I seem to be emerging largely unscathed by my ballet camp marathon. Yesterday was one of two days I had four classes scheduled to play for. On this penultimate day of camp I was assigned to two teachers I have never worked with. This is actually part of the charm of this work: getting to work with so many fine people. One of these teachers was a seasoned international type, the other had never worked with live accompaniment before.

I also had two sessions in a row in the un-air-conditioned studio. They have been moving sessions out of this studio due to the incredible heat wave. Yesterday they did not do this. My 1:30 class was very hot.

The next class at 3 PM seemed a bit less excruciating.

I only have two classes left today.

Also this week we have had construction renovation stuff at the house. The workers ran across a duct they needed to move wrapped in asbestos. This halted all work until a specialist company could be contracted to come in and remove the asbestos. This happened this week.

Our new washer and dryer are scheduled to arrive today. The new bathroom seems to be completely dry-walled but I don’t think they will be able to install the washer and dryer just yet. Here’s a pic of where they will ultimately go:

But at least they will be on the premises.

It’s kind of a weird experience for me to actually be looking forward to the arrival of a major appliance. Usually I don’t care too much about that sort of thing. But. Our old washer (not that old as Eileen is quick to point out) doesn’t work very well and needs to be coaxed through any cycle now (it gets stuck or doesn’t rinse the clothes or doesn’t drain properly). So it will be very  nice when the new one gets in place.

1. Billions in Debt, Detroit Tumbles Into Insolvency – NYTimes.com

Largest bankruptcy in history. I lived there for a whil.

2.BBC News – Dinosaur teeth reveal feeding habits

I love this shit.

3. Taking Off My Pants – NYTimes.com

This is an article by a composer who is dealing with gender prejudices. I noticed one young classical musician had this linked in on facebookistan. I basically see music differently but it is interesting to read.

4. Digital Tools to Curb Snooping – NYTimes.com

I keep reading about recommendations to use a password compiling and security software. It seems to me that they would be on the frontline of getting hacked. What do I know?

5.“Do This” a sermon by Jen Adams

I mentioned this sermon in a post recently. Jen put it up and here’s a link. Recommended.

A silly thing happened  in my last class yesterday. Observers are allowed in these ballet classes. Etiquette in ballet class is mandatory. Students are supposed to never yawn in class, dress and act in rigorously prescribed ways and even ask permission to enter class late. Usually observers are other ballet teachers.

Yesterday an observer came into class. Before too long I noticed she was talking (!) on her cell phone. Talking itself is not usually done by observers, much less  on a cell. I looked at her. I looked at the teacher who was continuing to teach the class. I looked at the person who takes roll and monitors each class.

Without too much thinking, I began to play the piano louder and louder until the woman left the room.

Get it?

She couldn’t hear to talk on the phone.

Much like it was difficult for the teacher and the students to concentrate while SHE was on the phone.

Immediately after this, the teacher walked by the piano and thanked me. After class, she told me I had  made her day. It’s the little things in life, eh?

1. The lunatic fringe opposes Common Core | Michigan Radio

This Michigan legislative story has recently bugged me. This morning I got up and decided I should know who my state rep and senator are. I was curious if they were involved in what Lessenberry is calling (and I agree seems to be) the “lunatic fringe.”

It didn’t take too long for me to find that my state senator is Arlan B. Meekhof (30th district of Mich) and my rep is Joseph Haveman (90th district). They are both Republicans but as far as I could tell from a quick look neither has online evidence of mindless attacking the Common Core legislation.

It was pretty to easy to find these guys: Link to Find your Mich Senator page and Find your Michigan State Representative page.

My guess is this info is probably online for most states.

2. Was Blind, but Now She Sees – NYTimes.com

Another feel good story from journalists. Come to think of it, Kristof wrote another happy link I previously pointed out.

“Journalists and humanitarians understandably focus on unmet needs, and that can leave the impression that the story of global health is a depressing one of failure. In fact, it’s an inspiring story of progress.”

3. The Drone That Killed My Grandson  – NYTimes.com

This stuff makes me crazy. States killing people via due process has always struck as wrong. Without due process, insane if not proof of the existence of evil.

I have three days left in my ballet camp work. In the course of the next three days I have nine classes to play for: three today, four tomorrow (!) and two on Friday. Mary Ellen Cooper, the person who books this gig, handed me a check yesterday. That’s nice. I like how prompt this organization (Ceccheti) is to pay. I have found churches and colleges less considerate around this kind of pay issue (piece work). When I get paid early, however, I always put the check away and do not cash it until services have been rendered. This is a good size check and it will be good to pay off some stuff with it.

I had an in-depth meeting with my boss yesterday. We had a lot to talk about. Good stuff, but not stuff I should be writing here just yet. We did talk about the Gloria setting I am writing to go with the Holy, holy and Fraction anthem we have been using (also my composition).

I have called this set the Grace Jazz Mass. I am now happier with this designation than I was at the outset. I now see Jazz as a bigger umbrella of styles than I used to.

The Gloria I am attempting to write has (for me anyway) African overtones in its use of rhythms and repetition. I can hear (and have written some of) three part women’s choir harmony on some licks to the congregation melody. I basically have an entire melody sketched out and a working accompaniment for about a third of the composition at this point.

I am interested in how artists (musicians, writers, and others) are more prone to collaboration these days.

At least it seems so to me. I like the idea. My list of possible collaborators is not long in the Holland Michigan area. But what the heck. I realize that Reverend Jen (the title she prefers to be referred to in formal writing) has been a valuable collaborator in my work at Grace. She was invaluable in her response to my writing the two congregational pieces we use. I told her yesterday that I hoped to show her some work on the Gloria soon for her input.

