At the end of Wednesday night choir rehearsal, we traipsed down the ste ps to sing through the anthem with organ accompaniment in the church. We were rehearsing the anthem for today, “Now We Are Ambassadors” by Felix Mendelssohn.

It’s an adaptation of a Tenor/Bass duet in his St. Paul.

It is also a quote from the epistle for today.

At the very end of this rehearsal, a soprano asked me about the pronunciation of the last syllable in “ambassadors.” We had discussed this upstairs during the rehearsal a bit. I wasn’t satisfied with how I was asking people to pronounce it. The soprano pointed out that we were singing it inconsistently throughout the group. She was right. I had already dismissed the choir and decided I would look it up before this morning so I could suggest a more clear way to pronounce the “ors” in “ambassadors.”

A good source for this sort of thing, one that I return to over and over is Madeline Marshall’s The Singers Guide to English Diction. I pulled it out this morning.

In it, I learned that the syllable in question is a diphthong like in the word “no.” I was surprised.

I haven’t been trained in solo singing, only how to coach a a group of singers. I can do the latter with a degree of success so that my choirs tend not to be as bad most church choirs I hear.

Anyway, I hadn’t realized that we were singing a diphthong.

The two sounds are o and u, respectively the “o” sound in the unstressed syllable of “obey” and the “u” sound in “full.” It’s number 4 in this chart:

This morning I will point this out to the singers and ask them to elongate the first sound for the sustained vowel closing to the second at the last minute.

This should work.

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UPDATE

So Eileen got up and we were talking about this pronunciation thing and I looked up the word, “Ambassdor.” It turns out I was wrong. It’s not the diphthong sound. It’s only the o (as in the unstressed syllable in “obey”). But since the pronunciation properly ends in in “r” sound, in singing we change that sound or omit it. Here’s a link to a pronunciation of it if you’re interested.

FINAL UPDATE

Before we left for church, I consulted Madeline Marshall again and decided that the syllable in question in what she calls the “unstressed” syllable. I had the choir say the word, the way it’s pronounced on the link, then say it without the “r” sound, then sustain it. Voilá. They made a good sound.

As the instructor arrived at the ballet class yesterday morning, I was playing a Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words,” the one in E major.

I was playing it slower than this recording. It is the one I was playing when the other instructor had asked me if I was preparing for something. Presumably she meant a recital or something. To which you may recall  I said no.

Anyway, yesterday the instructor eventually explained to me that she had danced to this music. She said that she had played the “child” in the piece.

This indicates to me that it might be a set piece she danced in. Often there are sort of classical set pieces that are part of the furniture of the classical ballet dancer’s and teacher’s mind.

When I searched online to see if I could find a video of it, I found this:

This uses two other Songs without Words by Mendelssohn. I was fascinated by this video. In the first section, the ballerina dances alone. The coordination of her movements with the music interested me. She is on the music, and her dance has the musicality of the piece. Then in the second section (a break is edited out while she changes into point shoes), she is joined by the choreographer himself.

The contrast between them is striking to me. She is pretty much a quintessential ballerina. But him. He is old for a ballet dancer. He has a pot belly and moves a bit slower but still with dignity.

For many years dancers had to quit dancing when they began to age and lose any of their agility. This has changed in some areas of dance. A change for the better in my estimation. The older male dancer in this piece adds a fragility and beauty that could not be done in the same way as a young man.

There you have it. I notice that no credit is given to pianist.

Music stands in odd relationship to dance. Its is necessary but secondary in an extreme arena of performance.

In class yesterday, the instructor gathered small groups of dancers to talk with us about their assignment of creating a series of combinations at the barre emulating a dance class. Specifically we discussed how the combination is given a musical introduction, how the instructor outlines what they want in the dance which implies how the music might fit it, how the instructor will cue the musician to begin.
This was lots of fun and a bit unusual. Pianists play that role mentioned above. Maybe it’s like being heard  but not present really. There is an etiquette of respect in the dance world for the musician. Yesterday the teacher mentioned that she “worships” her musicians. And indeed she does treat me politely to the point of deference.

But at the same time, the music must take its place in service to the dance. It’s an interesting conundrum.

Later in the day, I recorded myself playing the Mendelssohn organ piece I plan to play Sunday. I learned  a great deal from this. I need to make my tempo steadier (worked with a metronome) because once again I am rushing in places in an attempt not to drag. If I set out at the beginning with a specific tempo in mind the piece falls together better.

I also learned that my phrases and little bits of accompaniment felt choppy.

Here the answer was to think more about the floating nature of my hand technique. That helped.

Boy, recording oneself is helpful if painful.

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In Defense of Telecommuting – NYTimes.com

This is about the Yahoo thing of course. You know, where the new CEO forbids working from home. I especially liked the phrase, “The Dilbertization of Yahoo.”

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The Market Speaks – NYTimes.com

Krugman always makes sense to me.

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The Orthodox Surge – NYTimes.com

David Brooks writes about the notion that the Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn combine a modern Whole Foods type life with keeping Shabbat.

I liked this:

Meir Soloveichik, my tour guide during this trip through Brooklyn, borrows a musical metaphor from the Catholic theologian George Weigel. At first piano practice seems like drudgery, like self-limitation, but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs. Life is less a journey than it is mastering a discipline or craft.

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In Supreme Court Debate on Voting Rights Act, a Dubious Use of Statistics – NYTimes.com

Nate Silver continues to illuminate the best way to think of statistics.

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Is Facebook Suppressing Un-Promoted Posts? | Here & Now

I heard part of this report on the radio yesterday. I was unable to verify some of the more outrageous claims but did find a couple more links online.

Facebook Under Fire For Suppressing Unpaid Content – ReadWrite

It looks like Facebookistan is attempting to “monetize” but one wonders if they will do the standard business approach to the interweb and kill the goose that lays golden eggs. If not kill the goose at least discourage it from using Facebook as much.

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Bob Woodward’s Tantrum, Bradley Manning’s Torment | The Nation

Disturbed by footage of a deadly aerial attack on Iraqi civilians in 2007, he [Manning] said, “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.” Such a sober meditation on the human cost of US military force is precisely what was missing from the press during the run-up to both wars.

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How Does the Brain Process Art? | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

I found this article when I was image searching for yesterday’s blog pics.

