abyss:  Meditations of a Modern Believer. It wasn’t until the fourth chapter that I began to think I might get something out of it.

Wyman’s background as a “fallen away” fundamentalist who finds himself a poet struggling with honest belief and unbelief especially after receiving a fatal diagnosis of cancer is enough to at least keep me interested.

He is most vivid when he draws from his own life and his love of poetry.

“Life is ALWAYS a question of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus. Contemporary despair is to feel the multiplicity of existence with no possibility for expression or release of one’s particular being. I fear sometimes that we are evolving in such a way the the possibilities for these small but intense points of intimacy and expression—poetry, for instance—are not simply vanishing but becoming no longer felt as necessary pressures.” p. 49

This puts me in mind of another book I am reading, What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund.

The “small intense points of intimacy and expression” mentioned above seem present in Mendelsund’s understanding of reading as co-creating.

“There is no such thing in art as the naive reception of imagery. This is true of reading as well. Like painters, or writers, or even participants in a video game, we make choices—we have AGENCY.”

“When we want to co-create, we read. We want to participate; and we want ownership. We would rather have sketches than verisimilitude—because the sketches at least are OURS.” Peter Mendelsund

Pictures (instead of prose in a book) can be a “form of robbery” when they show us concrete representations of things we would rather imagine ourselves. These imaginings are Wiman’s “small intense points of intimacy and expression.”

Finally Wiman asks the following:

“What is poetry’s role when the world is burning? Encroaching environmental disaster and relentless wars around the world have had, it seems, a paralyzing, sterilizing effect on much American poetry. It is less the magnitude of the crises than our apparent immunity to them, this death on which we all thrive, that is spinning our best energies into esoteric language games, or complacent retreats into nostalgias of form or subject matter, or shrill denunciations of a culture whose privileges we are not ready to renounce—-or, more accurately, do not even know how to renounce.”

I haven’t quite worked this all out. But I think that Dylan Thomas’s weird visions which include a strong Biblical flavor, Wiman’s musings and Mendelsund’s questions all seem to leave me asking some of the same questions, seeking “necessary pressures” and not simply gazing into the mirror of art, poetry and music and finding myself “vanishing.”

There is of course a pleasure in holding a published book in your hands when you read that cannot be duplicated (so far) by an ebook reader. I find this particular pleasure varies immensely from one book to another. A book that is beautifully made and designed attracts me physically one way. Another book that is old and worn and falling apart attracts me in a different way. A book that was owned by someone I love who is now dead or far away is another way.

Having said all that, I am convinced that holding a book like Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence: A Christian History in my hands conveys information and thought in a much different way than an ebook does.

First of all there is the physicality thing again. My copy came in the mail recently and I find the paper of jacket cover pleasurable to touch and the weight of the book in my hand satisfying.

But more importantly, the layout of the Table of Contents is very helpful in perceiving just how MacCulloch is planning on talking about his subject.

Then I take a quick look at the back of the book and notice the many footnotes, the further reading section.

As I begin to read, the footnotes interest me greatly. MacCulloch writes excellent footnotes and loads them up with opinions and ideas as well as references to sources.

I have listened to this book as an audio book and as usual it only basically whets my appetite for reading the book more carefully.

MacCulloch begins by referring to two mystery stories with dogs in them that either bark or don’t bark (heading towards thinking about silence in larger ways such as absence).

In “Silver Blaze” by Arthur Conan Doyle, a dog doesn’t bark and it is significant to how Sherlock Holmes solves the case.  In “The Oracle of the Dog” by G. K. Chesterton, a dog’s bark is misunderstood as oracular in the sense that somehow the dog knew a murder was taking place.

As you can see, I have found these two stories online.  I used the “Send to Kindle” app to send them both to my Kindle so that I can savor them and MacCulloch’s point.

I also immediately went to this section in MacCulloch to read on the page:

“All through my historical career, I was keenly aware of the importance of silence in human affairs, for a good biographical reason: from an early age, I was conscious of being gay, and that proved to be a great blessing for a young historian… this life experience has left me alert to the ambiguities and the multiple meanings of texts, and to the ambiguities and multiple means in the behavior of people around me. I have become attuned to listening to silence and to finding within it the keys to understanding many situations, far beyond anything to do with sexuality.”

And this section:

“As a gay child and teenager, I also effortlessly developed the historians’s other essential quality, a sense of distance: an observer status in the rituals constructed for a heterosexual society in a world which in reality was not quite like that.”