She demurred that she’s not a musician. Then she immediately acknowledged her part in this sort of collaboration. It’s a sort of verbal dance that I have done with people for ages when they say stuff like “I don’t know art-music-poetry-etc but  know what I like.

For my part, I think that all humans are artists. Creating is part of living.

This is one of the reasons I resonate so strongly with Christopher Small’s coining of the verb, “musicking.” I really extend this idea of doing is the main part of living into almost all areas of my own life.

Come to think of it, (not to get all religious and shit but still) Jen ended her sermon Sunday quoting Christ’s answer to the lawyer in the gospel who asked what to do to inherit eternal life. After quoting the Shema (Love God) and adding a little twist (Love your neighbor): Jen quoted “Do this and you will live.” For me the emphasis is on “do.”

I’m hitting the home stretch in the ballet camp. Three classes today. Also meeting with my boss at church, Reverend Jen. Three classes tomorrow. Four on Thursday. Two on Friday. I feel like I’m starting the countdown.

Yesterday I could see the fatigue in the students and the teachers.  My first class (which began at 10:30) was particularly brutal. The students did not seem to be able to concentrate. The teacher pushed them and teased them and wheedled them. At the end of the class there was a bit more concentration than at the beginning. But it was still not up to what is needed.

Learning to dance, learning one’s body and how to move it, is a very  involved intellectual endeavor. Good dancers have to have brains. This may seem contradictory, but it’s also true of good athletes for similar reasons.

Mozart vs. the Beatles – NYTimes.com

I read this article this morning. It’s written by Gary Gutting, a Notre Dame philosophy teacher. In it, I think he attempts to make an argument for high art. I think he pretty much fails. He links in Virginia Woolf’s chapter in her book The Death of the Moth called “Middlebrow.”

Gutting dances around in a way familiar to me from having listened to many profs and students. He has a conviction and is seeking a way to prove it. The conviction seems to be that “high” art is superior to “popular” art.

This stuff never fails to amaze me.  I think the conversation begins from a confused point of view. Namely that art is a thing not a process.

Woolf on the other hand has written a piece of humor. “Middlebrow” is an unpublished letter in response to a review of her work. She objects to not being explicitly called a “highbrow” by the reviewer. The essay is a bundle of silliness around class and learning.

This articles sent me to the OED to find out more about the “brow” words. Interestingly enough they are first found in the United States.

Woolf defines highbrow as someone who is chasing ideas, lowbrow as someone who is chasing life. “Middlebrow” is sort of a despicable lukewarm person in between who also seems to be in the “middle class” economically.

As I read her chapter this morning, I kept thinking that she is obviously not entirely serious, but doesn’t avoid a condescending tone.

I have been reading about her peripherally in the biographies of T. S. Eliot. She doesn’t come off very well in those either.

Oh well.

I think these two articles and their arugments would benefit from Christopher Small’s insight that art is a social dance and not a thing in and of itself. Both thinkers seem to presume a canon of art that is sort of eternal and sitting somewhere in Plato’s cave.

This kind of thinking is in such contrast to sitting in a room with people dancing, improvising music.

It can be a very odd experience living in the USA (“Uppercrust Sideria of Utilitarios” is one name Joyce gives to it.)

I think McLuhan had some notions about what was coming when he was writing in the 60s.

I am seeing him as a very astute blind man who had hold of an elephant in places that are still hidden from the rest of us blind men.

It is tricky reading him. He speaking from the past. He makes what seem like silly mistakes to one who reads him now. His language goes from stilted to clear to eloquent.

I think he mastered the beauty of a synoptic sentence that holds an insight.

Obviously, the “media is the message” which more properly would be the media is PART of the message. It is foolish to completely put aside content and context and the subjective and objective response we have to our technology. But it’s equally foolish to assume we understand the inherent changes and effects worked upon us by it.

Besides the necessary limitation of speaking from one point in history, McCluhan often draws wild conclusion about what caused what. An example that pops to my mind is that the “flowering of jazz in the twenties was a popular response to the highbrow richness and orchestral subtlety of Debussy-Delius period.”

Wrong.

I think it was a mutual influence and if anything Debussy and Satie borrowed from the jazz idiom.

This is one of many flawed observations that a reader of McCluhan in the 21st century must guard against. I have many of them marked in my copy of Understanding Media.

The other thing to guard against is McLuhan propensity to see an subject as either one way or the other. While insisting on the multiplicity and variety of  evolving human technology, he falls again and again into the actual fragmenting (and compartmentalization) he is preaching against.

But instead of railing about his weaknesses, I am more interested in those insights historical and philosophical that seem to still elude the thinking about technology and the arts that I read. Or at least most of it.

Here are some random examples:

“Our private and corporate lives have become information processes because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology.”

Speaking of T.S. Eliot’s work:

” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an interpenetration of film form and jazz idiom. But this mix reached its greatest power in The Wasteland and Sweeney Agonistes. Prufrock uses not only film form but the film theme of Charlie Chaplin, as did James Joyce in Ulysses. Joyce’s Bloom is a deliberate takeover from Chaplin (“Chorney Choplain,” as he called him in Finnegans Wake. And Chaplain, just as Chopin had adapted the pianoforte to the style of the ballet, hit upon the wondrous media mix of ballet and film in developing his Pavlovalike alternation of ecstasy and waddle.” (!)

“The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity. In this mild form everyone could play many roles. Participation was high, and organization was low. This is the formula for stability in any type of organization.”

I can’t resist adding this little gem in which McLuhan connects the development of the phonograph to the loss of singing in the lives of people in the USA. I was surprised to read this quotation he draws on from John Philip Sousa.

