Yesterday we drove off to the beach.

Before long we had set up camp.

Cool rock formation.

I was quite taken with the profile of the cliffs.

Before too long we were joined by birds. One in particular was eyeing a left over sandwich on our blanket.

It doesn’t take long before he helps himself.

The beach had rocky parts as well as sand.

The pools in the rocks were full of life interesting to examine.

A sea anemone.

While Eileen was building sand castles she got swamped by a wave she didn’t see coming.

Daughter-in-law to the rescue.

Tomorrow: Newport Beach and Pier pics.

1. A Simple Way to Reduce Suicides – NYTimes.com

Packaging. Pills in individual pop out things.

2. Why Haven’t the Marines Shown Stronger Support for Women? – NYTimes.com

An admirer makes a critique.

3. Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com

Echo chambers of thought are one of my favorite concepts right now.

4. US announces bounty for African group leaders – Africa – Al Jazeera English

Slow motion drone deaths? As long as a country seeks deaths without process it is evil. Bad enough when the state kills in our name legally.

It’s 5:38 AM local time and I’m just tucking into to my first coffee of the day.

Yesterday, we all went for a nature walk.

At first we tried to access the walk via the suburb right next to it. A woman came out and politely pointed out that if we parked on the street there we would get a ticket.

So we found another place to park and access the public park.

It was a pleasant day, not too hot for California.

At first we walked on a wide smooth concrete trail.

But as we continued to walk it got less and less developed.

I loved this sign, especially the instructions on Mountain Lions.

Whenever we visit California, I immediately start admiring the mountains.

They remind me of where I was raised in East Tennessee, however California mountains are much bigger.

My understanding is that geologically the California mountains are younger.

Finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday.  Again it was a bit of a surprise since the ebook only showed that I had read 85% of the book. The remaining %15 is some notes that Wallace left about certain chapters as well as the footnotes which in usual Wallace fashion make up a hefty amount of the prose of the book.

My first impression without too much processing is that the book really is unfinished. This is disappointing because most if not all of the prose is spectacularly finished and pretty wonderful. Wallace can handle a sentence like no one else I have read who is writing now.  I have read where he has tousled with editors who did not understand that his convoluted (but always coherent) sentence structure was tightly under control and intentional.

I am reading the notes that Wallace left for himself about certain chapters now. They contain speculative plot twists that he is contemplating. So far “the pale king” of the title is only alluded to once or twice in the course of the prose. It seems to be a nickname for a high ranking IRS exec.

But this book is about a lot. Wallace is making up a story to help the reader think about America, how people interact these days, and the invisible water all we goldfish are living in (allusion to a story in one of his books about an old goldfish and a young one…. the old goldfish asks the younger one, “How’s the water?” The younger replies, “What the fuck is water?”).

1.A Freakish, Grinning Whale Is Floating Across Australia | Wired Design | Wired.com

A many-bosomed whale balloon floating across Oz.

2. Mr. Know-It-All on Whether You Own Your Kindle Books and How to Nab Free Journal Articles | Underwire | Wired.com

I was afraid of this.

3. E-Book Antitrust Trial of Apple to Begin – NYTimes.com

Don’t be evil. Oh wait. That was Google.

I managed to sleep an hour longer this morning and slept until 3:30 AM local time. Maybe I will adjust to the time change. After all, it’s only a difference of three hours. I still lay in bed until 5 AM local time and listened to the audiobook Eileen had put on her Blackberry via Herrick library’s free online audio book  page.

We have been listening to City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin. This book was published in 1955. The current copyright according to the audiobook is for 1967 and had been renewed as an audio book in 2007. Wow. That means it was written over fifty years ago. The author to the best of my knowledge is still alive. I wonder if she signed away her rights in the fifties or if her contract had some sort of time limit to her rights.

I have been enjoying it so much that I thought I might go and actually read it. While I was convalescing recently from eye surgery and not doing any actual reading, I discovered that listening to a book can be almost as good as reading it. By that I mean that I was able to think about the book and work on understanding and retain ideas from it by sitting and concentrating on listening the way I would if reading it with my eyes.

But usually when Eileen and/or I play a book at night it is to lull us to sleep, thereby almost by definition we end up not paying close attention to all of it.

I finished Musicking by Christopher Small yesterday. I found that there were chunks of his thinking with which I didn’t agree. These were more than offset by my agreement with what I perceive to be his basic thesis: that music is best understood as a very complex human activity instead of reified into a thing, whether that thing is notes on a page, ideas in a musician’s or musicologist’s brain or waves in a recording.

I disagreed with his notion that beauty is also only a subjective performance activity and does not in and of itself exist other than as a human response. This is a harder pill for me to swallow since my experience of beauty is that it is a deep emotion and conviction that feels bigger than my own response and understanding. Easier for me to believe there is no such thing as God than to believe (in Small’s words), there’s no such thing as beauty only one’s subjective pleasure in perception.

Small may well be right. However, I don’t find his observations any more helpful in this area than I do the fact that he insists that ultimately, the western classical tradition in performance goes “counter” to the way “human relationships should” function. This is a weird place for him to end up. Just as weird as his admission to loving this tradition and playing it himself on the piano.

I will continue to read and think about Christopher Small’s ideas. I have his Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music sitting on my Kindle to read next. I am drawn to his take on African American Music. In Musicking he mentions that he has written an entire book on the relationship of African American music to the white Western classical music tradition. My interest is piqued, but I am not planning to plunge into his next book on vacation. But soon.

1. The Limits of Big Data in the Big City – NYTimes.com

Higher tech is not always essential tech

2. The Price of Rebellion – NYTimes.com

“My grandfather was not a hero. Unlike Mr. Campbell, he did not plan to put his life on the line. He set out as a privileged person expecting to be heard, and ended as a privileged person surprised by backlash. But he did speak up. He was then used as an example of what could happen even to a white man of standing if he stepped out of line. And, in his own way, he spent his life paying for it.”

3. China’s Ethnic Song and Dance – NYTimes.com

China’s own version of American Minstrel Shows and just as disturbing.

4. China’s Economic Empire – NYTimes.com

China is moving in monetary ways to influence the world and it’s not all good.

5. Grief and Political Reverberations After British Soldier’s Killing – NYTimes.com

Terrible murder on the streets of London and its aftermath.

6. The Right Way to Do the Hillary Step – NYTimes.com

Edmund Hillary not Hillary Clinton. You know. The Mount Everest guy.