In the week before Christmas, attempted to make these two points to my boss (who is gay) in one of our conferences. She said to me, “I needed that.” Me too, actually.

Referring to what happens when silence ends about sexuality, MacCulloch charmingly writes:

“Inflexible pattern-makers get very angry when their patterns are under threat, or when others offer new patterns, or when it is pointed out that there are parts of the pattern missing; that is why so much conservative religion in the modern world seems so deeply and perpetually cross.”

I am definitely not thinking of the crazies who committed the recent tragic and atrocious shootings in Paris, instead using MacCulloch’s ideas to think about American conservative religious type helps me. They are definitely “cross” at times.

So savoring ideas for me works a bit better book in hand. But I’m not giving up my little screens.

My organist friend, Ken Thevenet, who suffered a severe coronary “incident” the Saturday after Christmas is recovering nicely according to Facebook updates posted by his Dad. At first I passed on his updates to my teacher, Craig Cramer, who then published them to his list of organist emails (which he manages to block so that I couldn’t do so myself). After a few days he ceased to respond so I figure he was losing interest or something and quit emailing him.

Ken has insurance. But apparently he has high deductibles and his hospital stay (which is is continuing) is incurring costs not covered. His Dad has said donations can be made to a local bank, but I’m hoping he will publish info on how to donate via Paypal. It makes  me a little crazy that health care is so hit and miss in the US. But church musicians are notorious for their lack of benefits and low salaries so I guess it makes sense that we sort of have to kick in and help each other.

I hate money.

And I have difficulty believing in it.

I’m enjoying a second day off today in a row. I am scheduled to accompany a Blue Lakes Fine Arts ballet audtion/masterclass this evening at 6 PM. I wonder if it will be canceled due to weather. Hope College closed down early yesterday. It is pretty nasty out there.

8 Things Top Practicers Do Differently

I am constantly on the lookout to improve my practice techniques. This link was put up on Facebooger by another musician. It contradicts some of my recent adaptation of repetition (four times for anything), except if one factors in accurate repetition which is usually my goal.

The Problem With Men Explaining Things | Mother Jones

Daughter Sarah put this link up on Facebooger. I read it and understand the problems of gender power described in it. I asked Eileen if I do this to her. She said I did but qualified a little bit that I often sound like God. Nice. I am aware of this attribute and do try to temper it. But just as women in the article feel shut down by Men Who Know, I also have the opposite experience of being short changed and not just from men. I wonder what it all means. At this stage of my life I am much more likely to demur silently when contradicted or ignored.

Bess Myerson, New Yorker of Beauty, Wit, Service and Scandal, Dies at 90 – NYT

Another amazing obit. Reads like a novel.

Brain Freeze – NYTimes.com

First person account of becoming an invalid. Seems well written to me.

Dish Unveils Internet Pay-TV Service, Sling TV, Starting at $20 Per Month | Variety

TV cable people keep farting around trying to understand and “monetize” the internet.

I have read the preface and the first chapter of My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman. I’m not terribly impressed with it so far. Like me, Wiman comes from a fundamentalist upbringing. He seems to be struggling to connect with Christianity. I find his struggles so far not that interesting.

I’m in an emotional space right now that questions banality and ill-informed approaches to both religion and the arts. I’ll probably read a few more chapters before giving up entirely on Wiman. Working for the church these days I find myself simultaneously admiring people who seem devout and committed and at the same time feeling disconnected from simple good-hearted understandings of Christianity.

Last night a few committed members braved the local very bad weather to come to choir rehearsal. We had a good one. Part of my struggle is to choose material that is edifying and also attractive both to those who perform it and those who might notice it in worship.

Yesterday as I was preparing several anthems for the rehearsal at the photocopy machine (legally), I was alone in the office with a parishioner who had come to count the collection from Sunday. He mentioned to me how much he appreciates some of the service music I have written for this community (“The Jenkins Jazz Mass”).

It was encouraging to hear him talk about how the music made sense to him and that he enjoyed singing it. It’s so difficult to strike this balance at a time when people’s tastes and education are so fragmented and unpredictable.

I also started reading Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read recently. I noticed it in a bookstore during the Christmas shopping and then managed to interlibrary-loan a copy despite the fact that it is a new book.

Mendelsund’s bio in the beginning of the book says that he “is the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, the art director of Pantheon books, and a recovering classical pianist.”

Cool.

This book has definitely been designed by a designer.