“With the phonograph vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it now weaken? What of the national chest? Will it now shrink?”

McLuhan goes on: “One fact Sousa had grasped: The phonograph is an extension and amplification of the voice that may well have diminished individual vocal activity, much as the car had reduced pedestrian activity.”

1. Glasto musings – Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer

I regularly read this woman’s astute blog. I loved this quote mentioning Mick Jagger in this one: “It should feel as if Sir Mick and I are in the same profession: music. But sometimes it doesn’t.”

2. Music Man, Merry Band – NYTimes.com

This is one of two “happy links” I mentioned yesterday. I love it that a bunch of jaded classical and broadway musicians find time to just do music for the love of doing it. Very cool.

3. A Free Miracle Food! – NYTimes.com

This is the other “happy link.” One thing I particularly like about this story is the way the journalists offered a starving baby and her mother a ride to the hospital.  I often wonder how journalists covering the tragedies of the world don’t just throw down their equipment and start helping.

I was thinking I could link up some happy news stories this morning (Nicholas Kistroff’s Wednesday’s column “A Free Miracle Food” and the “Music Man, Merry Band” article published on Friday). The phone app I use for the New York Times is of course clunky in that I have not found a way to bookmark articles using it. Instead I email myself the link. Unfortunately, the link is to the mobile.nytimes.com site and takes you to a page designed just for mobile apps.

So in order to continue bookmarking the pages from the actual NYtimes.com website, I have to go online and search for the article to bookmark it with my other pages on diigo.com where I have bookmarks that reflect years of bookmarking.

Anyway, this morning I thought I would like to bookmark the story “Music Man, Merry Band” and figured it would easily be found on the Arts page of today’s NYtimes.com. Unfortunately my eye fell on the lead articles announcing George Zimmerman’s acquittal.

Even though I was expecting this verdict I found the story very dismaying. It’s hard not to see this case as about anything but race and violence. But Florida law, incompetence in the police investigation (they contaminated evidence), and possible overreach of prosecutors all came together and created reasonable doubt in the legal sense.

Out here in my world I have no doubt that something wrong happened here. A man died. A tragedy.

Yesterday I bookmarked Charles Blow’s insightful pre-verdict article. Beyond the Courtroom – NYTimes.com, in which he quotes the African proverb “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

Blow seems to expect the verdict that happened. One problem he points to in this kind of case is that the dead are unable to tell their story. Hence the proverb.

And then there’s this disturbing news story: Fla. mom gets 20 years for firing warning shots – CBS News. Same state. No one killed. But apparently the defense team was unable to invoke the law that protected Zimmerman. Oh yeah. The woman is black. She fired warning shots at her abusive husband.

I certainly don’t have answers for all this stuff. Just questions  and sadness. I think I’m going to leave it at that today. I’ll put up a happier links a different day.

Yesterday was Eileen’s 61st birthday. I’m hoping she had a good one. I had a flower waiting for her when she got up. Years and years of birthdays and living habits make these kinds of days tricky. You want it to be nice for your partner. This means if you make too much fuss, they will feel uncomfortable. Eileen often compares how I  celebrate her birthday with how she celebrates mine immediately. At any rate, having a date night last night seemed to be what she wanted most. So that’s what we did. The waitress included some carrot cake to go for Eileen after learning it was her birthday.

I had the morning free yesterday and used the time to attempt to balance checkbooks and do bills. After  a few attempts at balancing  Eileen’s and my checkbook and failing, I decided to ask her if she would check my work. Mom’s balanced easily.

Eileen ended up taking Mom to the doctor. I made the appointment misremembering that Eileen had the day off. She alternates Fridays and Saturdays off. I got confused. I left a voice mail for her on Thursday after I made the appointment. She immediately got time off from work to take Mom in. Mom began suffering from a symptom of excessive saliva immediately after we left on vacation.

This is a symptom she had for many years (in the 90s?). It was eventually diagnosed as myasthenia gravis and her doctor put her on a med for it which she still takes.

Her internist (also Eileen’s and my doctor) dismissed the nurses’ concern that Mom had a hiatal hernia, upped her MG meds and sent her to a neurologist. We’ll see what the outcome will be. Mom has lots of confusion around this sort of thing, oscillating between insisting she has had symptoms for weeks (this is probably not the case, because I would have noticed) and asking Eileen when it began.

The doctor kept Eileen and Mom waiting for over an hour past the appointment time. Eileen ended up having to take two and half hours off from work. She was of course good natured about it, but still it is annoying. I try to tell myself that doctors have a tough time juggling patients. At the same time the “professional” class doesn’t realize how deeply entitled it sees itself.

Oh well.

I have been enjoying using Home Fweet Home to understand Joyce’s Finnegans Wake more completely. It has slowed down my reading of it. Though the entire text is online , Raphael Slepon, the web site creator, recommends not using the online site to actually read the book. So far I have read a paragraph in the book and then reread it online with the annotations interleaved (you can set up the search results however you want— you don’t have have the text of the book present and can just access notes).

Eileen has just surprised me and gotten up. I’m sure this is so we can have some moments together before I go off to play three ballet classes. So I’m outta here!

I had only two classes yesterday. I was mistaken about the added class I thought the director had told me about. Instead I was to switch my afternoon class to a morning one. When I arrived at the afternoon one, I found that I was not needed. Hurray! I happily walked home.

My two morning classes were with two new teachers I have been working with and admiring. Their names are Scott Putman and Gordon Pierce. I would google them and put up some info except that I am avoiding finding out more about them at this stage of working with them. Both men have a quiet air of competence and expertise that suggests an impressive CV. I would rather know them in their work at this point and not be inadvertently affected by their prestige and reputation (which I suspect is probably extensive).