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The Good, Racist People – NYTimes.com

Save me from the good racist people. Good take on this.

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Ad Campaigns Fight It Out Over Meaning of ‘Jihad’ – NYTimes.com

This article eventually gets around to pointing out that one side of the fight is coming from hate groups.

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FactCheck.org : The ‘Obamaquester’

I found this article helpful in understanding the background of the sequester.

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“Beauty dies: that is the source
of creation.”

Louis Glück, “Hyacinth”

I find transience an important notion in beauty. I also am puzzled sometimes by others who emphasize the idea of worrying about what one leaves when one dies, one’s legacy as it were.

The idea that beauty is not eternal but is enhanced by its limited duration, its beginning and end, applies in two ways. First there is the sweetness of the moment that passes, the clarity of being alive in the moment and the wonder of it. Then there there is the idea that all things made will eventually perish and actually be forgotten. This second idea is a bit harder to swallow, but I figure it’s probably true.

Humans have walked the earth for a long time. They have lived, loved and made wonderful things. Their lives and their deeds and creations are now completely forgotten.

Our memories keep some things alive. I think of our memories of those who have died but also great art. But there may come a time when Bach is forgotten, when Shakespeare and the language he made his enchanting creations in will be no longer remembered. This is harder for me to accept than whether my own existence will have an effect after my death (beyond the memory of my loved ones).

Happy thoughts for a Friday morning, eh?

Here’s another passing thought.

Someone put up a comment online telling me that I am blessed.

This is very true. My life continues to be a good one. I have my work and I have my loved ones. My daily life is one in which I experience the love of my wife and the beauty of music. Beyond that I am well fed, have a place to sleep, books to read. It’s amazing really.

I was reading in Musicking by Christopher Small yesterday. I am in the section he calls “Interlude 2: The Mother of All the Arts.” It’s about ritual. He says there is no such things as meaningless ritual despite the popular notion that uses the term to denote empty gestures.

So much language I hear is hollowed out of meaning. I recently heard a very religious person denigrate the notion of ritual in a passing comment. It helped me understand the way he sees the world. A very different way than I do.He has whittled his words down (as many religious people are wont to do) to very specific notions. This apparently excludes understand the importance of ritual in the context of myth, a context of related concepts that Small points out: “ritual, myth, metaphor, art—and emotion.”

I mentioned last night at dinner to Eileen that I had read about ritual and that our weekly date night was one of those important rituals in my life.

I was thinking of this quote from Small.

“Coronations, Olympic games, the Roman Catholic mass, symphony concerts, executive lunches, elections, funerals, having oneself tattooed, grand banquets  family dinners and intimate meals à deux, prostrating towards Mecca, the “hazing” and bullying of recruits in elite armed corps and exclusive schools, and thousands of other rituals large and small are patterns of gesture by means of which people articulate their concepts of how the relationship of their world are structured, and thus of how humans ought to relate to one another.” Christopher Small, Musicking, location 2112 of 5394

I know this idea of ritual has informed the way I understand both my daily life and work.

It was the ” intimate meals à deux” I had in mind as I looked across the table last night in the restaurant with Eileen. I am indeed blessed.

I feel like the chair of the dance department is making an effort to reconcile me after Joffrey’s bad behavior (described in recent posts).

Yesterday I dragged myself wearily out of bed.  I have been finding that if I have stuff scheduled in the evening lately, my mind continues to whir and I rest badly.

I ascribe this to my introverted inclinations. People drain me.

I think the draining has something to do with being overly aware of others and also then dealing with my own interior obsessions which will often focus on conversations and comments that I have difficulty resolving or putting down.

So I was exhausted yesterday morning. I walked the several blocks to work in the morning cold. When I arrived at the dance studio I found out that I was not needed for the class. I came home, emailed the chair to remind her about comp tickets for an upcoming dance recital and told her I planned to bill for the canceled class even though I hadn’t played for it. She emailed back a supportive email (which is sort of what I expected or at least hoped she would do). We had discussed that the department would give me two comp tickets for this Saturday. I am taking a party of five people and mentioned this to the chair of the dance department in my email, I pointed out that two of my guests also have affiliation with the college and suggested she consider giving me four comp tickets. She gave me all five. That was nice. So I’m feeling a bit better about the dance department at Hope this morning.

I finished another volume of Louis Glück’s poetry this morning, The Seven Ages.

This means I have read her last seven books of poetry.

They are

Ararat (1990)

The Wild Iris (1992)

Meadowlands (1996)

Vita Nova (1999)

The Seven Ages (2001)

Averno (2006)

A Village Life (2009)

I own hard copies of three of these (A Village Life, Averno, and Vita Nova). The rest are in a recently published collection of all of her work to date in a library copy I have on hand.

This leaves her four earlier books. I started one of those this morning.

I continue to enjoy reading her and occasionally a poem will jump off the page at me.

One in particular seemed a bit related to “Casals” by Gerald Stern that I put up in yesterday’s post. Both of these poems have been rattling around in my head since they are poets speaking of the experience of listening to music.

The phrase cri de coeur (“cry of the heart”) covers both how I read these two poems and how I often feel in relationship to music.

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The Balcony

by Louise Glück

It was a night like this, at the end of summer.

We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.
How many days and nights? Five, perhaps–no more.

Even when we weren’t touching we were making love.
We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.
And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.

We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,
well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,
sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn’t in those years know.

Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken
the only happiness, who was alone now,
impoverished, without beauty.

The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figures–
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy.

Such a small mistake. And many years later,
the only thing left of that night, of the hours in that room.
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This poem is Proustian in the way it incorporates the remembered emotion connected with listening to the aria on the radio.

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Free Speech for Day Laborers – NYTimes.com

Bad law that states come up with sometimes is a good argument for the federal government stepping in and correcting abuse.

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Gaza Marathon Canceled After Women Are Barred From Participating – NYTimes.com

The struggle between re-remerging fundamentalism and human rights continues.

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Bolshoi Dancer Held in Acid Attack on Sergei Filin – NYTimes.com

For me this is another “the rest of the story” news item. I wondered what in the world was going on when the director of the Ballet company was disfigured recently in an attack where the attacker threw acid in his face.

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Trading Cultures Along The Silk Road: An Interview with Professor Valerie Hansen — Ancient History Encyclopedia

China Gansu Dance Theater Tells a Silk Road Story – NYTimes.com

Interesting serendipity of finding these two articles recently.