It is a pleasure to hold and look at. I was surprised to find Mendelsund using books like To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Madame Bovary by Flaubert. These are all books I have read and admired. Mendelsund is asking questions about how our minds work when we read.

Plus Chris Ware, one of my favorite graphic artists, gave him a blurb. What’s not to like?

Finally, a big thank you to Rhonda E. for bringing Eileen and me another Christmas gift of the book, tinkers by Paul Harding.

I haven’t started it yet, but this book also fits nicely in the hand and looks very interesting.

A week from Sunday my choir is scheduled to sing an anthem by Orlando Gibbons. I thought it might be nice to schedule some organ music by this composer on that day as well. I thumbed through one volume of my copy of the Fitzwilliam Virginal book. Sure enough there was a piece but it wasn’t the ticket. So I turned to the interwebs.

I dearly love this aspect of the internet. This edition from the 20s seems to be a reputable one for its time. I went through several volumes and noticed that the editor, Margaret Henrietta Glyn, talks about some of these pieces as though they were organ music.

The above passage is the only place she mentions that the Fancies are organ pieces (as far as I can tell). I found a couple pieces that are attractive to me.

This one is the one I proposed for a prelude. It’s lengthier than the other one I chose for the postlude.

if you look closely you can see that Margaret Glyn has put the indication “Piano” but also has indicated organ stops with the numbers 8,4,16 in the first piece and 8.4 in the second.

After playing them through on the piano, I took them to church and tried them on my organ and decided they would make a nice prelude and postlude for a week from Sunday.

When I choose music I try to factor in how easily a listener might be edified by them despite my skepticism on who is actually listening to what I play. I pretend, I guess, that they will be heard.

How people perceive music was on my mind yesterday as Eileen and I watched the movie, “Into the Woods” at a local theater. I have been very curious about this musical ever since it came out on Broadway.

It was fun to finally see it and hear the music. It is indeed a great piece. Eileen and I watched it in a nearly deserted theater. I would like to see it in a more crowded setting to gauge crowd reaction.

I’m not sure this movie works for American audiences more used to movies as a “ride” than as cinema or theater. For example, we watched a trailer for “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” as we waited for our movie. Sheer inanity.

Later over Chinese takeout Eileen and I discussed the movie, “Moulin Rouge,” and how it was a turning point in perception of movies for us.

Difficult at first to get with the program but eventually coming to the point of enjoying its pace and pastiche of music numbers after a couple of viewings.

I wonder how the lovely melodies and even polyphonic type duets sound to sensibilities that are “All about that bass, no treble.”

Then there is the character development in “Into the Woods” which seemed to strain against the screen in its excellence and depth.

So I liked it, but wondered how it would hit other people, especially younger people who are not exposed to a wide gambit of stuff.

I recently completed reading The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. I stumbled on it by listening to an audio book online via the local library streaming service. It interested me enough to check out of the library and read. It is about Joseph Allston, an older man grappling with his aging body, and his relationship to the present as well as a description of his marriage.

“But all the time while I was wondering if my clock would stop, I felt inside me somewhere, adjacent to or below the ailing heart, a hungry, thirsty, empty, sore, haunted sensation of being unfinished, random, and unattached, as if, even if the heart were working perfectly, there was nothing there for it to run.”

Stegner was in his sixties when this book was published. Allston is seventy. Stegner’s immediately previous novel was his Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose which I read and enjoyed some years ago. Weirdly this book was never reviewed by the NYT or the LA Times (found this out googling this morning).

Allston is definitely not Stegner. Alston is a retired literary agent living with his wife and being a general pain in the ass.

“Who was ever in any doubt that the self-esteem of the elderly declines in this society which indicates in every possible way that it does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities, and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and Social Security checks? And which has  a chilling capacity to look straight at them and never see them.”

Regular readers of this space might recognize some of my own complaints in the quote above. So you see, having listened to the book a bit (in order to fall asleep at night), I felt like I wanted to read it.

The spectator bird idea is mentioned at least once. It seems that age has found the character Allston as a sort of morose Marcus Aurelius (whom the character admires and reads) who like a spectator bird has had the feathers beaten off of him. This makes him vulnerable at a time of life when it is particularly embarrassing.

Allston’s marriage is  a good one and this book is on the redemptive side. Most of the plot revolves around Allston reliving a time of life right after his son killed himself. Recommended.

Also reading Stoner by John Williams. I think this was a $1.99 Kindle deal one day. Anyway, my kindle tells me I’m 70 % through this book. It’s the melancholy story of a man who makes a bad marriage, loses touch with the daughter he adores, and most distressingly for me suffers from academic politics despite his own ability to be a good teacher.