7. The Banality of Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ – NYTimes.com

I found this article so informative that I put it up on Facebookistan as well. Say hello to the new boss.

Well the time change is a bit of a problem. I woke up at around 2 AM local time and waited almost three hours before finally sneaking downstairs and fixing myself some coffee.

You’d think I could sleep longer since I was pretty exhausted after a long day of traveling. The worst part was probably the drive from the airport to the Casa Jenkins. We arrived at just about rush hour on a Friday evening. So it took us almost two hours to drive twenty miles. Ah, California. Land of no Mass Transit and plans to put in more highways, toll roads at that.

It was good to see my son, his wife, my grandkids: Nicholas, Savannah and Catherine in person and give hugs. It’s been a year since our last visit so everyone is doing new stuff. Fun to catch up.

I didn’t bring my blood pressure gauge. I usually get up and weigh and take my blood pressure and record the results. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a hiatus this week. That way I didn’t have to find a place in stuffed suitcase for the blood pressure gauge. I have a six month check up scheduled the Monday after we get back. Trying to be healthy as I age is not easy. I  have been putting on a few pounds since before my eye operation. But for the most part my blood pressure is not too  high. Plus I’m hoping to do a lot of relaxing, reading and goofing off for this week. Not exactly high stress.

I am looking forward to more reading. Besides the fiction that I was reading on the trip here I also spent some time with Christopher Small’s Musicking. I don’t see eye to eye with him about everything (He seems to think you have to be religious to like Bach’s religious works. Ridiculous.) But I think he gets a long more right than wrong.

For example he takes a wide view of what music is and what it is for and how it works. By examining the many ways humans do music, he puts Western music in a nice perspective.  It is helpful to read a musician trained in the Western tradition who recognizes the fact that all humans are basically musicians and that making  music (“musicking” as he likes to say) is something everyone can do.

When discussing the prevalence of people in the West who insist they are “tone-deaf,” he points out that this cannot be near as prevalent as the number of people who do not make music or grow up making music.

Pitch recognition is part of living especially if you are a native Chinese or Vietnamese speaker since the very language itself relies on pitch recognition to differentiate one word from another.

No, we in the West have been trained into ignorance, cut off from group music making that is so important in so many human cultures past and present.

He points out that received musical wisdom in the colleges and academic classical music is as much a function of social phenomena and judgments as it is cerebral aesthetic ones .

This is something I have been grappling with in the last decade of my life. After schooling I was able to make coherent observations on how well constructed music was, how it conformed to my understandings of aesthetic judgments. All my life these judgments have been a bit broader than the ones evidenced by my academic brothers and sisters in music.

But in my fifties I began to wonder just what kind of music did I personally enjoy?

A different question and a much more interesting one to me.

Christopher Small helps me wonder if I was starting to become more aware of my own social connection to music. I feel lucky that despite the fact that I have arrived at a place musically which is as anachronistic and eccentric as my entire intellectual take on life is, I still have ways to connect with other humans socially in the music I make. Whether this is listening to my grandson play the piano, noticing (as I did at the airport yesterday) kids who provide an aural musical accompaniment to the hand held video games they are playing, playing music with my piano trio, conducting my choir, playing organ at church and piano at home, or leading a group of people in singing (congregationally), in all these cases there is a concrete social aspect to what I am doing that supplements my romantic notion that when I play historical music I am in conversation with the composer and previous performers.

1. Losing My Father at War, One Letter at a Time – NYTimes.com

Very poignant writing about family, war and alzheimers.

(It turns out that the New York Times has just developed an app that recognizes Windows phones. So when I accessed it yesterday on the trip, I had to suddenly relog myself into my paid subscription and was bumped into a different url. The upshot is that in order to book mark interesting articles with my phone, I have to email them to myself (as I was doing before) but now the link is to a mobile app link which is not the same as the usual web site link. So I have to search on the stupid site to get a link to put here. This is probably not the only way to do it. It makes me crazy when people change things and make them more cumbersome.)

2. Detroit’s Davos – NYTimes.com

Davos is the city in Switzerland where the World Economic Forum meets (ah google). In Michigan there is a summit on Mackinac Island each year that is sort of a mini-state Davos. This year’s is just getting over.

3. Pro-Fracking Spin on Public Radio — FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

Bought and paid for.

4. Obama to Pick James B. Comey to Lead F.B.I. – NYTimes.com

I hope this guy is a bit more moderate than most Republicans.

5. William C. Thompson Jr. Takes Moderate Stand on Police Stops – NYTimes.com

Speaking of “moderate”  this NY city mayoral candidate is endorsed by unions but still strikes me as not all that moderate. But then I think the NYT itself is far right of any center in US politics which has to my thinking disintegrated into a country controlled by people and their corporations with the most money. Jes sayin’

Eileen and I are almost to California. We had a stop over in Chicago and now we are waiting in Phoenix for our final flight to Ontario (California). I bought a cowboy hat here in Phoenix. And sunglasses. So I guess I’m ready for a California vacation now.

I finished reading several books lately.

I  finished Brothers Karamazov on the way here. It was an excellent read. Good translation (Penyear/Volohkonsky). I will be mulling over that for a while.

I also finished Troubles by John Banville.

I’m not sure how I ran across this novel. But it was excellent. A weird mixture of Irish/Brit politics at the beginning of the 20th century and whimsy. Whimsy to the extreme. I would read another book by this guy.

Having a smart phone makes travel more fun. No matter what I seem to be able to access the Internet with it. Very cool. Also it’s nice to have the Kindle along. I have tons of books sitting on it. I read in Flannery O’Connor in between the two novels above. Plus I have several books on it that I have been reading for a while.

Phoenix has free Wifi which is enabling me to do this blog. It seems to me that’s the way it should be. Well. Onward.

1. Aldrin – ‘After Earth’ Noisier Than Space Really Is – NYTimes.com

I guess sometimes it takes an astronaut to remind movie makers that there is no atmosphere in space to carry noise.

2. Andrew M. Greeley, Outspoken Priest and Writer, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com

I have read many novels and sociological studies by Greeley. He was (is?) a blessing to anyone trying to see Catholics in a positive way.

3. Authorities Investigate Disneyland Dry-Ice Blast – NYTimes.com

Ahem. Where I’m headed Not Disneyland specifically but California.

I want to get a quick blog post in this morning. I have a very busy day planned. It begins with a 9:20 AM appointment in Grand Rapids with the man who shot a laser into my eye to heal a tear. After that I have appointments with my boss and my piano trio. I also need to prepare and pack for my trip tomorrow to California.