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Qualified Private Activity Bonds Come Under New Scrutiny – NYTimes.com

At a time when Washington is rent by the politics of taxes and deficits, select companies are enjoying a tax break normally reserved for public works.

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I broke down and purchased a copy of Chopin’s waltzes through the mail. I used to have copy of them somewhere. But I seem to have lost it. It was old and crumbling (like much of my sheet music much of which was originally purchased used anyway).

My dance people seem to like Chopin. Or at least the idea of him. My instructor will try to give me descriptive words of what they would like the music to be sometimes. Chopin’s name comes up a lot in her descriptions. But I end up playing Schubert for her (that is when I play composed melodies for class instead of improvising). I have played his waltzes on and off for years since my piano study. I like them and I like Schubert. The Schubert waltzes seem to be written as waltzes and preserve the necessary regularity for ballet class.

This strict regularity is missing from much composed music. There are 19 waltzes in the collection of Chopin I purchased. A small number of them were published during his lifetime (9?) yet Palmer says in his introduction that they were some of his most popular music when he was alive. This makes sense because of a more thriving salon and amateur pianist scene. The waltzes are more regular in their phrasing than much (most?) of Chopin’s work.

But I find the melodies of both composers consistently compelling and interesting. I have been playing and analyzing Chopin since he arrived in the mail.

I associate Chopin with my deceased father. My dad was a fledgling pianist who could whip off a bit of Chopin if he wanted to.

I remember when I was in high school an exchange student from South America who brightened up when I pulled out my dad’s editions of Chopin (I still have it).

He (the exchange student) then played from it.

I understand that Chopin himself was largely self taught. I find that interesting but instructive.

I do continue to find beauty in his work and am curious now to go back and parse some of his simpler work like the Waltzes. How he puts them together is instructive to me as I improvise hours each day and have to come up with harmonic progressions that don’t put me to sleep but are still conventional enough to make sense to dancers.

I have been reading in Pau Elie’s Reinventing Bach. It is a guilty pleasure in some ways since it is such a lay approach to music, but at the same time he talks about stuff that interests me and is part of my consciousness as a musician. He spends a lot of time with Pablo Casals. Casals has had a huge influence on me. I have read his “autobiography” at least twice. Plus I have a charming book of interviews that someone did with him. I love his recordings of the Bach cello suites.

So when I ran across this poem a week or so ago it stuck in my head.

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Casals

You could either go back to the canary
or you could listen to Bach’s unaccompanied Suites
for which, in both cases, you would have the same sofa,
and you will be provided with a zigzag quilt to sleep
under and a glass-top table and great fury,
for out of those three things music comes;
nor should you sleep if even the round muscles
below the neck fall loose from their stringy moorings
for you would miss a sob and you would miss
a melody a la red canary
and a la white as well and a la canary,
perched, as the cello was, on top of a wooden box
and a small musician perched on top of the cello
and every night a church full of wild canaries.

Gerald Stern, In Beauty Bright

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I think this poem is about a longing and connection the poet makes to the beauty in music. The use of the “canary image” makes me think of the stereotype of canaries in a mine where they indicate the loss of oxygen.

The idea of a church full of wild canaries and a small musician perched on top of his cello resonates with the loss of an appreciation of beauty which I see around me. Retaining this appreciation is like oxygen to me.

When I go to play a ballet class, I usually bring along a few other piano scores I am thinking about. I play through works I love and am analyzing as the class sort of wanders in. When the teacher comes in I usually stop out of respect.

Yesterday I was playing a Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words” when the teacher came in. She asked me what it was (as she often does). I told her and she asked if I was preparing for something like a concert . I said no.

Sunday I realized as I sat down to play piano before our Lenten gathering chant that my preludes and postludes at church are more and more like this kind of playing for me, playing out of love for and interest in the music. It is a lonely pursuit these days in my life. So few people seem to be listening or even notice what I am doing.

A symphony player at our church remarked to Eileen that people ignored me at church and then pay money to hear music of similar quality in other situations.

Context is important I guess.

Saturday the Joffrey Ballet Company hired me through the Hope College dance department to play for auditions. Joffrey is a prestigious ballet company based in New York City. They hold summer ballet schools for young dancers. This was the audition to be accepted into this summer school.

The audition consists of  a dance class, so it is much like any ballet class in that.

The secretary of the department originally emailed me asking if I had the date free and that I would be paid at least as much as Hope pays me. I agreed.

The dance instructor (no longer at Hope) that has impressed me the most was from this company. Plus I routinely accept invitations to situations where I feel I might be challenged (new instructor) and learn something.

Just before the class Saturday, the visiting instructor (who I would describe as witty and competent) handed me an envelope marked $40 telling me that they were paying me $25 an hour and that they had rounded up. The class was an hour and half.

As I continue to play these classes (and improvise at church) I try to make music that I am proud of as improvisations. This means I want it to be as good as a composition. The language is mostly tonal, a little jazzy, an emphasis on clarity of tonal movement (this is for the dancers who are keeping track of where they are in the combination, and of course evolving motivically related melodies, counter melodies and bass lines.

I am often proud of the result. Doing it this way is to immerse myself as much as possible in the moment, allowing the ebb and flow of a good piece of music.

Anyway, I got home and was thinking that $40 didn’t seem like much. I looked it up in my records and the previous year I had been paid $75 for the same work. I started to email the dance department chair (through whom this negotiation had taken place). Then I interrupted myself deciding I should open the envelope and count the cash.

There was a ten and 21 one dollar bills in the envelope. $31. I emailed the chair and copied it to the secretary. I told them that in the future I would need at least $75 for these kinds of extra services. I also informed them of the short changing I had received.

As far as I know, Joffrey was not contacted. Yesterday the chair of the department dismissed me an hour early from an hour and half class. She had told me she was doing so in order to make up for my being short changed. After a bit of thought, I realized the discrepancy in this. I was essentially still losing the money and being given compensatory time off. This might make more sense if I was working enough to have a real salary from Hope. But since they hire me by the class and it comes out to about ten hours a week, compensatory time off for being short changed doesn’t make much sense. Sometimes I come and sit for an hour while an instructor teaches and doesn’t need music, waiting to play if needed. Either way, I always bill the same.