Doing it this way is much more interesting and rewarding. I’ll check them out later after the camp.

Scott Putman had a class full of young dancers. It was fascinating to watch him adjust his pedagogy for their age without diluting it.

Things I jotted down during his class: “In order to change a physical movement, it needes to be repeated 12 times in a row to make a change.” When referring to more advanced difficult moves to come, he said something about one must learn the basics before the “tasty delicious stuff.” I quite like that. And then he said, “When in doubt, dance!”

I really like that.

When in doubt, do something, move, play!

Yes.

Gordon Pierce has a quiet way of connecting with advanced dancers. Judging from the attention and response yesterday, this works. It is fun to watch and participate in. His manner his unpretentious and like all the teachers totally focused on the dance. I watched him win over a class of young adults with this procedure. No doubt, these kids know about his background and abilities. But despite that, one must connect with the people in front of you.

After class, Gordon and I simultaneously said to each other: “That was fun!”

This has been my gut feeling so far throughout this camp. I find it fun to observe and then lay down some music.

The teachers either expect me to make up some cool stuff or don’t mind if I do. I tend to watch the teacher and process their movements (which are usually wonderfully graceful and beautiful) and then try to allow the music to come into being in the actual moment of the danced combination.

Made it through the grueling six hours of Ballet classes yesterday.

(These two pics are from the movie, “They Shoot  Horses Don’t They.” If you are looking for a depressing flick about dance marathons, this is the movie for you.)

I worked with four different instructors (four classes: each one and a half hour long). The instructor for the last class was one I have worked with before.  Last time, it took me a while to figure out that she wasn’t hearing my introductions (preparations, they call them) as clearly as others (teachers and students). In order for her to be satisfied I had to end the intros on the tonic chord of the key I was going to improv in. Usually I end on the dominant chord as this prepares the upcoming music. But for some reason this person did not hear it easily.

I suspect this teacher has not worked with live pianists much or that she has one that she is comfortable with and does this kind of introduction.  She also had very specific requirements of how heavily I should play or loud. This was easy if she told me this. Once she had asked me to play softly I continued until she complained that I needed to change to a more vigorous introduction to a piece.

This all sounds like the teacher is obtuse which she is not. Like all the instructors she is concentrating on training and evaluating a room full of dancing bodies. That’s what’s on their mind. The music is just the framework for the exercises.

I managed to remember some of the above while dealing with this teacher yesterday. I think the class went better because of it.

I came home, poured me a glass of wine (NOT a martini) and read Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger. Eileen brought an autographed copy home from the American Library Association convention she recently attended.

Interestingly enough, the book seems to have originated in a request to Niffenegger from Wayne McGregor for a “new dance.” Raven Girl is an attempt at writing a new fairy tale (which succeeds in my opinion) that could be the basis of a cool new ballet.

I love serendipity like this (reading it while working a ballet camp). As usual Niffenengger does her own illustrations.

The story and the pictures are lovely and intriguing. I liked it.

Speaking of books (heh), David Brooks recently mentioned an interesting book in a column, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. Even though it’s another dang religious book, I found Brooks description intriguing. I looked on Amazon and was amazed to find that the Kindle book was $39.14 and the published book was $42.75. Yikes.

I was using my phone which did not enable the browse inside option (one of my favorite things about Amazon which I use all the time…. I see it like picking up a book in a book store used to be). So I searched the online site of our local library and found it was sitting on the shelf. Checked it out the next time I was there.

Then I was reading the comments on a NYT article about ebooks. One reader pointed out that when a buyer is interested in a book and sees it in an ebook for $9.99, he is likely to purchase it. If the price is $15 or higher, the buyer is more likely to check it out of the library. Wow. That’s just what happened to me.

1. the ocean at the end of the lane (a book & marriage review) The official website of Amanda Fucking Palmer. Yes it is – Amanda Palmer

I love Palmer and like Gaiman. Here she writes a bit about Gaiman’s new book. I haven’t had time to finish the whole thing but what I have read is interesting.

2.Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ – NYTimes.com

So Eichmann’s evil wasn’t so banal afterall.

3. 140 Characters Spell Charges and Jail – NYTimes.com

Seems incredibly naive to me. Poor fuck ended up in jail. No wonder.

4.Games: McLuhan (Reyy)

This is a link to a quote from Understanding Media by McCluhan. It talks about a hockey player thinking about the acoustics of a smacked puck in an arena. I liked that. I have been reading in this book and thinking quite a bit about it. I’ll probably put my thoughts in a blog sometime. M is wrong about a lot due to the limited context of his time. But he is also at the same time full of insights which help me thinking about the current interconnectedness and explosion of access via the interwebs. More later.

I’m pressed for time again this morning. The Farmers Market opens at 8 AM and I plan to be there to pick up my CSA package and buy some chevre and eggs. My first ballet class is at 9 AM. I have four of them today which means six hours in class.

My Mom has developed symptoms of a probably she had years ago. She finds flem constantly filling her mouth and throat. I fear it’s possible that her internist discontinue the meds that were keeping this in abeyance. I just missed the nurse by minutes yesterday at the nursing home. I don’t really have time to get over there today. I will tomorrow.

Mom is also listless and “feeling glum.” She was pretty unresponsive at lunch with Mark and Leigh on Monday. But she at least did get out which is saying something if she is having depression.

After classes yesterday, I zipped over to the library to return the books she had read and get her new ones.

After dropping those off, I went to church and chose four organ pieces for the preludes and postludes for the upcoming two Sundays. I chose little pieces that require little prep at the console. They are mostly manuals (keyboard no pedals) so I can practice them more easily.