These New York Review Classic books have been a good find for me. They reissue books I haven’t heard of but have enjoyed reading.

This one I have been taking in small doses because it is such a sad story. The academic story which involves the main character in a struggle over competency (he loses) reminded me too much of my experiences in college.

Nevertheless I am planning on finishing it. It is well written (by  my lights) and worth the time.

Finally I come to 10:04 by Ben Lerner. I have been listening to this book to fall asleep and am just about ready to read the dang thing.

It is a fun meta story about itself which draws upon the movie, “Back to the Future.”  The title is the time that Marty catapults “back to the future” from the past having changed stuff. I like that a lot.

I’m probably going to buy the Kindle book after finishing Stoner. Lerner’s book is about a writer who has received an advance on the book you are now reading. The story seems to repeat it self with slightly different characters that are recognizable transformations of each other.

I will know more after I read the dang thing instead of dozing to it.

Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent – NYTimes.com

Reading an article like this  about the resurgence of Maoism is made slightly surreal while reading a bio of Mao which is clear about both his accomplishments and his terrible terrible failures and miscalculations that cost thousands of Chinese lives.

Today is the last Monday for a while that I don’t have to be at an 8:30 AM ballet class. The winter schedule is shaping up to be a bit lighter. Two days a week, 8:30 to 1, with an hour off from 9 to 10. Not bad.

I had to phone Julie, the teacher I work with, last week to confirm this schedule. She told me what it would be last term, but I only had it written down on a sticky which I promptly lost. She asked me if the chair of the department had emailed me and I said to the best of my knowledge that she hadn’t. No biggie. I have long since adapted to this particular department’s way of doing business.

Church went fine yesterday. It was the first curate solo (soli?) Sunday. Jen’s taking some well deserved time off. It seemed that despite the fact that people were standing close by me and talking the prelude came off well. Funny how I can sort of read the choir as it gathers to process. I got the impression that they understood and approved of my little prelude which consisted of a Pavanna and a Galliarde by William Byrd.

While I’m thinking of it I’ll mention that the person who proofs the bulletin decided that “Wolseys Wilde,” the title of my postlude, was a grammatical mistake and put an apostrophe in it. This is a matter of continuing differing vision of what constitutes accuracy between me and a retired English prof. If something looks wrong to him it trumps the possibility that what he is looking at is intentional and more correct. In this case he was about half right. While the title in the Fitwilliam Virginal book has no apostrophe, in its index there is one.

I had a little surprise during the anthem. Just before church, I asked Eileen to go get me a second copy of it so I could use it for a page turn. I laid the two copies out as I usually do so that I could see the entire anthem without turning a page. Unfortunately this was after our rehearsal of it.

During the performance I noticed that the ladies did not enter when I expected them to at one point. I improvised an extra measure or so and they came in fine. As I was playing and conducting it occurred to me that the two copies of the anthem were not the same in their pagination. Yikes. I began carefully counting measures as I played and managed to do the rest of the piece with no train wreck.

That was fun.

The only other thing that sticks out was Jodi’s comment in her homily that in “just a moment we are going to do the Episcopalian version of an altar call.” I could only laugh quietly.

The Art World’s Patron Satan – NYTimes.com

This is about “Stefan Simchowitz, the controversial 44-year-old movie producer, Internet entrepreneur and industrial scion who over the last seven years has pursued a manic quest to assemble the world’s most lucrative collection of emerging contemporary art.”

Interesting approach to collecting art. Discouraging that everything is about how much money it’s worth but I guess that a sign of the times.

Asia Times Online :: War by media and the end of truth

This talk by John Pilger was given at the  Logan Symposium, “Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship”, organized by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, December 5-7, 2014.  It puzzles me. Sometimes he seems to be accurate and incisive in his criticisms. At other times he seems as vague and unsubstantiated as the people he is criticizing. I found this article on EastSouthWestNorth which seems to be a renegade Chinese web blog. I bookmarked Pilger’s website to keep an eye on. Who knows?

Best of 2014 | The Paris Review

Paris Review’s end of the year compilation of essays.

The Queen Just Honored a Politician Who Believes Hurricane Katrina Was Caused by Gay People | VICE News

So the US has no corner on the market for nutty politicians.

Reading Alexander V. Pantsov ‘s and Steven I. Levine’s biography of Mao,  Mao: The Real Story, I have arrived at the Cultural Revolution of 1966-67. I have read other descriptions of this but this time I was struck by how similar the horrific events are to the story in the novel, Lord of the Flies, written some 13 or 14 years earlier.