I have found that what I do for a living (which often includes this kind of free lance work) is invisible to people. Music is a commodity. It something that comes out of ipods and computers and CD players. Musicians are rich and distant magical people like politicians or movie stars. To devote one’s life to the doing of music as craft and art as I have done is to commit obscurity in our society.

If people who dance for a living and teach dance for a living feel that my work is sufficiently negligible that given the choice they pay me less per hour than I notice I will be paying the person who repairs my recently wrecked Subaru (Hope pays me $25 per hour, on the estimate I received yesterday I happen to notice the repair person gets $40 an hour), if people who love art and beauty see my work as so inconsequential, I ask myself the question is there actually any room for a person like myself who approaches music as craft  instead of a “thing” ?

The answer I tell myself, is “Yes, just barely.”

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City Transportation Transposed

I had a nice chat with my son via Facebookistan messaging yesterday over lunch. He has started up his blog again. Cool. He also mentioned that he is my third blog reader (after Sarah and Rhonda) and referred to my recent “confessions.”

According to Google analytics I get about 20 hits a day on this blog and I know I do have a few regular readers beyond David, Sarha and Rhonda. My comments about my small number of readers are supposed to be exaggerated dumb humor so you readers who do read me, read on and thank you.

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Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com

I bought a Kindle edition of the current issue of Time magazine after Jon Stewart had the author of this article on the Daily Show. Now his article is free online. Excellent.

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Sylvia Smith, 67, Memoirist of the Life Banal, Dies – NYTimes.com

Very weird obit about a writer whose work sounds fascinatingly mundane.

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Russia and U.S. Join to Help Polar Bears – NYTimes.com

Russia and the US are ahead of Canada on something besides economics and war? Who knew?

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Baby With H.I.V. Is Reported Cured – NYTimes.com

My son was very taken with the fact that doctors were able to actually cure HIV in this baby. It is an amazing thing.

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Marie-Claire Alain, Organist and Teacher, Is Dead at 86 – NYTimes.com

So Marie Claire Alain did get a NYT obit. I mentioned her death in a recent post.

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My grandson who recently turned thirteen has interesting ways of reading books. I noticed that the book he brings along to read on any given excursion is often one he has read before. When questioned, he said he just picks up the book and begins reading anywhere in it. It was obvious that he reads the books over and over not necessarily from beginning to end.

I found that liberating somehow. Recently I was reminded how much I like Ulysses by James Joyce. Eileen and I usually listen to audio books at night. We do this via the local library’s subscription to audiobookcloud.com. Once a patron logs in, he or she can stream many audio books.

About a week ago, I streamed a recording of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

This is a book I  have attempted to read over the years. I’m pretty sure I have made it through more than once. But the joy of reading for me these days is to return to books like this and discover how much I missed in them in previous readings.

I’m pretty familiar with the first part of Ulysses (having started it over and over). As I was listening to audio book and admiring the lilt the reader was giving to the accents of the young men at the beginning of the book, I eventually noticed that it skipped quickly from the Stephen Dadalus section to the Leopold Bloom section and omitted several sections (Stephen’s walk on the beach, his interior monologue while teaching) that I love.

What the heck?

It was not too long after that that I began looking for my copie(s) of Ulysses to read. I decided to start later in the book, when I’m a bit fuzzier on the story. I landed on Chapter 12 or as the helpful Kindle version I downloaded to read calls it Episode 12.

This is the chapter identified by Joyceans as the Cyclops chapter.

It is helpful to know Homer in order to understand how Joyce has clothed the skeleton of the story of Homer with his own stream of intense experience of one day in Dublin.

I have been thinking about Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Eliot knew Joyce. He read Ulysses and according to one of his biographers admired it, but was sorry he had. Presumably they were heading in similar directions and Eliot wanted to be unencumbered another contemporary genius’s approach.

At least that’s what I got out of it.

Anyway, both men used allusions. Eliot in “The Wasteland” even provided “author’s notes.”

This kind of use of the past interests me. If one must read Homer or the books that Eliot was reading as he was writing “The Wasteland” in order to “get” their work, it seems to me kind of bogus. I think both authors felt this way. The work should stand. The allusions were playful and the work of tricksters to some extent.

All this is to say I don’t recriminate myself for my ignorance when trying to experience their works.

At this point, I enjoy the work but also do let my curiosity roam and look stuff up.

So I read Episode 12 of Ulysses and could get the skeleton of the “citizen” who owns the bar this episode takes place in as the Cyclops that Ulysses (Leopold Bloom) fools and blinds.

But as I said before Joyce does so much more with Homer’s skeletal ideas (the Coen brothers emulate this in “O Brother Where Art Thou” with crafty little allusions to the same story).

I forged on to Episode 13 which is sometimes called Nausicaa after the woman in book 6 of the Odyssey. I read it and the accompanying helpful “Schoomp” notes.

But unlike the Cyclops story, I didn’t recognize the Homer story and went back last night and read the original in the wonderful Robert Fagles translation.

Joyce is doing some interesting things in his Episode. It is the episode where Bloom watches a young girl (Gerty/Nausicaa) and masturbates in a public place.

The episode is about exhibitionism, voyeurism, but also the interior monologue of a not so young (will not see seventeen again) girl who is aware she is being observed and the continuing  monologue of Joyce’s Ulysses: Bloom.

I’m enjoying revisiting this wonderful work and give a nod to my grandson for helping me develop better ways to approach the books I love.

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(Note: I have been neglecting to include links due to the length of my recent posts, so here a few)

Sign Language Interpreters Bring Live Music to the Deaf – NYTimes.com

I remember playing piano for a deaf Sunday School class when I was about the age of my grandson (13 or maybe a bit older). It taught me to be interested in the deaf. I love the idea of the signer deliberately conveying the rhythms and emotions of pop music.

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Russians Renew Fury After Death of Adopted Boy in Texas Is Ruled Accidental – NYTimes.com

Although the Russians are obviously out of control about this incident, I do think they have a point about questioning whether the child in question died of self inflicted wounds. I hope more comes about this.

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Benedict’s Decision May Affect Future Popes’ Terms – NYTimes.com

This article helped me understand a report I read on an Australian news web site that the cardinals were going to insist that the next pope pledge to serve till death. I found that puzzling. But it sounds like it might only be a few of them. Australian ones at that

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Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement – Boing Boing

http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf

This topic fascinates me. Haven’t read these links yet but I have returned to reading Thinking Fast Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman which deals with this idea.