The washing machine has gone berserk and stops mid cycle. This is problematic because it leaves the washer full of clothes soaking in soapy water. Yesterday it took most of the day for me to do two loads. I had to futz with it and experiment with starting it mid cycle or running different wash cycles. Yikes. Bad timing.

I finished Titus Groan  the first volume of the Gormenghast triolgy by Mervyn Peake yesterday.

Published in 1950, the author has developed a prose style to match his subject. The opening sentence of Titus Groan is sufficient to illustrate this: “Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.”

And that’s just a beginning of a description of the castle. The people are also fantastic (in the sense of imaginary and fanciful). I returned to this book recently when I read a description of its third volume in which Titus emerges from this fantastic isolated world into a world of the future. That remains to be seen. However it piqued my interest and I started reading where I had left off.

I also ran across a new concept in Van Doren’s The History of Knowledge this morning: ideonomy.

This word is not in the online OED which is funny because it means the science of ideas.  This science is being developed right now. It doesn’t help its credibility that the first word in this html page describing it is misspelled. No wonder the OED has chosen not to include it yet.

1. Buddhist Mobs Burn Mosque and Muslim School in Myanmar – NYTimes.com

Bizzarely Buddhists on motorcycles terrorizing Muslims. There have been 44 deaths since March in this senseless idiotic violence.

2. Museums Mull Public Use of Online Art Images – NYTimes.com

Oh baby. Good stuff. The museum is actually encouraging use of free images of its collection. Excellent.

3. Rijksstudio – Rijksmuseum

Here’s a link gleaned from the NYT article above where you can presumably access free images.

4. The Wifely Person Speaks

Another blog I have stumbled on. The author left a comment on the next link.

5. Bob Dole Misses His Republican Party – NYTimes.com

Hate and fear have emerged as popular driving political forces. Bob Dole muses about this. It looks seriously like the pandering of the Republicans in the latter part of the 20th century to  has morphed into madness.

Roger Faires (in another online comment to this article) says it well:

“A lot, if not all of this wretched quandary this Tea Party addled congress has created in our country can be trace it’s roots back to the days of Dole, Reagan, Bush 1, Quayle and McCain. They kicked the doors down on a lot of issues that doors should have been left well enough alone. Deregulating the banking industry. Outspoken belittlement of the people and gains made in the environmental movement. The persecution of labor. The over re-militaryization of our nation (and planet). Introducing red herring issue after red herring issue for low info voters to think that’s what running a nation is all about; like abortion, guns and school prayer.”

Not to mention racism.

6. Addressing Medical Errors – NYTimes.com

A doctor steps forward to talk about his serious error in an effort to encourage a more humane and open attitude in his profession. Admirable.

I’m thinking about what I’m going to do about blogging during my vacation. I persist in doing this even though (as with my music I guess) I’m not sure it means much to anyone except myself. I also am motivated because people who care about me can keep tabs on me if they wish (Hi, Sarah).

I usually keep pretty good connection to the internet when we go to California. My son has Wifi in the  home. And now I have a more consistent connection with my smart phone. Conceivably I could blog on it, but what a pain. I prefer the physical keyboard of my laptop (which I plan to drag along as well).

When we go to the cabin near Grayling for a time away or my friend Barb’s rented cottage we are too far from civilization to stay connected to the internet or even get a phone signal. So blogging at those places is out of the question.

I’m looking forward to traveling with a smart phone because airports have such weird approaches to wifi that I often can’t get online while we are waiting for the next plane. We have also tested out the GPS driving directions and will be using them to get from the airport to my son’s house after we pick up a rental car.

Anyway.

I’ll probably blog on this vacation. We leave Friday.

In the last chapter of Van Doren’s The History of Knowledge, he speculates on the next hundred years. This has got to be the weakest chapter in the book. He envisions personal computers with intelligence as a sort of constant companion and servant. So far he hasn’t talked about how communications might connect to the point the Internet has us connected. I suspect his “companion computer” (CC instead of PC) might be as close as he gets.

Yesterday I got out of the house very early to go get my blood drawn. I fasted the night before and didn’t have anything when I got up. I find it sort of humorous that my doctor has to be prodded (by me) to get this done prior to my six month check ups. The procedure is usually to draw it on the day of our appointment. Then I get a call from her assistant telling me the results and to exercise more or something. Lame.

I have a check up right after we get back from California.

I have now passed the point I had read up to in The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. I have to agree with some of the blurbs on the book that it is his best book. At least of the ones I have read. He surpasses any notion of surrealism into another weird place. He combines the mundane with the odd. The book is about boredom, its necessity and virtue. But he also dips into inexplicable stuff like an infant which maintains a fierce look on its face and suddenly begins speaking (“its tiny hands folded adultly together before it”). Terrifying stuff.

I’m on chapter 46. According to the Kindle edition, there are 50 chapters.

1. Anti-Polio Campaign Worker Shot Dead in Pakistan – NYTimes.com

So much of the violence in our world makes no sense to me. This incident strikes home. The killers are convinced that the workers are distributing injections that will sterilize people and/or are actually spies. This kind of paranoid fear rhymes (in my head) with the rampant fear and hate now consuming the USA.

2. Cicely Tyson and ‘Blessed Assurance’ – NYTimes.com

On a lighter note, audiences break out into song breaching the barrier of passivity. The author of this article seems to think its because they are African American. Odd. I find it encouraging when people start singing like that.

I continue to ponder the changing literacy and awareness surrounding me in this culture. I ask myself if it’s because I am living in a small provincial W. Michigan town that I do not cross paths with people who share my own tastes in music and literature.

This comes home as I finish up Charles Van Doren’s The History of Knowledge and continue to read Marshall McCluhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Since I am near the end of Van Doren he is discussing 20th century. In the section I read this morning he compares Thomas Mann…

and Franz Kafka.

These two writers are writers I have read and admire. Van Doren thinks that they both provide stories in their work that point at and comment on the onrushing future. I know that both writers have given me tools to cope with living in a time of such disjunctness.

I continue to try to understand McCluhan’s “hot” and “cold” medium.

The more I read him the more I realize it’s important to adjust my thinking about these terms as he uses them. It may be that thinking about physical heat and cold may be helpful to me. I understand that when a physical objects heats up, the molecules in it begin to move quickly. Conversely when an object cools the molecules move more slowly.

It may be that this describes better what McCluhan is trying to capture in his observations. A photograph is “hot.” A cartoon is “cool.”