Our washer continues to go nuts. Yesterday it probably was in spin cycle for most of the day. When Eileen came home she noticed it. We managed to get to stop. I am trying to trick it right now to complete the cycle. Eileen wondered if the clothes were okay  after a day of spinning. We’ll see.

Gotta Skate.

This good news is that I felt pretty rested yesterday. Rested from vacationing I guess. The bad news (?) is that Cecchetti has indeed scheduled many hours for me as a ballet accompanist during the next two weeks. On two days they have even scheduled me for four classes. That’s six hours. I don’t think they usually do that to their accompanists. At any rate, I can use the money and I do enjoy the work.

I fell back easily into doing this work. It’s basically careful improvising. I need to be sure to keep my phrases even. If the class is struggling, I make the melodies very simple and clear. If not, I take more liberties with melody and rhythm. But always keeping the phrases four and eight measures long.

I worked with a new instructor yesterday who complimented me after the class. He said something like he appreciated my rhythmic playing instead of the usual blah blah blah that he found accompanists played. It’s tricky because you don’t really want to distract the teacher or the players. At the same time, the fun for me is the music, so if I can vary it, I have more fun.

My solution to this is to be a bit adventurous with my rhythms. I also use a lot of different kinds of chordal harmony: some jazz and even dissonances, as long as it’s clear, it’s okay.

Anyway, I probably won’t have time for long blogs this week.

Last night, instead of treadmilling, I sat around with Mark and Leigh sipping drinks and chatting. They are planning to take off today so I wanted to spend time with them. Also I was a bit tired for exercising. Hopefully today I will have energy, even though I have four and a half hours of class scheduled.

We arrived back safely from the Grayling cabin last night. Mark and Leigh came to Holland as well. I begin playing for the annual Internation Cecchetti dance camp today. Mercifully I only have afternoon classes today. I will receive the schedule for the upcoming two weeks at one of them.

In the meantime I have been thinking about David Foster Wallace since I listened a bit to the audiobook of his last novel over vacation.

In Chapter 19 of The Pale King the authorial veil seems to slip a bit and we glimpse what David Foster Wallace’s incredible mind has to say about the contemporary madness of living in the USA (and beyond).

The chapter consists entirely of dialogue. Like other chapters in the book it leaps into the middle of something with no indication of context or characters. Gradually we figure out who is speaking and that they are stuck in an elevator.

This is a brilliant context for the chapter. Several IRS people are stuck in an elevator together. The reader can eventually identify one voice as Mr. Glendenning. He is the senior person in the elevator and serves as a sort of Socractic like narrator of the conversation. It is his voice that Wallace is using to elucidate his own take on “civics and selfishness” (a phrase he uses in the very first sentence of the chapter before we really know who is talking and where we are).

“Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.”

Telos means “End, purpose, ultimate object or aim” (OED).

The idea that profits drive the masters of the universe seems to be a defining understanding of contemporary living. That it is both enshrined and hidden is also party of the tricky stuff.

The Pale King is set in the late 80s, but Wallace is speaking clearly to the early 21st century. He captures the puzzling current anger and understanding of the government as “them.”

“The government is the people, leaving aside various complications, but we split it off and pretend it’s not us; we pretend it’s some threatening Other bent on taking our freedoms, talking our money and redistributing it, legislating our morality in drugs, driving, abortion, the environment—Big Brother, the Establishment—”
“The Man.” (SBJ note – chimes in another voice in the elevator)

Mr. Glendenning quickly arrives at the metaphor of the “lifeboat” to help explain the morality or lack their of in reifying the government into “them” and not “us.”

“Suppose you’re in a lifeboat with other people and there’s only so much food, and you have to share it. You’ve only got so much and it’s got to go around, and everybody’s really hungry… Of course you want it all, of course you want to keep every dime you make. But you don’t, you ante up, because that’s how things have to be for the whole life boat. You sort of have a duty to the others in the boat. A duty to yourself not to be the sort of person who waits till everybody is a asleep and then eats all the food.”

“You’re talking like a civics class”

“Which you never had, I’m betting.”

I recommend the entire book, but especially chapter 19.

I just got up from my computer at the table and took this pic.  This is where I h ave been this past week, my wife’s family hunting cabin. My brother and his extended family joined us on Wednesday. It has been very enjoyable to have them around.

 This morning I had to look up something in the OED and broke down and hot spotted in with my phone to the interwebs.

Actually I needed to take some reading notes on Understanding Media by Marshall McCluhan. I have found this work very odd in that some of its insights are dated or even wrong, but others so salient that I think McCluhan’s wisdom informs thinking about the internet and community.

Today I read his chapter on The Press which blew me away. I’ll spare you (and me) putting anything here about it today, but it will probably leak out here before too long.

We jump in the car and drive home some time tomorrow. It has been relaxing to sit around and read and do lots of nothing.

I finished NW by Zadie Smith and was so taken with it I started a second read. Great book.

Well enough jokes as they say, I have to get back to seriously goofing off.

Eileen came back a bit earlier yesterday than she said she would so that was a nice surprise. She was of course exhausted. I had completed all (well most) of my little tasks that needed doing prior to leaving for the cabin in Grayling . We relaxed and chatted for the evening.

The week at the cabin will most likely be an Internet fast.

I know, I know. You read a lot about people needing to get away from the Interwebs, how they can’t seem to stop themselves from checking their email every thirty seconds. I don’t use the internet quite like that. For me, it will mean no New York Times and no Oxford English Dictionary for a few days.