*****

British Vote Shows New Support for Right-Wing Party – NYTimes.com

I find British politics interesting and like most politics these days disheartening.

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A Divide on Voting Rights in a Town Where Blood Spilled – NYTimes.com

Regarding the Supreme court taking up the Civil Rights stuff. You can tell who wants to abandon the Civil rights safeguards and who wants them to remain in this little city by (you guessed it) the color of their skin.

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At Ice Age End, a Smaller Gap in Warming and Carbon Dioxide – NYTimes.com

Gore was right it seems.

*****

Borough Searches for Taken Banksy Mural – NYTimes.com

Hey. Bansky in the news. I recently referred to this guy in a book review. I think he is partly the model for a character in Capital by John Lanchester,

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I better begin with my third confession since the vast majority of my readers (that would be two people, Sarah and Rhonda) seem interested.

For about two months I have started every day with the morning office of the Episcopal church.

This means that when I got up, I prayed through the Prayer Book morning prayer. It begins with a confession (heh), a fixed morning psalm (95 alternating with 100), psalmody, Old testament reading, Epistle and Gospel reading, and finishes with some prayers including the Our Father.

For many years I prayed the office. I even worked out my own course of psalmody so that I prayed through the entire book of psalms in a periodic manner.

Anyway, one day this week I simply stopped doing this. It coincided with a renewed interest in the my long time passion James Joyce, but I don’t think it had much to do with that. I’m not sure why, but I experienced a renewed disenchantment with religiosity especially Christian religiosity and felt that the prayer in the office could be a waste of time. Disenchantment is probably too strong. It’s more like I lost interest, church and religion can  bore me and this week they did so with a vengeance.

It is the mediocrity and insularity of the whole dance that causes me to avert my attention.

How’s that for arrogant? But there you are.

I finished a second read of Michael Robbins’ charming little book of poetry: “Alien vs. Predator.” I broke down and bought the Kindle version this morning so that after I return the library copy I can still refer to it occasionally.

I enjoy his mix of words and pop references. Though he is younger than me, his references often ring true, he uses many phrases from Bob Dylan and other musicians.

In fact, I enjoy his poetry in much the same way I like a good recorded song (what do you call this music now? Popular music seems so lame and inaccurate. Reminds me of the cringe I have when people use the category “Classical music.” I fall back on the Duke Ellington ethos: there’s “good music and the other kind” or “if it sounds good, it is good.”)

Two famous musicians died this week. I found that I have a tiny strand of spider web connection to each one.

Van Cliburn and Mary Clair Alan both passed away.

I was surprised to read that Van Cliburn’s first and very important teacher was his own mother. But it was his other teacher, Rosina  Lhevinne, that caught my eye in his obit.

I am largely a self taught pianist. However, I did study seriously for about two years with Richard Strassberg at Ohio Weslyan. One day I brought in a book I was reading on piano pedagogy. I was impressed that it echoed Strassberg’s ideas.

He pointed to the woman on the cover and said “That was my teacher.”

I was blown away.

Marie Clair Alain didn’t make the New York Times obit section (as far as I know and I check every day online), but she is an important organists of the 20th century. My organ teacher Ray Ferguson (from whom I learned a ton) used to talk about his work with her. I’m not sure exactly how he studied with her, but I’m sure he did. He would talk about sharing a glass of wine with her and when he or others had challenged her eccentric musical path that often veered from one interpretation to another of the same music, she would reply (according to Ray) “Can I not change?”

I loved hearing him talk about her.

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned.

Or something.

This has been a week of breaking. Breaking cars, faith, trust with myself.

Let’s work backwards.

On Thursday, I pulled into the driveway and got confused as the car slid towards the garage. I pressed the accelerator mistaking it for the brake and the car plunged into the garage, the wooden door folding back and over the hood as I destroyed my wife’s lawnmower, the gas grill and flung debris over my wife’s precious Mini Cooper causing surface damage to it.

My reaction for two days was to be shook, but not self recriminatory. Eileen felt much worse than I did. She mentioned  yesterday as she went out to shop that shopping was good for the blues. “You have the blues?” I asked after registering the important part of her comment. She said she was taking my accident harder than I was. She wasn’t blaming you understand. She was feeling bad.

Not me. Just shook.

Okay I felt stupid.

But I was already in the throes of stupid from something I did on Wednesday.

I was driving over to church. The road was snow covered and slippery on the side streets. The car I was following was driving overly cautious. I was annoyed. After a few blocks the car went slower and braked. I honked, drove by and flipped the guy off. I looked in my rear view mirror a moment later and noticed the slow car was now going very quickly in my direction. I decided not to stop and kept turning and moving from street to street. The car increased its speed and was evidently following me.

Now if this had been Detroit where I lived for many years, I would have panicked more than I did assuming that the person driving was going to shoot me. But in silly old Holland my panic was not as pronounced. I simply kept moving and turning to see if the guy was really following me.

Finally I pulled into a parking lot, turned around and met the driver as he pulled in. I rolled down my window as did he. He wanted to know what my problem was. He didn’t appreciate being flipped off. Are you in a hurry? he asked. No I said truthfully. I explained how his driving was upsetting and confusing me. He defended it. I was going the speed limit he said (he wasn’t actually). I said to him you didn’t signal your turn. He goes I was stopping at my house. I said you didn’t signal that you were pulling off. I don’t think he thought he had to.

Anyway, by this time, I was feeling like the grown up thing to do would be to apologize to him, so I did.

“I apologize,” I said. “Good!” he said and we both drove off.

After about a half hour, I came to the conclusion that of the two of us, I had behaved badly.

My road rage operates under the unthought through assumption that cars are driving badly, not actual humans.

I read a proposal once that said that driving might improve if all road signs and stoplights were removed. As vehicles approached each other they would have to look carefully at the other driver and determine how to proceed at intersections.The idea was that one would become more aware of the living breathing humans in the other car and treat them more as one would if passing them on the street or in a hall.

This is a good thought for road ragers like me. I hereby resolve to alter my general behavior and address my own rage which admittedly at this stage of my life tends to be addressed to inanimate objects preferentially instead of living breathing humans.