There is something about the noise a “hot” medium generates that McCluhan seems to think drowns out the response of the human recipient. Thus in McCluhan a participative approach to living is more facilitated by “cool” media.

This is a bit odd to me since I think of participative living as more active. Would McCluhan see a “hot” approach to getting one’s food as purchasing premade food and a “cool” approach as making and even growing one’s own food?

Hard to say. I wonder if “hot” is when more noise is generated, whether that be literal noise or noise in a more metaphoric sense.  Would “cool” be more silent or more organized sound?

It doesn’t help things that McCluhan leaps quickly into slangy uses of “hot” and “cool.” He is writing at a time when “cool” is slang for attractive in a laid back way. This colors his language and metaphors. “Hot” jazz. “Cool” Jazz. At one point he cites a 1963 Life article which talks about the way Russia was responding to American music.

Apparently the Charleston was more acceptable then the Twist. McCluhan says the “Charleston” was “hot.” The “Twist” (obviously being very cool at the time) was not.

For McCluhan the “Charleston” was more like “hot” jazz. He even goes so far as to say its jerky movements were more mechanical and doll like thus appealing to the limited Russian sense of the avant-garde. American avant-garde at the time was more in tune with the so-called “primitive” Twist.

Still sorting all this out and reading McCluhan. My goal is to understand what he was trying to say in his context and then see how that applies to what I can figure out to be happening now in media and literacy.

1. Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart – NYTimes.com

A proposal to recapture the sense of a citizen driven country instead of a military or corporate one.

2. The Essayification of Everything – NYTimes.com

Excellent essay on essays. Warning: many literary allusions (Montaigne, Francis Bacon).

3. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories – NYTimes.com

I met an adjunct prof in the the early aughts who was a walking conspiracy buff. At the time he only accessed the Internet with a dial up. I told him hoards of his fellow conspiracy theorists were awaiting him on the Internets.

4. 4,300 Singers Gather in Russia – NYTimes.com

By Guiness world records a rather small gathering, by mine a large and very cool one.

5. Turncoats: How the Taliban Undermines and Infiltrates the Afghan Local Police | Danger Room | Wired.com

Bookmarked to read. Looks interesting. And long.

6. Woolwich murder: we must use reason to beat terrorists | Terry Eagleton | Comment is free | The Guardian

Bookmarked to read. Seems to say that it’s best to understand the logical of crazy people.

“if you deny your enemy any shred of rationality, you come perilously close to excusing him. To be bereft of reason, like a baby or a squirrel, is to be morally innocent.”

I was musing as I walked to church yesterday that I was planning to perform a work that I had been preparing for more than a year. The work was the first movement of Distler’s organ trio. I hadn’t been working assiduously nor consistently on it for this period. But I had made a page turn copy a while back and did include it from time to time in my daily practice. I admire the work.

So like any craftsman I had put hours and hours of preparation into that morning’s upcoming performance.

Playing a trio is an odd experience. Usually a moderately trained organist such as myself can pretty much sight read each individual voice with hands or feet. This is true of Bach’s organ trios which I quite adore. Distler’s trio is a bit of an exception. His melodic ideas are so unique that it’s easy to get tripped up when sight reading even one of the three voices. I like the uniqueness however. Not just their uniqueness but the shape of the melodies and the sound of the  harmonies themselves attract me. I won’t bother to embed a video of me (or anyone else) playing them here. If anyone is actually reading this far and is curious, you can go back a post or two and find them embedded there. Or google a performance.

The fleeting aspect of musical performance is something that I ponder from time to time. One puts in literally a lifetime of study for a moment of beauty. I find this satisfying.

Anyway, I nailed the piece yesterday. I was very happy with how I played it. As I intensified my study of this piece in the past couple of weeks anticipating this performance, I realized that I would occasionally stumble over little sections that were actually repeated several times in the course of the piece. I would usually played them all correctly but once in a while in the last occurrence I might have a bit of a blip, not exactly a wrong note, but a moment of loss of control.

I figured out this was a lag in my concentration. This lag followed one of the most difficult sections in the piece which I rarely misplayed. I discovered that if I consciously concentrated a bit more in the preceding difficult section the rest came off pretty much flawlessly.

Good to know.

The situation yesterday was not only was it Memorial Day weekend, but the service followed last weekend which was an intense tumultuous one for many in this church’s community. Our priest, Jen Adams, was running for bishop of our diocese. The election was last Saturday. We and she were poised for one of two outcomes. She would win or she would lose. Either way it was a lot of stress for some. A lot of stress for her.

At the end of the service Jen remembered to announce that the next Sunday (that is yesterday) we would begin our summer schedule of starting our services a half hour earlier at 10 AM.

All of this made me expect a small attendance yesterday. I was correct. I also predicted an influx about twenty minutes after the new starting time. I was correct in this also.

So it was a small gathering. As a performer on the organ it’s hard to connect physically with listeners. In my situation, I’m never sure if people are listening since when they sit they sit with their back to me. I can’t see faces.

So I try to reach out with my playing but am never quite sure how if people are noticing much less responding.

I asked a young person who was one of the acolytes if she had listened to the prelude at all. She said she had some. Since she herself is a musician I asked her if she noticed if the piece was steady in tempo. This wasn’t unreasonable since I know she is a fine percussionist. She said she wasn’t listening THAT close.

After a pause she said it sounded nice though.

1. Joss Whedon on His ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ – NYTimes.com

I love the mix in this story. A movie maker is stressed about an upcoming blockbuster he is working on based on comic book heroes (“The Avengers:). In the meantime, he covertly convenes some actors and makes a movie of Shakespeare. It clears his head and he continues with more vigor in the final edit of his money maker. I love the mix of Shakespeare, comic books and movies.

2. For Consumers, an ‘Open Data’ Society Is a Misnomer – NYTimes.com

Date for me, the corporation but not you, the consumer. Hard to get clear access to one’s own data. Delicious irony.

3.Can 44 Subtract 43 From the Equation? – NYTimes.com

Dowd comes up a clear and excellent phrase that sums up the error of the war on terrorism: “W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smokescreen and treated pre-emptive attacks as just.”

“War on a tactic.” Excellent.

It looks like I am reading (rereading) McCluhan.

He is tricky to read at this point since his salient insights are couched in a very dated language. (Interesting side note: very few of his books are available in ebooks on Amazon)  He himself was aware of the limitations of seeking insights on something that is happening in one’s time: Alluding to Edward T. Hall in Silent Language, McCluhan says we “are never aware of the ground rules” of our “environmental systems or cultures.”