I have been putting music on this laptop and am planning to take my good computer speakers (which do sound very good to me) for listening (especially when cooking). I plugged in my exterior hard drive where I have much of my music stored and copied a few things. I downloaded Amazon’s new “Cloud Player” which actually works well and pulled down several albums I have purchased there.

I also purchased a copy of an album I have been listening to on Spotify (It’s good-bye to Spotify for a while).

I was reading about Bach’s Musical Offering and realized I didn’t know that much about the music itself. I played through the first 3 part Ricarcare and remembered that I loved it. Started playing through it and listening to the wonderful setting by the illustrious  Capella Istropolitana. I do love fugues and what not when played by a group of instruments. I took the Musical Offering along to church yesterday and sneaked in a little bit of playing one of the trio movements on the organ. Very cool music. So I thought I would want to continue listening (and playing… I’m taking my electric piano) during vacation.

And I’m planning on taking some ebooks and printed books with me.

But speaking of exiling myself from the Interwebs, I discovered a pretty interesting web site this morning.

I have been dipping into Finnegans Wake recently. This morning I was wondering how much I had read in it. It looks like I have read most of it judging from the little penciled notes in my copy. I have outlined much of it and was wondering if there was some good material online I might copy. I was anticipating having to be offline and started poking around and found FWEET (pronounced like sweet with a lisp).

I was charmed and even downloaded the font that would allow Joyce’s use of sigla.

It really looks like a fun and extensive site. Of course I find it the day I will be going offline.

I may be able to blog depending upon if I drive into Grayling (like I did last time). I am hoping I will be able to read the New York Times on my phone since this will be my first cabin visit with my smart phone. I know that Emily had difficulty getting reception with her cell phone last year but don’t know what provider she uses.

Anyway, I am looking forward to some serious goofing off with or without internet

I have been keeping busying while Eileen is away. Yesterday I went picked up the CSA package and tomatoes, strawberries and cherries at the Farmers Market. The market was very busy. I went around 10 AM. Then stopped by a little local shop (called “I Love Bread and Butter”?) and bought some spicy peanut butter, vegan peanut butter cookies and some savory zucchini bread. Stopped by the coffee shop to buy a pound of beans. Most of these purchases are in preparation for this week’s time away at the Hatch Cabin. But several cookies are gone as well as about half of the savory zucchini bread.

Back home to move the computer and bookshelf to make way for a new electric outlet installation Eileen and I have asked our workers to install. This new outlet will be for my treadmill.

That took up an hour or so. Then off to my Mom’s to check in with her and grab her library books. Dropped by the library to return them and get Mom some more books. Dropped those off to her. Then to church to practice organ, home to exercise and once more to sip martinis and read. Not a bad life, but missing my wife of course.

1. Dangerous Divisions in the Arab World – NYTimes.com

This editorial helped me sort out some of the complexities of the current mess.

2. Rights Report Faults Mass Relocation of Tibetans – NYTimes.com

The Chinese do seem to love to uproot zillions of people for the “good of the society.”

3.Redrawing the Family Debate – NYTimes.com

New groupings of people as family —- “Huddle”?

4. Don’t Talk With the Taliban – NYTimes.com

I like that this writer urges policy makers to review recent history.

Eileen left yesterday morning. I did my usual Friday routine of doing bills (both for Eileen and  me and Mom). Checkbooks balanced. Yes! Then I tousled with my Internet security on my laptop. When I purchased my laptop last December, I allowed Best Buy to provide me with a short subscription to Trend Micro. It lapsed this week and rather than purchase more of it I managed to add it to my other Trend Micro subscription by dropping coverage on one of  the computers we don’t use much.

After that I was off to practice at church. After rehearsing, I stopped by Meijers and purchased a new martini shaker, gin, vermouth and olives. Came home, exercised, showered and then sat in the back yard sipping a martini and reading.

I have decided that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a heckuva writer.

I have mentioned before that I don’t see myself as a reader enamored of short stories. However I loved Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout which was a series of connected short stories. Now I’m reading The Things Around Your Neck by Adichie and it too is a collection of short stories. They are not connected plot wise but all (so far) have to do with Nigerian characters.

I especially liked one called “Jumping Monkey Hill.” The title refers to a fictional posh resort in South Africa where a group of aspiring and accomplished African writers have gathered for a two week workshop.

They have all committed to writing a short story for each other to critque while there. Adichie cleverly weaves one of these short stories with the point of view of the writer who wrote. So it’s a short story within a short story.

She capitalizes on this notion by having the main character, Ujunwa, insist to the other writers that her work is not autobiographical. The point of the story ends up that not only is Ujunwa’s work autobiographical but  “Jumping Monkey Hill” could in its entirety could well have happened to Adichie herself.

This technique had an impact on me because it comes as a sort of denouement when the readers is explicitly told that the fictional short story of Ujunwa (the story within the story which is presented entirely interleaved) represents something that actually happened to her. This refutes the snarky criticisms made of her work (“this story is implausible”) by the powerful leader and sponsor of the workshop and his toadies.

It hit me as strong writing.

Now I am savoring each subsequent short story so this book doesn’t go too quickly.

1. New Leak Suggests Ashcroft Confrontation Was Over N.S.A. Program – NYTimes.com

I remember when the Bush administration approached Ashcroft laying in a hospital bed. Not the country’s most shining moment.

2. The Up-in-the-Air President – NYTimes.com

This is an effective critique of President Obama from the left which ironically points out at one point how much more effectively G. W. Bush described slavery in a speech.

3. Native Alaska, Under Threat – NYTimes.com

A moving description of a crisis from a Native Alaskan writer’s pen.

4. Viral Justice – NYTimes.com

If you doubt that social media can have an impact on a country’s political system and sense of justice, read this article about what has been going on in Afghanistan.