Well, reader, I see I have exceeded my daily self imposed word limit. I have more to confess but that has to wait for a different post.

I have been thinking about the fact that so much technology in our lives changes our approach to using devices.

In the pre-tech age of today, if one wanted an electric device to function the first step was often a simple switch, i.e. one turned it on.

This is  no longer the case.

Now one problem solves or learns a multi-step process of “booting up” or allowing a device a moment or two to respond.

Case in point this morning, I was laying in bed trying desperately to not get up. One way to do this is to listen to the radio. I have the netbook by the bed which I use to play audiobooks at night via the library’s online resource. I clicked on the web page of the U of M NPR station as I  usually do and then wait for the page to load, then click on the “listen now” button and wait for it to start up.

This morning it would only play the initial commercial message built into the access and then stopped.

When this happened I remembered that it happened the morning before as well.

So I click on the various help links trying to figure out why it’s not working or actually just trying to get it to work.

I finally figured out that I needed to update my Adobe flash player.

By this time I was wide awake and thinking about getting up and filling the dishwasher as I made myself my morning coffee.

I ended up bring down the netbook and continuing the process of installing a new version of the flash player.

And I turned on the radio in the kitchen while the little computer continued to load.

My point is that with the older device, I simply turned it on, with the new device I had to problem solve and it took quite a while.

This delay is part of my life now. When I turn on a computer or my new phone or my old Kindle I expect delays.

Back in the day of the phone modem, I used to read the paper as I did computer stuff because it was so slow.

Somehow this relates to my experience of teaching my Kids choir about books. I have put Bibles, hymnals and the Book of Common Prayer in their hands to briefly discuss how books work.

I can remember being taught how to estimate where to land in a dictionary or a bible as I opened it.

I think this sort of skill dates me a bit.

Young people access information in so many ways and the subtleties of the book are probably not as pertinent as they used to be.

On Wednesdays in Lent a Eucharist service is part of the evening. The boss has made a little sheet with the service on it and a music sheet with the Kyrie and a hymn she wants to sing.

I asked her why we didn’t just use the Prayer Book and a hymnal. She had thought the same thing.

It amuses me that many approaches can seem more cumbersome. But then I have resolved to develop my own patience with myself and my surroundings.

Slow new tech helps me do this. So there are benefits to watching a page slowly load in my internet browser or wondering if the device has “heard” my request to do something and is moving slowly or just not working. Honest.

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Living In The Land Of The Lost | The Most Succinct Word

This is kind of cool. Thanks to the Davepaul for emailing me this link.

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Van Cliburn, Pianist and Cold War Envoy, Dies at 78 – NYTimes.com

Van Cliburn’s obit has some details about him I did not know.

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Republicans Must Bridge the Income Gap – NYTimes.com

I keep noticing that not all republicans are mad. Encouraging.

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Native Americans and the Violence Against Women Act – NYTimes.com

Indian laws in the USA have a lot wrong with them apparently.

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Get Off of Your Cloud – NYTimes.com

I tend to read Dowd’s articles but don’t often bookmark them. In this case she has some insights in the recent Yahoo dealy of forbidding their employees to work off site via computers.

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Supreme Court Hears Arguments on DNA Sampling – NYTimes.com

DNA is obviously different from fingerprinting. But I wonder about the issue of using it to find connections to other crimes on people who have been arrested. We do this already with their pictures and fingerprints, don’t we? Somehow the idea that we can use little bits of them left at crime scenes to identify them as perps seems to raise a larger question of privacy. I will be interested to see how the court rules on this.

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British Government Seeks to Limit Disclosure in Litvinenko Case – NYTimes.com

This is the case where the spy was killed with radiation covertly. I tend to try to follow certain cases over the time it takes to actually litigate them.

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Chinese Intellectuals Urge Ratification of Rights Treaty – NYTimes.com

This seems like a good step, getting the government to ratify this. I guess North Korea has done so which makes one think that China could do so and that it probably won’t make much difference. But still.

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Castel Gandolfo, Near Rome, Prepares to Welcome Pope – NYTimes.com

The pope is officially emeritus now. Here’s an article about his new digs. Sooprise sooprise, it’s fancy as heck.

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Coalition Says Afghan Attacks Didn’t Fall After All – NYTimes.com

Another example of initial analysis being faulty.

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Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Surveillance Law – NYTimes.com

The USA has become a government of secrets and torture. Too bad.

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I finished Capital by John Lanchester yesterday. I found it a delightful and informative read. Delightful because it is deftly and cunningly put together. Informative because Lanchester draws portraits of several people living in England in the first part of the 21st century and does so convincingly. In doing so, he presents a picture of London the Capital (or the City as he puts it) as well as the capital of  high incomes of some of the people on one particular street. But it’s mostly about the City in my opinion.

I have a vested interest in this because my youngest daughter has resided in England for quite some time (since 2001?). I share with her an abiding interest in the Brits. Lanchester fills in some holes (albeit in fiction) for me about England. I find reading contemporary fiction sometimes does this. It helps me understand reality a smidge more.

Anyway, Lanchester hangs his tale on people connected somehow with one street in London named Pepys. This must be a fictionalization and a convenient one since Samuel Pepys is known for his famous diary of London life.

There is a mild conceit of a small mystery. Who is sending postcards to addresses on Pepys road of photographs of the addressed residence with the message “We Want What You Have” on it each time?

But this is not a mystery story. It’s a story of people, specific people. Like Roger Yount the ridiculous rich  financier who is described in part thusly in chapter 2:

At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six foot three, just short enough to feel no need to conceal his height by stooping—so that even his tallness appeared a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than more ordinary people. The resultant complacency seemed so well-deserved, and came with so little need to emphasise [sic] his own good fortune relative to anyone else, that it appeared like a form of charm.

And of course his complacency and charm are doomed from the start. Despite his repugnant wealthy ease I was drawn to sort of like Roger. In fact, that’s something Lanchester does with most of his characters. He paints them with warts that initially amuse and repel but then fills them up a bit with traits that one indulges much as one might indulge one’s own foibles in a mirror.

So there is the financier character plus his family and Hungarian nanny. There is the philosophical Quentina Mkfesi an immigrant who is a “warden” who spends her day issuing parking tickets. (Did you know that “sleeping policemen” is what some Brits call speed bumps? I quite like that.)