I think it is due to datedness that I have always struggled to understand McCluhan’s use of “hot” and “cool” media. It may be that since this is his sound byte it tends to drowned out his much more nuanced contribution to my understanding of the shifting sands of the 20th century.

I could never understand why movies were “hot” and TV was “cool.”

“Hot” media are ones that extend “a single sense in high definition.High definition one is the state of being well filled with data.”

I think some of it is that McCluhan thought that since TV was essentially pixels of lights (black and whites at that) spread over a small screen that the sensory experience was low on “data.”

Maybe he was discounting the extreme involvement when one passively submits to either TV or movies. Passivity was for many years the watchword around the damage TV was doing to us. This has passed as far as I am concerned.

We spend time with screens of pixels. But we are far from passive.

It’s more like Glenn Gould’s picture of the new listener of music. The tech allows the listener an active role in shaping the experience. Just as the computer screen draws us in to shape our experience with it. “Where do you want to go today?” was the question Microsoft’s ad campaign asked in the nineties.

But McCluhan got a lot right. He thought metaphorically which frustrates the scientific approach but actually fills out the conversation better for me in this time of complexity.

He felt that art could approach complexity of living in the now.

Despite his begrudging attitude, Mark Van Doren agrees with this assessment in his History of Knowledge. 

Van Doren ticks off poets, novelists, artists whose work is full of wisdom about what was happening in their world. More than this, they helped shape it. Van Doren cites Picasso and Braque as reshaping our understanding of how we looked at our surroundings.

He even spends time with Yeats and his uncanny political poetry summed up in poem, “The Second Coming.”

I usually hear the closing lines when this poem is invoked. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” But this morning I was startled by these lines: “everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

This seems to capture some of the intellectual, spiritual and political environment of this moment in the USA.

McCluhan points to the arts as more than self-expression or property of the elite. He points to their prophetic nature and the necessity of them for the community.

For me, this is a small hope in a bleak and bizarre time.

Weirdly I found myself pulling out Rachmaninoff piano preludes yesterday as well as some Scriabin and playing through them.

It must be because my student is back in town. These are his tastes. A retired criminologist he also is a singer. He asked if we could spend part of the lesson with me accompanying his singing. I of course complied gladly. This week he sang “Motherless Child” by arranged by Burleigh and a Brahms lied.

I worked over my Distler trio with the metronome yesterday and think I have improved it a bit. No one responded to my query about registration. Surprise. I am drifting toward the louder registration which was both Dennis and Dawn’s preference. It seems actually to fit the piece better.

1. Why Do I Teach? – NYTimes.com

“We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates.”

2. Some Cracks in the Cult of Technocrats – NYTimes.com

Unintended consequences proliferate when technocrats develop public policy.

3. MTO 17.4: Hook, Impossible Rhythms

Scriabin and others have written rhythms that are ambiguous and require some strategy to realize. The prelude Opus 11, no. 1 by Scriabin is one that I have puzzled over since my one piano student wanted to learn it.

4. President Obama Vows to End the Perpetual War – NYTimes.com

I hope the president’s words become policy, but I am doubtful. At least he said it.

5. Banks’ Lobbyists Help in Drafting Financial Bills – NYTimes.com

Foxes and the hen house yada yada.

6. Beijing Signals a Shift on Economic Policy – NYTimes.com

It seems that China has embarked on an experiment in mixing capitalism and communism. Fascinating to watch.

7. Forgotten Heroes – NYTimes.com

Obituaries by readers memorializing forgotten or unknown people.

Yesterday I had three very nice encounters around music. The first was with the assistant pastor at my church, Dennis Remenschneider. He is a Lutheran minister with whom I actually worked at one point in a Lutheran church. He loves the Lutheran tradition very much and in the course of our conversation asked me if I would play for him some of my prelude for this Sunday which is by Distler who was writing in the Lutheran tradition in Germany in the 30s. I was flattered that anyone took that much interest in what I am playing at church and immediately complied.

I asked him to listen to two registrations I had in mind for the piece. It is the first movement of Hugo Distler’s Organ Sonata (Trio) opus 18/2.

I also had a nice chat with Dawn Van Ark, the cellist from my piano trio. Our violinist failed to show as sometimes happens. We are a tolerant trio and just tend to carry on if someone is a no show. Sometimes we play through our trio material absent the missing part. Sometimes we do other stuff. Yesterday Dawn and I did a bit of both.

I asked her to listen to my organ registrations as well. Here are two videos of the two registrations.  If you like, dear reader, you could sample them and email me (jupiterjenkins@gmail.com) or leave a comment about your preference.  (It looks like Take one has a permanent freeze in it 3:51-5:13, but you can still get the idea about the sounds I have chosen) I think I will not prejudice you with the responses from Dennis and Dawn. Any opinions would be helpful to me as I decide which of these registrations to use this Sunday. FWIW I did notice that the first take is a bit slower than the second. But speeds up. Yikes.

Distler does a very clever little thing in this trio. There are three sounds in a classic organ trio. In this case my left hand begins on the lower keyboard and my right hand is on the upper keyboard. At a certain point, Distler asks the player to switch which hand is playing which manual (this happens at  2:32 in “Take one” and 2:25 in “Take two”). The listener then hears some material that originally sounded in the other voice with the sound on the upper keyboard. This entire section is then repeated so that by following Distler’s instructions to switch hands a second time, the hands (and the melodies) return to their original set-up. 4:48 in Take two

Later in the afternoon, my friend, Jordan VanHemert dropped by for conversation and music. Jordan is an accomplished musician who is currently studying improvisation in U of M’s grad school. He plays saxophones, but yesterday brought his flute.  After catching up a bit we played through the E minor Bach flute sonata. It was fun.

Then later Eileen and I had date night. I think my life is pretty good.

Just for fun, here’s a video of me practicing my postlude for Sunday as well:

One of the things I have devolved into in this space is recording insights I run across. Decades ago when I first began building a website my goal was to start conversations. I use conversation here as Mortimer J. Adler uses it when he suggests that books (and hence ideas) are in conversation with each other. I also see scholarship as a kind of conversation.

Well, conversations of this ilk  in cyberspace are as rare as they are in my daily life.

But I persist here anyway. Some of this is realizing how valuable verbalization is to me. Writing something out helps me think about it. I used to use this as a kind of self therapy (when the self therapy of writing bad Paul Simon songs failed me). Now I don’t turn to writing and verbalization for this so much. Like Gertrude Stein I have found that the vices of my youth are the charms of old age and don’t trouble as much I guess.