Millions of young people joined in tormenting and even killing their elders. What a terrible story especially in the historical context of Chinese respect for the elderly. Mao is seventy years old and goading these events with glee (according to this believable description).

I have thought of the parallels between American anti-communism and Mao’s attempt to stamp out his enemies. But American disgrace meted out to those accused is no where near the madness of young people storming classrooms and torturing and killing people for their lack of orthodoxy.

Deng Xiaoping a victim of this purge who later emerged as part of the post Mao leadership has made a famous remark about Mao’s life that he was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong” According to this 2004 source this remains the current mainstream idea about Mao.  I have seen it cited  in other places.

It seems a generous assessment at best.

I am feeling much better. Around 4 or 5 PM last night I was feeling pretty chipper. This is the time of day I have been sinking into exhaustion so that was a nice change.

Today I’m planning to get on the treadmill for the first time in over a week if just for a short time after church.

Eileen jumped in the car and drove to Whitehall yesterday to connect with her Mom and sister Nancy. She took a table loom for Nancy to play around with. She and her Mom had Christmas together and went out to eat. I stayed home continuing to recuperate from being ill. It’s been over a week today and I am only beginning to feel like myself again this morning. I got up and showered. I haven’t been exercising during this period of course. Not sure if I will today. The choir party is today and one of my goals is to get through that.

I continue to be preoccupied with Dylan Thomas. I am thinking I would like to read and probably own all of his works. I have been thinking about his portrait of the artist as a young dog. Thomas evolves his much of his art and aesthetic from his childhood.  This collection published during his lifetime seems to be stories from his youth.

I decided to see I could get a copy from Paperback Swap where I trade books back and forth with other people. I was just getting ready to order it from another reader when the software informed me that I had already done so on such and such a date.

That sounds familiar. I spent the next hour going through books upstairs book by book until I found it tucked at the bottom of some shelves by my bed. Eureka! I immediately began reading in it. Good stuff.

I was shocked this morning when my daily Thomas poem was so religious. “In the Beginning” uses straightforward Biblical imagery to talk about creativity.

Diarmaid MacCulloch has recently helped me feel comfortable with my own “friendship” with Christianity (MacCulloch’s description of his own relationship to Christianity).

After moving here from grad school I went through a particularly weird stage of reading the Psalms continuously in the context of daily prayer as well as the many journals of Thomas Merton.

I was grappling with the fact that I was sure I didn’t want to convert to Catholicism (which would have made life considerably simpler), but still hadn’t completely forsaken Christian liturgy.

Eventually I ceased the prayer. After quitting my Roman Catholic job I spent more and more time practicing piano and organ. Was this some sort of prayer or substitute for praying? Who knows?

At the same time I realized that I do not believe in God the way so many people seem to. I am more comfortable with the label atheist than Christian but neither one is quite accurate. “Friend of Christianity” acknowledges a life long connection and a continuing interest in the arts, stories and ideas in Western Christianity not to mention Western Civilization.

So that reading a strong piece of poetry that is embedded in a healthy understanding of Christianity that I am comfortable with is a pleasant experience. I didn’t get this vibe off T. S. Eliot so much.

Probably because of the two theologies of Eliot and Thomas.

The former seeming cynical and conservative to me, the latter exuberant and in love with life and words. At least that’s how it works for me.

Reflections on Torture: The Real Reason Why

Caution: Left wing propaganda (I agree with)

I assert that torture has a very specific political function that has nothing to do with the gathering of “intelligence,” but everything to do with the projection of the image of the state as a lawless and fearsome entity to its citizens and to the rest of the world, capable of the most heinous and cruel depravity, and thus sending the message that it is not to be disobeyed. This is the same psychological “logic” behind extrajudicial murder (assassinations, drone killings) and the Guantánamo Bay prison, where due process is openly violated.

Social Programs That Work – NYTimes.com

Wow. A Republican trying to solve problems. Will wonders never cease?

10 simple tips for making your home wifi network faster – Vox

I have simply given up on making Windows 8 work with anything like efficiency. Still good to know these tips.

Who Really Burns: Quitting a Dean’s Job in the Age of Mike Brown

Inspiring words from a woman who quit her job over principle.

Sotomayor accuses colleagues of trying to ‘wish away’ racial inequality

This is an old Washing Post link. It surfaced on Facebooger recently and I found it interesting.