There is the widow Petunia Howe who rattles around in her house on Pepys and remembers her life. There is Smitty a Banksy like artist who is her grandson and visits her occasionally.

There is the Senagalian football (soccer) genius and his dad who have been transported to London to dazzle fans. There are the three Kamal brothers, each with a different degree of Islamic devoutness who take the reader into a Toltsoyan family that runs the convenience store on Pepys. A hulking Polish building contractor comes in contact with many of the owners of buildings on Pepys and is one of the more complex characters in the book, guilelessly sleeping with women only for sex and without bringing himself to actually reveal himself and have relationships with them. He is saving up money to return to Poland and care for his aging parents.

I can’t do justice to these characters and the way Lanchester makes them three dimensional and intertwines them into a gentle 21st century mix of Dickens and Trollope.

Recommended.

I have been easing up on the demands I make of myself as an organist for a while. When I was sick, I was dragging myself over to church to continue learning upcoming music.  I found that when added to the rest of my duties (choir director, meeting attender, de facto liturgy guy, and numerous other activities) that it might be good to schedule some easy music for awhile. Also during Lent there is no prelude this year because we are beginning with a little chant we sing over and over until the procession begins. The prelude seemed redundant. As I said to the skeptical person in the choir Sunday, “a preparation for the preparation.”

Anyhoo, this ended yesterday when I chose music for this Sunday and the next. Just the postludes.

We are closing this Sunday with a Lenten hymn, “The glory of these forty days.” It’s sung to a tune that has been around for awhile that is called Erhalt uns in German. This is the beginning of the text sometimes sung to it in the Germanic tradition.

Tunes in the North German tradition were far from uniform in their renditions in the 17th and 18th century. There were many different versions of hymnals floating around, usually without music. So which tunes were sung where becomes a point of contention.

This matters because of the many pieces composers like Bach and Walther and others based on hymn tunes.

The use of music based on hymn tunes has been useful to me. Much of my working church musician life I worked for the Roman Catholics who were trying to jump start a congregational singing practice after centuries of passivity. So organ music based on tunes made a lot of sense to reinforce the learning of melodies. This was especially true because most priests disdained the use of an entire hymn, preferring to truncate it to two stanzas.

I am convinced that the use of many stanzas of hymns in church communities also reinforces the melody in the communal mind of the congregation.

I can remember sitting on a panel in a local American Guild of Organists meeting where I was the only one on the panel that was strongly advocating the using of chorale preludes. The local mucky mucks (who are the high priests and priestesses of the reformed tradition) resisted with a smirk.

Nevertheless I think it’s pretty cool to use music based on the tunes in the organ music.

So I scheduled a little piece by Walther for this Sunday.

Walther actually uses a form of the melody which resembles the closing hymn. I have been known to alter pieces so that the listener who has just sung a melody would better recognize the piece as based on the same melody.

Whippy skippy, eh?

But I’m now committed to some practice for the postlude a week from Sunday. It’s the final movement of Sonata V by Felix Mendelssohn. I sort of fell in love with it yesterday.

Many organists (including my teacher at Notre Dame) don’t seem very enthusiastic about Mendelssohn’s organ music. This would be okay, except that I see and hear them play music more insipid stuff (to my ears) and then call it wonderful (“GLORious” is the working term I believe).

Yesterday I decided to give in and face the fact that I like Mendelssohn. I hear his music not as the product of a weak kneed romantic who is from suspect origin (Jewish ferchrissake), but as the product of a careful and classically trained mind.

I am convinced that his less than stellar reputation among academics is sorely tainted by antisemitism. Which always strikes me as almost funny since Mendelssohn was not only baptized as a child as a Lutheran but displayed a deep love of the style of the Lutheran chorale.

He even made them up so convincingly that more than one academic career has been wasted trying to find actual melodies that match Mendelssohn’s.

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C. Everett Koop, Forceful Surgeon General, Dies at 96 – NYTimes.com

I remember this guy vividly. He did some good and lived a long life.

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Devoted to Weight Watchers, but Workers Rebel Against Low Wages – NYTimes.com

The tupperware model of business doesn’t always work out for the sales people I guess.

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Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office – NYTimes.com

I learned a lot about how some businesses are allowing working away from an office in this article. It looks like Yahoo has handled this poorly. Not sure why they went so extreme. It seems like a case by case basis would have been more judicious and effective.

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In India, Missing School to Work in the Mine – NYTimes.com

Corruption at its finest. Note that the mine the reporter visits is owned by an unnamed government official. Ahem.

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Sequester Impact On States Detailed In New White House Reports

If you’re curious about what the government is actually saying about the upcoming cuts, this article has some information and links.

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I know a lot of professional type bloggers create an essay which has coherence for their bogs.

Other people use social media to talk about trivial harmless sort of stuff.

Everybody links.

I’m somewhere in the middle of this mess. I think of my blog as having you sitting in the living room with me and me expostulating about what I’m reading and thinking.

Hence, I’m not really looking to create an air tight piece of prose or coherence. More like an ongoing conversation with the cyber air.

I was feeling very grateful this morning to have this imaginary conversations in my life.

Not just with you, dear reader, but people like Chopin and Schubert (who speak to me through their music that I play or listen to); or John Lanchester (author of Capital) or numerous poets and writers that I visit daily (Poets: Michael Robbins, Gerald Stern, Louis Glück; T. S. Eliot biographers Peter Ackroyd and Lyndall Gordon). This sort of list goes on and on. But it is a very real feeling I have that I am not trapped in provincial Holland Michigan (or anywhere else for that matter) or this time but can rove with my thinking, reading, playing and imagination. Lucky me.

Having said that, here are few things on my mind.

My attitude towards politics, government and the society in which I live might be settling a bit. I have always been interested in the intrigues and manner in which representative governments govern.

I have read all of C. P. Snow’s novels about the British government stuff, some of them several times.

I have had my partisan moments in the last few years, but I am feeling more clear about the idea that society is so complex that it is reductive even to be partisan.

Take the upcoming sequester as it is being called…. you know…. on Friday many cuts to basic government budgets will take effect…. cuts designed to be stupid but now seem to be making politicians happy. On the right, government is indeed being taken into the bathtub and strangled. On the left, glee at the fact that the right will get the blame for any pain caused to the public by it.

Good grief.

The sequester? Never heard of it.