Anyway here are some insights from this morning.

1. business is the worst disease of love in Donne

I have been reading a poem or two by John Donne in the morning. This morning the poem was “Break of Day,” in which Donne challenges the notion that morning should part lovers. He goes to ask:

I know it’s silly but I have such an aversion to how business thinking dominates so much of public conversation and private thinking. Business theology I call it not limiting it to churches but to describe how pervasive this weird bias is my life.

2. McCluhan’s ideas about hidden content

Van Doren thinks thinks that McCluhan makes a bit of mistake in his reductive notion that the “medium is the message.” Van Doren sees it as an exageration to say that the only message in technology is the medium. A closer reading of McCluhan reveals that he is aware that technology has more than one piece of content including the medium. He gives the example of IBM. When IBM realized and articulated that it was not just in the business of making machines but in the business of processing information, it saw itself more clearly according to McCluhan. He doesn’t suggest that they quit making machines but that they had missed some of their own content. I think of it as hidden content because this kind of thing is sort of an ongoing discovery process. At least it is for me. An example is when I understand that cyberspace is not providing conversation for me as much as it is a sort of public verbalization available to anyone who wants to read it, but most valuable to me for thinking aloud.

3.cubism in both McCluhan and Van Doren

Van Doren moves from McCluhan to cubism in an effort to demonstrate how Picasso and Braque self consciously changed how we see things. I read on in McCluhan’s first chapter and sure enough he also uses cubism in this way. Cool.

4 Charlie Parker and St. John Coltrane

In Jack Kerouac’s poem 241st Chorus, he prays to Parker: “Charley Parker, pray for me.” This is the language Christians sometimes use in speaking of saints. I noticed that in my book of poetry I had tucked an article about Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. Same deal.

Links

1. Panic in the Year Zero: A Poem by D.A. Powell | Harvard Magazine

Found this poem online. Read it this morning. It’s kind of long but Powell seems to need the space to move around in and come up with gems like this:

Even in our legends, angels come.
They try their best. But we’re such shits.
And it’s not because we want to screw them.
We screw everything. We’re mankind. It’s what we do.

2. Garden Vegetable Tamales – Vegetarian Tamales – Recipe for Vegetarian Tamales

Made veggie tamales last night to go along with the meat ones Eileen had in the freezer that her boss’s Mom made. Turned out pretty good.

Veggie tamales on the left. I asked Molly why her Mom’s tamales were red. She said they put chili powder in the dough. Interesting.

3. Going Vegetarian in Tapas-Happy Barcelona – NYTimes.com

My friend Phil Harrington who helped me move books and shelves this week mentioned that he had spent some time in Barcelona. Made me remember my own visit there. This review has some dishes I might research and make myself.

4. Pressure Cooker Short Ribs | Dad Cooks Dinner

Eileen sent me this link. She was given a very fancy pressure cooker celebrating fifteen years of full time employment at the library. She got to choose what she received. She also comments that she has been there longer than fifteen years but she was only part time before that and had a bit of hiatus where she wasn’t working for the library. She wanted me to pick up the ingredients so she could use her new toy to attempt to make the dish she loves at CityVu: Braised Beef Short Ribs.

5. Vegetarian Gumbo Recipe – Vegetable Gumbo – Vegetarian Gumbo from Louisiana – Vegetarian Cajun Gumbo Recipe with Rice and Creole Recipes – Easy Vegan Recipes – Vegan Gumbo Recipe

I used this basic recipe to make gumbo this week. I put up this pic on Facebook:

I mentioned that I was making gumbo and this sparked a discussion. I have a friend from Louisiana who joined in. His comments and links of helped me understand that gumbo needs what Louisianians call “roux.” This is not French Roux, but is made with Peanut oil (smokes less) and flour. Next time I will make Louisianian roux. Thank you, Ken!

6. The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek – Boing Boing

Star trek tricorders. Why we need them now and what they could do.

7. Why I’m Not a Vegan – NYTimes.com

Some common sense eating.

8. A By-the-E-Book Education, for $5 a Month – NYTimes.com

Weird experiments in education both work and are troubling.

9.Anxiety: Blood – NYTimes.com

Fiction. Not that great but interesting and mercifully short.

In the span of four hours yesterday, my friend Phil and I moved all of the books out of the first floor library to the second floor.

I crammed them into make shift areas.

We also moved all of the bookshelves upstairs as well.

They are standing empty for the most part awaiting final arrangement. Then I will fill them with the books. It is my intention to return my collection to its order of being filed by author.

Although I did make some exceptions to this filing as Phil noted that Gide’s little book on Montaigne was filed under “M.”

Anyhoo, that’s a big chunk of work done. Many thanks to Phil for the help.

My reading continues to converge and overlap over the several books I am reading and my own musing. This morning I was amused to arrive at this paragraph in Van Doren’s History of Knowledge.

“A string quartet… basking musically in the feedback from a live audience, is inspired, in its musical love affair with a thousand strangers, to surpass itself and to take chances. That is impossible in the cold environs of a recording studio, where bits and pieces of a composition may have to be played over and over in a relentless search for perfection by the players. The final product must be perfect, because the medium is unforgiving. But the price of perfection is the loss of the hot, inspired, and courageous greatness of a live performance.’

Van Doren neatly states the view that live music is struggling in contested ways with recorded music. This particular contest is pretty much over since most people in our society connect with music much more through recordings than live performances. It strikes me that it is a false dichotomy. It’s like comparing a  physical embrace to a photograph. Different animals. Both can be charming.

Christopher Small is on a clearer track when he tries to understand music as a verb (musicking) which is about relationships and the social arena instead of Platonic shadows on a cave or something more reified. And of course I am beginning to see Glenn Gould as genius of both musicking and recording.

I finished the introduction to McCluhan’s Understanding Media. Here again my reading converges but its not so mysterious since Van Doren mentioned McCluhan and sent me scurrying to my bookshelf (just before packing my books away on shelfs with their spines obscured).

Speaking of McCluhan’s ideas, Van Doren says this: “Data move instantly, reaction follows action without a moment for relaxed consideration, forcing us to depend more on intuition than reasoned thought.”

This put me in mind of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in which he postulates two systems in our minds, system 1 which is the automatic quick comprehensions we make in the moment, system to which is our slower problem solving and reasoning. We spend most of our time in system 1. Van Doren seems to think that our technological environment exacerbates our descent into unreason.