My spam and hit count is down. I weirdly find this encouraging. I would like to think that people are turning slightly from their throbbing screens, small and less small, and reaching out to more tangible stuff. Silly me.

It’s a week later and I’m still weak from illness. Yesterday Eileen and I went grocery shopping. By the time we were done I was exhausted. I was also happy when my Mom phoned me. This is a good sign. She does seem more alert now than she has in months, more connected to her surroundings. She even seems to have a bit of a sense of humor. Wow. As good a Christmas gift as I could receive.

But speaking of gifts, this has been a Christmas where I seem to have been showered with gifts. Eileen and I were talking about this before Christmas. I told her that whereas neither of us particularly craves much stuff, we do crave giving things to people we care about, especially each other.

It’s difficult to give gifts to those close to you, but it’s important. Eileen is terrified of giving me books, some of my most prized possessions and choicest gifts for others. But really anything she gives me is always a delight.

This year she surprised me with a whistling teapot. This is a perfect gift for me. More and more I need a timer to keep me alert while preparing food.

Daughter Elizabeth continues to post daily updates and pics of new grandaughter, Alex Daum. This is an excellent gift in and of itself. Elizabeth and Jeremy are planning a stateside trip for a bar mitzvah which will include a Holland stop. Woo hoo!

My best gift from daughter Sarah was a relaxed hour or so of chatting online.

Although she did send a box of cool stuff like calendars of China trip pics for people.

Then there was the incredible outpouring from my brother’s side of the family.

I guess it helps to be incapable of not sharing one’s own self absorbed information whether via this blog or other routes like Facebooger because I got some cool stuff.

Mark and Leigh got me A Greek Anthology.  I have already been working on it. Very cool.

My nephew, Ben, and his partner got me all kinds of cool stuff including truffle salt and coffee beans from Zingerman’s.

They also got me the Food Writing 2014 which begins with a heart breaking introduction by Holly Hughes about the death of her brother and the food they ate on death watch. Excellent stuff.

Niece Emily and her hubby Jeremy got me Jam it, Pickle It, Cure It which is an amazing cookbook about making stuff like crackers instead of buying premade things.

So you can see I cleaned up this Christmas.

So my fam left yesterday afternoon. It was great having them around. My  Mom is back in her assisted care facility. Eileen and I will probably go over and check on her today. She seemed tired but happy to be back yesterday. The Jenkins clan stopped off to say hello on their way back home. That must have delighted her.

I had some leg work left to do. The full care facility doctor had not signed Mom’s prescriptions for her release. The assisted care facility is unable to administer meds without this. So I was doing follow up on it. Which meant marking time until I could pick up the signed “scrips” (as they call them). I called Heartland (the full care facility where Mom has been staying) and was pleasantly surprised to find that not only had the doctor there signed the scrips they had faxed them to Mom’s assisted care facility. Cool.

So I didn’t have to go out. Eileen and I didn’t have much energy left in us. We spent the evening watching movies on the computer. Happy New Year.

Every time fam visits, I once again realize how unusual it is for me to sit in a room and have so much in common with people in it. I was surprised last night that my family visitors seemed to understand why I liked some of the videos I embedded in yesterday’s post. Daughter Sarah commented on yesterday blog and I couldn’t quite tell what she thought of Chandelier and Beyoncé. But I think the people last night might have been slightly bemused to find me, the family curmudgeon, showing them a Beyoncé video.  I know they liked the Chandelier video.

So my brother, Mark; his wife, Leigh: their kids Ben and Emily; and their respective partners, Tony and Jeremy are all visiting for one night. Eileen, Mark and Leigh went over to say hi to Mom after they arrived. The rest of the group arrived later in the evening. I skipped the Mom visit in order not to spread my illness from which I am gradually recovering. It looks like Mom may be released from her care facility back to her assisted care place tomorrow. No one asked, but I guess it’s assumed we are her ride home. That should work fine.

Last Saturday a friend of mine ended up in ER in an induced coma in hypothermia. Apparently he suffered some kind of a cardiac event and was rushed there. His dad has been posting updates on Facebooger. His name is Ken Thevenet and is a working church musician in Louisiana.

I knew him in grad school as a sweetheart of a guy who worked his ass off to be a good musician. I hope he pulls through and am following the updates.

In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and Death – NYTimes.com

This report is amazing. The embedded video and story work together nicely to form a top rate piece of new journalism.