5. U.S. Prism, Meet China’s Golden Shield – NYTimes.com

I continue to be fascinated with how China’s public rhetoric and law is evolving before our eyes. This article is about how a Chinese lawyer is attempting to get his country to have better public responsiveness and accountability than the USA (Prism is the name of the NSA invasive program which is the subject of a bunch debate right now ).

Eileen goes away today. I will have time alone until Sunday when she returns. Yesterday morning I returned to my usual routine of alternating reading and practicing which had been totally disrupted by having workmen in the house. Despite enjoying this I am not looking forward to Eileen going away. I know she will have fun. She is going with two colleagues to Chicago for a convention. Yesterday she said if she could have chosen any two, these two people were the ones she would have chosen. So that should make for a fun few days for her.

While she is gone I need to continue to prepare the house for the workers. I think I mentioned this means moving one more bookshelf. I also need to move the desktop computer.

I realize that I am operating with a bit of mental and physical fatigue that seems left over from the school year and choir season. It is this fatigue that has led me to skip the regional AGO convention happening (this week?) in Kalamazoo.

I also hesitantly mention that I have been doing some composing. I find that talking about this especially in the early stages can sometimes sabotage the process a bit. Curiously I had an idea on Sunday during church and have been developing it. I try to keep good old fashion staff paper by the organ for moments when I want to jot down an idea or a descant or something. Luckily there was paper there Sunday.

Looking forward to some time away next week.

In the meantime, here are today’s links.

1. Watching the Lights Go Out

This is the blog of someone who is suffering from Alzheimers. It has a “Flowers for Algernon” feel to me. His entry today talks about how he discover some of his decreased mental capacity by taking online IQ tests. I think about Alzheimers and related declines in my own life. My short term memory has gaps. But this is not new. Only my monitoring them for increase is new.

2. The strangely familiar browsing habits of 14th-century readers

A review of a scholarly book. The point of the review (and the book) is that readers pre-Gutenberg read in a fragmented fashion as is evidenced by the assembled collections of excerpts they owned. Unfortunately a quick glance on Amazon reveals the scholarly book to be practically unreadable due to its gobbedly-gook academic prose.

3. DNA Buried 7,000 Centuries Is Retrieved – NYTimes.com

I love this shit.

4. Understanding Steinese: Gertrude Stein’s Blunt, Beautiful Peculiarities : The New Yorker

I book marked this one to read.

5.Current Conditions – NYTimes.com

Linda Greenhouse’s astute comments on current SCOTUS behavior.

6. Disabled duck gets new 3D-printed foot | Crave – CNET

I also put this link up on Facebookistan. Excellent use of tech.

We are experience a happy hiatus of a worker-free home at this point. They have done as much as they can do. Now they are waiting on the asbestos removers to come. This could take quite some time. We leave for the annual Jenkins retreat at the Hatch Grayling cabin on next Monday. Eileen has several days in Chicago coming up. An ALA convention. I have not done anything about attending the regional AGO convention during this same period.  I think I might be still a bit burnt out from the past year of work.

Before vacation, I have one more project of moving stuff around for the workers. I have asked them to install an electric plug in the dining room specifically for the treadmill. The treadmill specs recommend this. Unfortunately I will have to clear my computer and a bookcase out of the way in order for them to access the wall. I probably won’t get to that for  a day or so.

Here are a few links I have been neglecting to put up.

1. The True Deservers of a Food Prize – NYTimes.com

Nice list of food people worth following. I liked this quote:

In this day hunger comes not because there is not enough food; it comes because some are unable to either buy it or produce it. Hunger represents inequality: there are no hungry people with money. Alleviating hunger, in part, is recognizing that the right to eat is equivalent to the right to breathe, which trumps the right to make profits.

2. Slurs Against Italy’s First Black National Official Spur Debate on Racism – NYTimes.com

Some racism that’s not American. Unusual.

3. 2 Executed by Hamas as Informers – NYTimes.com

I find the killing disturbing.

4.Supreme Court Weighs Cases Redefining Legal Equality – NYTimes.com

I’m still processing the rulings this week. This article helped me thinking about formal and dynamic equality in our society.

5. Inspiring Mayberry, and Then Becoming It – NYTimes.com

This is kind of an old link. I didn’t know that Mayberry seemed to be inspired by the real little town Andy Griffith came from, Mount Airy, North Carolina.

6. Brazil’s Vinegar Uprising – NYTimes.com

I love the fact that a kerfuffle about vinegar is so wrong headed. Both the idea that vinegar can be used to alleviate tear gas effects and the idea that it is a possible ingredient in explosives are completely false. This has a “V is for Vendetta” feel to me.

I finished reading The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout and returned it the library before the seven days allotted to this new book were over.

The title is a bit misleading. The book is really about the Burgess kids which includes two brothers, Jim and Bob, the younger of which is a twin to the third sibling, Susan.

In the course of the book we learn about their family of origin. When all three were small, their father left them in an idling car to go down the hill of their driveway (to check the mailbox?). With the three children in the car, the car rolled down and kills the father.

This events haunts the lives the three children in the car. The book tells the stories of their lives through their late fifties.

By the end of the book, Strout has painted a convincing picture of why America needs family and community and how this does and does not work.

She cleverly emphasizes this with a plot line about an influx of Somali refugees into a small Maine village called Shirley Falls, the fictional (as far as google can tell) city where much of her novel, Olive Kitteridge, takes place.