I’m still pondering this.

*****

1. Food Stamp Politics – NYTimes.com

This article recalls that hunger was once a non-partisan concern.

2.Cul-de-Sac Poverty – NYTimes.com

The changing face of poverty: now in the suburbs.

3. Stop the Leaks – NYTimes.com

This is a weird polemic. It doesn’t address the idea that the people seeking the AP phone logs didn’t follow warrant procedure in the law. At least that my understanding.

4. Telling It Like It Is – NYTimes.com

Excellent essay on the relationship of the form a novel takes to its story. Very cool.

5. One School’s Catholic Teaching – NYTimes.com

A woman puts her partner’s name in her mom’s obit. Loses job.

6.Bring Back Ken Starr – NYTimes.com

Careful what you wish for.

I don’t have much time to blog this morning. I got up a bit late and need to get moving since today a friend is coming to help me move shelves. There are seven shelves in the room we are going to convert to a first floor master bedroom. I have managed to empty about four of them preparing for today. The books are crammed upstairs waiting to then go on shelves. I keep my books in alphabetical order by author generally. So I am temporarily losing the ability to put my hands on a book when I need it.

For example this morning I was reading in Charles Van Doren’s A History of Knowledge. He mentioned Marshall McCluhan’s book Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. He said it was one of the most important books in the 20th century but is little read now. I knew that I had a bunch of McCluhan, but couldn’t remember if this book is one that I had read. Fortunately, the M’s were still in order so I was able to grab a copy and take a look.

Nope, I haven’t read it. But now maybe I will.

I have added two new poets to my morning reading.  I reach first for Charles Van Doren’s History of Knowledge and read one or two sections. I have arrived at his chapter on arts in the 20th century.

Then a poem by John Donne.

Next a bit out of the The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

From there I have been moving to the two new guys: D. A. Powell and Eduardo C. Corral. I picked these guys off a list of poets online. Powell frustrates me because he keeps sending me to the OED. His unfamiliar (to me) words seem to be largely botanical. He has a good ear. Both he and Corral do.

examples:

“Among the soft cheat and meadow barley, a live oak begs relief
from the hardened light, the beating of its own gnarled limbs,
and the unrelenting rustle of its own beige blooms that tumble
together shyly like a locker room of boys once boisterous, now
called to roll and suddenly bashful, clasping at dingy towels.
Let the dead be modest. Give the tree, solitary being who feeds
on wind and the mote of another’s distant beauty, cause to brag.

from “Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct  by D. A. Powell in Useless Landscape: A Guide for Boys

“Cheat” refers to Cheat Grass which is not in the OED, but I found by Googling.

Here’s some more lines I liked:

“… down the street, a Taco Bell and KFC
merge as one fantastical beast with crispy wings.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”

from “Dying in the Development” by D. A. Powell in Useless Landscape: A Guide for Boys

The Blindfold

I draw the curtains.           The room darkens, but
the mirror still reflects                 a crescent moon.
I pull             the crescent out,             a rigid curve
that softens                               into a length of cloth.
I wrap the cloth around                                my eyes,
and I’m peering           through a crack in the wall
revealing                                     a landscape of snow.

from Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral

and

“Once a man offered me his heart like a glass of water. No once … Here’s a joke for you. Why do Mexicans make tamales at Christmas? So they have something to unwrap. A lover told me that. I stared into his eyes believing the brown surrounding his pupils were rings, like Saturn’s. I have to sit down to say this. Once a man offered me  his heart and I said no. Not because I didn’t love him. Not because he was a beast or white—I couldn’t love him. Do you understand? In bed while we slept, our bodies inches apart, the dark between our flesh a wick. It was burning down and he couldn’t feel it.”

from “Poem after Friedo Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column” from Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral

*****

1. Beware Social Nostalgia – NYTimes.com

Understanding the past as clearly as possible without weird nostalgia.

2. Show Us Your Woe – NYTimes.com

I sometime switch off NPR when the sobbing begins revealing someone’s sadness. Listening feels like voyeurism and I am simultaneously shamed and angered. Same thing for stuff on TV when the camera and mic are stuck in a suffering person’s face. This usually makes me more angry. This linked article is about the requirements of hardship in order to get certain kinds of celebrity, emphasis on political celebrity.

3.Get a Life? No Thanks. Just Pass the Remote. – NYTimes.com

I think it’s a false dichotomy to pit TV against reading. But it makes for entertaining prose.

4. Disease and the Public Eye – NYTimes.com

The sad truth that diseases get attention when connected with celebrities. The author of this article suffers from dystonia.

“Dystonia is quite rare but, by some estimates, there are more people who have it than have Huntington’s disease, A.L.S. and muscular dystrophy combined.”

I finished scanning in my little scrapbook of pictures from the seventies yesterday. I made a copy of each entire page.

I like the way the pictures lay on the aging browning old pages. Then I proceeded to make smaller scans of the pictures themselves.

(and in the case of the page above the typed poem from years ago)

These old brown pages bring my youth back to me. I remember walking around and taking pictures with a 35 mm camera.

I liked geometric shapes, signs and graffiti.

But I also took other kinds of pictures.

This is my first wife in a bank.

We weren’t married then. I seemed to have fiddled with the f stop or something between these two. I love the imperfections of the old pictures.

I’ve always loved trees.

And people.

Anyway, you get the idea about the old pics. It’s kind of a wimpy way to do a blog post. But I don’t have that much to say today anyway.

*****

1. Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing | Brain Pickings

Rule number ten hit me: “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.”

2. Sherman Mitchell Obituary: View Sherman Mitchell’s Obituary by Flint Journal

Dave Barber sent me a clipping of this man’s obit. (Thanks again, Dave!) When I was sixteen or so, I did a show where his band was the main band. I had rehearsed with the dancers and singers (also high school students) so I got to sit in with his band during their numbers. Afterwards he gave me valuable advice about performing. Always have fun, he said. If you have fun playing then everyone has more fun listening.

He played jazz trombone and oboe.

When I was 19 or so, I loved taking pictures. I also wrote poetry and read books extensively. I was not a careful reader and much of what I read I now think went uncomprehended.

I also played a lot of music then. At the age of 19, I played trumpet and guitar mostly. I played a bit at the piano but mostly had acquired very little technique. This came later.

I did enjoy wandering around and taking pictures. Yesterday cleaning out a closet I ran across a couple albums of my pictures I have made. Today I am putting up pictures that date strictly from the seventies or so.