In Ferguson by Darryl Pinckney | The New York Review of Books

Another good piece. On the ground in Ferguson the night the grand jury announced it was not going to indict. Vivid and eye opening.

Still a bit shaky, but I seem to be feeling better. Good thing, since my fam is arriving today for a brief visit.

I have been finding myself using visual distractions more than usual. Yesterday I watched several videos. The dance in the one above is a work of art. I barely noticed the bland music but was captivated by the choreography and execution of this amazing piece. A bit embarrassing that the dancer is a reality TV show star, but what can I say? I think it’s excellent.

I do find myself less and less interested in commercial popular music. I keep poking around looking for new things to listen to, clicking on things recommended by friends and fam. I made a spotify playlist of the albums in a recent NYT article about music in  2014 by Jon Carmanica.

I found a few things so far in the NYT article that I sort of like. The Vince Staples album above for example and Girlpool below.

Perhaps like so much of my personal taste not for everyone but my first impressions of these two albums is that they are doing music not just a bland bid to go viral in the age of the interwebs. I’m gradually working my way through the rest of the list.

Speaking of popularity, I was surprised to find myself attracted to the Beyoncé video below.

This entire piece draws me in. It uses the stark smile of the beauty contest contestant and the ritualized waving to make a deep critique of the objectification of women in our society and the pressure put on them. I find it particularly heartbreaking at the end when Beyoncé reaches into her own actual past to play a clip of her as a child receiving an award. Damn.

Anyway, I think it’s good.

I thought about putting these two videos up on Facebook and soliciting responses. I did in fact link the original Rolling Stone Article of the best videos of 2014 there. So far no one responded. I grow weary of the crowded paper thin world of algorithms and manipulation. Fuck it. I’ll put up what I think here.

And what I think is that I continue to find things of interest in popular culture, just not the most popular stuff, I guess. It is difficult these days to find stuff because there’s just too much of it and there are fewer and fewer coherent curators to guide me.

Eileen and I have been watching the series, “The Story of Film,” on Netfflix. It has drawn me back into the idea of film in a very good way. It is a savvy look at the entire world of film, not just commercial films from the West. I am finding it very educational and making notes of what movies I might want to look at. Plus the sardonic voice of Mark Cousins is delightful.

The Best Non-required Reading of 2014 was on sale as a Kindle book yesterday. I bought it and read the first article, an artful piece of fiction called On The Study of Physics in Preschool Classrooms: Pedagogy and Lesson Planning by Matthew Schultz

Good fun. The sterile voice of the non-fiction self help manual is employed nicely. “Perhaps, if the work warrants such a reaction, fall to your knees and let your head become heavy with new insights.” Schulz has his narrator say. I admire that sentence and this phrase: “anything true is impossible to fit inside your head.”

I am recovering from my illness. Today is the first day in several days that I have no fever. However I still feel like shit.

Sunday’s are hard for me when I am feeling better. Yesterday I barely got through playing for the service. My boss has also been ill. I told her I almost called it in. She said they could have made due but “it wouldn’t be pretty.”

When I’m feeling low physically it’s easy to feel low mentally. It was particularly encouraging that a woman named Helen Duggan commented on the usefulness of my compositions recently. I reflected to Eileen that it is sufficient if I get a hit like that once every two or three months. I do seem to do so, so that’s nice.

I was reminded of my Alzheimer’s fantasy of being weepy not angry when I lose my brains yesterday. I was chatting with Eileen and suddenly became very weepy. Oy. I thought to myself “this is what it will be like.”

I have a goal for myself to submit the music for Sunday this morning before the secretary arrives at 9:30. This means preparing a psalm and compiling all the info she will need. I am thinking of doing some William Byrd for the prelude and postlude. Yesterday I was playing through a pairs of Pavannes and Galliardes from my Fitzwilliam virginal book. I do love this music. I have given up on restoring my own crappy harpsichord in the near future. And I have decided that the piano allows subtleties of interp that the harpsichord doesn’t. So I’m thinking of scheduling a Pavanne and Galliarde for next Sunday’s prelude. They are often performed in the pairs in which they were conceived, so there’s that.

I think I could pick a third piece for the postlude this morning. Something goofy from the same source that would be easy to pull off.

Man, I am ready to be better.

I have a student coming today for our first run through of her Solo and Ensemble piece. I will email the student’s Mom so she will be aware that she is bringing her kid into a house that has recently had illness. I will offer to meet them at church instead or just cancel.