The refugees have fled terrible wars in their home country. We get glimpses of their lives and even get inside the head of Abdikarim Ahmed who is living through the pain of losing his wife to separation in America and not having a son. Abdikarim also rubs up against the Burgess family when he testifies at the court trial of one of them who is accused of committing a hate crime against this new Muslim community. The perpetrator is young Zach, son of Susan, who is himself estranged from his own father and is a typical gentle withdrawn American outsider who has acted in confusion causing his trial.

Not having children or not raising them well is a theme of this book. One of Bob’s wives, Pam, leaves him and it looks like it was ultimately because of his physical infertility.

I wasn’t drawn into this book as deeply as Olive Kitteridge, but I did end up enjoying it. I found passages that I wanted to keep to read and re-read and think about.

Here they are:

Haweeya is part of Abdikarim’s extended Somali family. Unlike him, she has chosen to return to Africa despite the danger. She sees that if she remains in the USA it will change her and her children in ways that are too troubling.

“Haweeya said, “In America, it is about the individual. Self-realization. Go to the grocery store, the doctor’s office, open any magazine, and it is self, self, self. But in my culture it is about community and family… I want my children not to feel—what is the word?—entitled. People here raise their children to feel entitled. If the child feels something, he says what he feels, even if it’s rude to his elders. And the parents say, Oh, good, he is expressing himself. They say, I want my child to feel entitled.”

In the next excerpt, Haweeya is telling Margaret, the sympathetic Shirley Falls Unitarian  minister, the sad news that she is leaving. Margaret is sad. Haweeya muses silently.

“She [Haweeya] wanted to say, but did not, You would not be along if you Somali, Margaret. You would have brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles everywhere with you. You would not go home to your empty rooms each night. But perhaps Margaret did not mind the empty rooms. Haweeya had never been able to figure out exactly what Americans wanted. (Everything, she sometimes thought. They wanted everything.)”

It is a nice irony that the “victims” living in refuge in America prize and actually maintain what wounded and crazy America needs and seeks usually futilely, a sense of community and extended family.

Near the end of the book, having lost almost everything, Jim complains to Bob that his life is ruined. Bob explains American families to him.

“What am I going to do, Bob? I have no family.”

“You have a family,” Bob said. “You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That’s called family.”

Despite the harshness of his comment, Bob is describing how Americans do sometimes manage to survive and stay connected to each other as best they can.

I had a busy Monday.

Eileen and I went out for breakfast, first dropping off Mom’s car at the car place for Eileen’s free monthly car wash (car of her choice). When the Mini was repaired part of the perks were free monthly car washes for a year.

We came home and I prepared three classical piano pieces for the little birthday party I was scheduled to play later in the day at my Mom’s nursing home.

Then I picked up Mom and took her to her shrink appointment. Mom was up for going out for lunch. She was in the mood for potato soup, so I searched online while she was in the appointment. It looked like the only local restaurant I could find that had potato soup was Russ’s. When we got there I left Mom in the car while I went in to confirm this. All the hostesses and waitresses were busy or not around so I grabbed a menu. No potato soup. I stopped a waitress and told her my elderly mother was waiting outside and was looking for a place that served potato soup. She told me they did so. I told her I couldn’t find it on the menu. She checked with the kitchen and came back and told me they did have it. So I went and got Mom. And sure enough she got her potato soup.

In the meantime workers were crawling all over our house.

My potato soup plan B was to come home and heat up some instant (I keep it around because Mom occasionally requests it). Then take Mom some place less chaotic and picnic. However that wasn’t necessary.

Mom said she thought she had time to rest up before the June birthday party I was playing for. This was unusual. She often doesn’t have the energy to come hear me play which of course is fine with me. She especially gets exhausted quickly after a doctor’s appointment and a meal out.

I realized I had about an hour and a half before my performance. I could have used this time to cram and go over the music I planned to play. Instead I found a quiet spot at the library and read.

This proved to be the right choice because after the performance I was exhausted. I needed all the energy I could muster.

I mused later that I “press the flesh” much more at a performance at the nursing home than I do at church where I also serve. The nursing home party is challenging in that I’m never quite sure how much people are understanding about the world around them for one reason or another. There’s always some shouting. One man insisted that we sing Happy Birthday to him before I performed. This usually happens a bit later but we did so. This man is a musician and seems to get very flushed and incoherent at my performances. I am pretty gentle with him.

And of course there’s the ones that wander around as I play.

I’m working on balancing my attention between the music I am performing and the people I am performing for. I think it’ a mistake to ignore people you are playing for. If music is communication, one has to think about to whom one is communicating a bit. On the other hand, I play in places where there is always a lot of distraction and the music is secondary or tertiary or even invisible to many people.

I was very happy with my ability to put myself inside the music yesterday as I played.

I started with a Haydn sonata movement. I talked about the fact that I understood that Haydn was someone who through music was for pleasure and joy.

Then I played a couple Bach suite movements: a Sarabande and a Bourree. These are pieces I use quite a bit. I finished up with a transcription of  the Andante Cantabile movement of Tchaikowsky’s string quartet in D major, opus 11.

After I played it I told the story of the first time I heard it. I was a high school student at Interlochen and was walking through the idyllic surrounds when I heard a string quartet playing. They were sitting outside and rehearsing. I remember the area as leafy and green. I remembered liking the music.

Later I was playing through a book of piano pieces and realized that I had a transcription of what they had been playing.

I don’t know why I press the flesh more easily at the nursing home.

I experience the people at church as more guarded and judgmental I guess.  As I age, I notice that I do not assume that people enjoy my music if they don’t give me any indication that I’m even in the room much less creating a kind of beauty in their presence. My consolation is to go deeper into the music.

This worked yesterday.

As I was walking Mom back to her room, a woman said to me with a very thick accent (Dutch? German?) that she loved music and listened very hard. I thanked her and told her we had that in common.