I would put up more, but it’s taking forever to scan and then upload.  I put up some stuff on Facebook, mostly for fam. These old pictures here are pictures I love but am not sure how much they appeal to other people. Perfect for the blog, then.

More stuff next time.

1.Heritage Action Advice to Boehner, Cantor – NYTimes.com

Juliet Lapidos discerns the rabid partisan approach the right is taking to not governing but attacking, attacking, attacking.

2. The Hidden Costs of Buying on the Cheap – NYTimes.com

Shoppers and merchants apparently don’t think too much about where goods come from. Upper end shops tout origins, regular shops expect you just to buy shit.

3. France Fights Racism by Outlawing ‘Race’ – NYTimes.com

Cool approach. Probably would work in the USA.

4. Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role – NYTimes.com

USA involvement the elephant in the room.

5. Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi Service on Trains – NYTimes.com

Trains with wifi. My dream.

6. New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking – NYTimes.com

Nate Silvers precisely parses the flaws in anecdotal thinking.

7. Financial Times Web Site Is Hacked – NYTimes.com

What can I say? Attack, attack, attack. This stuff makes me crazy.

8. Vision Is All About Change – NYTimes.com

Having recently had eye problems, this article interested me by talking about the neurological fact that nerves in the eye need constant refreshing or images will disappear.

I am amazingly tired this morning. I have had social events the last two evenings. While I like people I find that the introvert I am is drained by this kind of socializing. Since grad school I have found ways to subdue my passion and stay as calm as possible and still transmit ideas and do a sort of measured self disclosure with people. This takes a lot of energy.

Yesterday I had my piano trio rehearsal. As usual it was lots of fun for me. We played through the Beethoven movement we have been working on. Then for fun we played Fauré’s Opus 120 which is very unusual. It is unlike Fauré’s other music I have studied. My one piano student has played most of the Bacarolles. But the piano trio is surprising and interesting. After that we played Mozart. A good time was had by all.

I tried to make two dishes to take to share at the choir party Wednesday night. I made the couscous dish my friend Rhonda served us the other evening. I followed the recipe and it turned out alright. I need to alter a bit to make it more like what Rhonda served (more cheese? less lemon?). I attempted to make a a main course salad with spinach and chick peas. Unfortunately I over roasted the sweet potatoes, carrots and chick peas.

Oops. I still want to make this sometime.

The choir seemed to enjoy getting together. We sang all the way through Trial by Jury by Gilbert and Sullivan.

That was fun.  I was amused when one person suggested the misogyny would be dampened if it was sung by cross dressed males. Heh.

Yesterday I used up the last of my frozen blueberries and made a blueberry pie for the AGO Meeting. I have been remiss in attending these meetings for years. My friend Rhonda E. has motivated me to get involved again. So there I am. The theme of the evening was show and tell. I took a bunch of stuff by Ned Rorem. I had fun.

This morning I got up a little late and after sitting with Eileen I played through some Schubert (instead of the usual Bach or Scarlatti first thing in the morning). I do find playing through stuff a bit like connecting with great minds in a small way. A good way to start the day.

*****

Looking for Capitalism’s Tipping Point – NYTimes.com

The current climate in the USA is a mixture of rabid brainless partisan bickering and viewing the entirety of life through the business perspective. I resist both fi I can. But here I am reading another a article explaining various understandings of the economic environment.

*****

Japanese Reactor Is Said to Stand on Fault Line – NYTimes.com

Of course it is.

I became interested in T. S. Eliot’s verse play, The Rock, yesterday. I have never read the entire thing. When I looked on Amazon I could only find very expensive used collector copies. So I decided there were too many holes in my Eliot verse collection and ordered a used copy of his complete poems and plays for about $8 (including shipping). I think I love Amazon. It reminds me of Napster at its inception. The concept of the universal jukebox is replaced by the concept of the universal and all encompassing library. Works for me.

Last night at the choir party I had an interested conversation about the word, “fuck.” Don’t ask me how we got there. I probably said “fuck” casually in a discussion of sexism and words. My conversation partner shared an etymology I had never heard before. Fuck, he said he heard, came from an acronym: For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and originated in puritan England. Snopes debunks it.

I remembered its origin was more “to strike” or “hit.” The OED came to the rescue.

I recall thinking I could freelance an article to Ms. magazine right after it was founded.

I would research the etymology of gender words and write a scathing and interesting article in support of feminism. My search led me to discover how sexist our language is (woman= wife of man). I think this was when I got the notion that “fuck” had the “strike” etymology as well as others.

I sent a copy of the OED definition to my conversation partner this morning. I accompanied it with a message in which I confessed to embracing the profane. I quoted Bobcat Goldthwaite: “I choose to swear.”

I mostly love words. I read a story about Bartok in which he began to speak very vulgarly in a private conversation, then defended his use of language.

“‘What a pity,’ he [Bartok] continued with sympathy, ‘not to be able to feel the strength and purity of real words, words that stand for the very thing they are expressing. How vulgar substitute words are, by suggesting that they cover something ugly or evil. These words were accepted naturally by people who lived in close connection with the earth. These words in their original strength emerged like plants from the fertile soil, with special power and beauty, and were used by people who worked, rested, and made love on this soil and called every part of their bodies by these direct and inevitable names, names they used with both gusto and tenderness. Those who try to change these words, covering over their real meaning, making cheap substitutions, are the ones who cast ugliness upon words and meanings alike.

“He stopped for a moment, then spoke again more bitterly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the most vulgar word in any language is “unprintable.” That’s the word that makes me wince, and how often I have had to suffer from this word in printed texts of beautiful folk songs, inevitably in the most beautiful ones, created in a mood of warm spiritual and physical tenderness, or in a deeply needed joyful humor to break the monotony of a hard life.’ ”  from Bela Bartok: The American Years by Agatha Fassett, p. 158 Dover edition.

1.A Police Roll-Call Reminder – Women May Go Topless – NYTimes.com

I love New York.

2. Daft Punk Gets Human With a New Album – NYTimes.com

Bookmarked to remind myself to spotify this group.

3. Metropolitan Diary: A Window Concert – NYTimes.com

I had a buddy (who has since pretty thoroughly renounced our friendship—a growing list of people over the years) who always read this section of the NYT (i.e. the Metropolitan Diary). Whenever I read a heartwarming story like this one, I think of him.

4. Holder Defends Justice Department in Journalists’ Records Seizure – NYTimes.com

Defending the indefensible.

5. Spying on The Associated Press – NYTimes.com

see link number 4