I am planning to use some recently acquired stipends (funeral from over a month ago, ordination fee) to tune my fucking piano. I have been putting this off since we are sort of on an austerity budget. However hosting a student who is preparing a piece for Solo and Ensemble makes me aware of how badly out of tune the piano is.

First thank you to Helen Duggan for leaving me a comment on my Free Mostly Original Sheet Music Page.  I was just puzzling this morning as I was listening to an archival choral evensong from the BBC as to why the local college choir director never saw fit to comment on my choral setting of Psalm 146 for SATB and organ (link to pdf). As I was listening to lovely compositions by Kenneth Leighton and Howard Howells, I couldn’t help but speculate that this choral setting wasn’t that bad. The only reason I haven’t used it with my choir is that it would be a bitch to play and conduct.

I have recently heard or read that blogs are a thing of the past now. This means that I have posted online throughout the entire life of this phenomenon. My original goals remain. To attempt to spark conversations, learn from others and make my compositions available to interested parties.

I am still pretty shaky this morning. I do feel a bit better, however, and am planning to do the church service. It helps that the choir has the Sunday off and my string players are coming to help with the prelude and postlude. I figure I will get enough of an adrenaline rush to get me through.

I continue to be impressed with Diarmaid MacCulloch. I finished listening to his book on Silence. But before I did I had already ordered me a copy. I find that listening to books is a poor substitute for actually absorbing them.

However I did learn lots just listening to this recording. For example, MacCulloch points to the very low emphasis on Mary in the libretto for Handel’s Messiah. I had never thought of that before. But of course it’s correct. The Prots were trying to figure out what to do with Mary. Quite an accomplishment really. To write a long libretto on the birth of Christ that de-emphasizes Mary’s central role.

Also I  found MacCulloch’s observations about the homeo erotic aspect of the Oxford movement very informing. I had not put together that John Cardinal Newman was gay (MacCulloch says if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and looks like a duck…).

An interesting outgrowth of this is that in the sixties when the Roman Catholic abandon the old liturgy, the oxford movement types are left hanging. I of course have thought of that, but MacCulloch sheds some new light for me.

The book is about silence in many ways including the larger sense of absence. Time and time again I thought to myself that I would like to see the footnotes for the books and ideas he is talking about. Hence the purchase of the book.

I have noticed lately that once in a while I need to have a book in my hands and not an ebook.

This happened to me recently with James Joyce. I have Ulysses as an excellent ebook with good footnotes, but as I was thinking about it and reading it I found myself scrutinizing my book collection (which is still in disarray from having moved many shelves of books from the first floor of our little house to the second floor.) I was very happy to find one of my old copies of Ulysses. It is now sitting by my chair.

Another very clever thing I learned from MacCulloch was the practice of wild tracking. Apparently when one does a radio interview, at the end of the interview the engineers requests several moments of silence so that they can record it. This recorded silence will be used to patch up odd sounds in the interview. Is that cool or what? And now a moment of silence.

The last 24 hours have been miserable for me. I have body aches and have not been able to rest. I don’t feel too bad right now. I hope this is lifting.

I have been experimenting with reading my New York Times a bit differently. If I use their “Reader” option (as opposed to reading it online, I think I can skim better.

The online paper consists of headline links. These are the old style headlines which are written more with the idea of clever attraction than being clear what the story is about. Written thus because the headline hovers over the story and with a quick skim one can see what it’s about.

But if one has to click on a dubious headline to find out more, the speed of the computer can be an impediment to browsing.

The “Reader” obviates this. But it means that in order to bookmark a story, read comments and highlight sections it’s necessary to keep both the “Reader” open and the online edition of the paper open. This is dumb. But it works.

This morning I skipped Greek and went right to reading the paper and drinking coffee. I don’t know how long I can comfortably sit up. Yesterday the body aches were so bad that I couldn’t read. I lay in bed and listened to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence: A Christian History.

Then Eileen and I watched Newshour on the computer and I went to bed. I chose another book on Hoopla to listen to: 10:04 by Ben Lerner. I have been burned more than once by audiobooks online via library access. Sometimes the books are very badly written. I suspect that they may be self published. This is especially true of Blackstone Audio.

I haven’t been using Hoopla very long. Both Blackstone audio and Hoopla are available online via our local library. Yesterday on Hoopla there was a list of the best audiobooks of 2014. 10:04 was the first one. I have to admit it’s not bad.

Unfortunately, I do doze off and miss stuff. But that’s not all bad.

I’m planning to baby myself today, staying in bed, gathering strength for tomorrow’s service.