This Washington Post blog posits that the sequester is less understood and causes less concern than the fiscal debt discussion (the “cliff”) because it doesn’t have a catchy name. Oy.

Ryan Lizza: Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? : The New Yorker

This New Yorker article digs a bit deeper into the machinations of the House Republicans. More like C. P. Snow’s view.

Eileen and I recently watched a taped Jon Stewart show in which his guest was Steve Brill.

Stewart had read a article in which Brill commits journalism regarding health care costs in the USA.

Yesterday, I purchased a Kindle copy of this issue and am a third of the way into Brill’s 36 page article. It is another layer of corruption and mismanagement in our health care. Mostly ascribing insanely high mark ups of medical stuff like meds, tests and wheelchairs/canes. Also pointing out the insane wages given to heads of hospitals and teaching med departments in universities. Read it and weep.

Finally, I had an odd thought about people who are so adamant about keeping guns to protect themselves from the US government. Haven’t they thought of the fact that the government owns all these drones and if it wanted them gone, poof! they would be good and gone no matter what gun they own.

Just a thought.

It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten a new toy. The smart phone is kind of goofy, but I do keep thinking of ways I can use it (besides as a phone). Most of these ways involve accessing the internet more easily like at the grocery store or dumb doctor’s waiting rooms (dumb because like Meijers they don’t bother providing a free wifi).

Also I now am carrying a camera. This part I love.

Yesterday the postlude as I mentioned in previous posts was by a man named Matthew Locke.

Matthew Locke is also the name of my daughter Sarah’s significant other. He might even be related to the composer.

I resisted impulsively taking pictures during church yesterday.  But after church I snapped a few.

I have thought of taking pictures of the stained glassed windows in the choir area and using them on the church web site.

They’re kind of hokey. There are two of them with several (four?) panels all sort of music related.

This is the most choral one and might serve to make a picture for the music page on the church web site. It is also the scariest picture. Note that the three boys all have the same face but are slightly different colors. Rev Jen pointed this out to me yesterday as I was taking pics. I like this window for its weirdness, but not sure it’s quite the ticket to use. We’ll see. And then there’s this one.

It’s awfully Christmassy.

Anyway I love having my phone to take pictures. I added some apps yesterday (Facebook, Kindle, Google News). Discovered that the New York Times Digital subscription only seems to be compatible with the Iphone app. Texted back and forth with son in California. I am trying to figure out a routine for having a smart phone. Having a dumb one was easy. I just kept it turned off most of the time. Right now the smart phone is off, but I’m not sure how I will routinely use it yet. I used it the way I have been using the dumb one yesterday on Sunday mornings: as a clock. Smart phones, expensive clocks and flashlights.

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The Price of Public Violence – NYTimes.com

Giving our kids PTSD.

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In Nepal, Buddhists Reconstruct Tibetan Murals – NYTimes.com

Using locals to make new art for temples. I loved this little description:

an abbot used a mirror to absorb the spirits of the gods in the statues and murals before the painting began; after the project is completed, the abbot is expected to release the spirits from the mirror so they can return.

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Refrigerator Inventory: 5 Steps to a freshly frugal fridge | Squawkfox

This link posted by daughter Elizabeth on Facebookistan inspired me. I have been trying to organize the fridge lately. Maybe I’ll steal some ideas from this site.

I was listening to the radio program, “On The Media,” in bed this morning. The first report pointed out something I continue to notice, the idea that both sides of current partisan debate are equally responsible for bad government (or practically no governing at all).

I have noticed the falsity of this stance. For example on the current ridiculous manufactured crisis of the “sequestering” that will begin in earnest next Friday, the two sides in congress are offering two different solutions. One, the Democrats and Obama, leans toward some sort of combined increasing of revenues via taxes and cuts of expenditures in the budget. The other, the Republicans, are opposed to any revenue increases at all and want only cuts.

These are two fundamentally different approaches. Polls I have read have indicated that most Americans would prefer some sort of mix of revenue increase and budgetary responsibility via cuts.

In the report on this morning radio show, one reporter pointed out that the media is applying an old style understanding of itself as refereeing between two sides that fundamentally even have overlap and some areas of agreement. In reality this situation no longer exists. As the report points out the most conservative Democrat in Congress is far to the left of the most Liberal Republicans. Also the Senate is broken when routine cabinet appointments are now subject to holds placed by Senators.

The result is that the reporting tends toward false equivalency of attempting to present two sides of an argument. Deborah Tannis pointed this out years ago in her book, The Argument Culture.

The example in the radio report was the Obama birth certificate silliness. It tended to be reported with corroborating evidence on one side and Trump’s doubts on the other.

It is easy to generalize about the reporting of media. The fact is that many consumers of news have not thought about their own bias and how they get their information and what sources are what.

The best example of this is the little web site literallyunbelievable.org. My son-in-law Jeremy has expressed the idea that this is now his preferred way to read the Onion. This is the current top of this web site:

When looking at a link, all one has to do is notice the URL to begin thinking about the source of the information. This doesn’t seem to be the way many approach online information. Like the media itself, many consumers are stuck in the idea that if it is in print or on their screen (or being broadcast to them) it is de facto true, especially if it happens to fall in line with their own predisposition.

In other words, we are all in our own little echo chambers, the trick is to try to notice this and factor that in.

Here are some links around this issue (and possibly the inspiration for the report on On The Media).

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False-Equivalence Watch: WaPo Edition, Chapter 3,219 – James Fallows – The Atlantic

Beltway Brain Fever: Sequester Edition — Daily Intelligencer

On another note.

Eileen has been very unhappy with the fact that we are paying TMobile for cell phone  usage and have such lousy reception with our phones, often being unable to make calls. So we finally traipsed over to Verizon with the idea of switching. Originally we thought that one of us (Eileen) should have a smart phone. We looked at very economic ways to do this (pay as you go). But in the end we decided to go with monthly plan.

As we were doing it, I heard the woman say that by using a smart phone (for Eileen) and a dumb phone (for me) we were saving $10 a month. That seemed silly, so we decided we should both get smart phones.

The cool thing is that when we were ringing it up, my Hope College I.D. gave us a discount of 15% on our basic monthly fee of $60 which almost absorbed the difference in my having a smart phone as well.

I will have more to say about learning the phone culture but in the mean time here is a picture I took with my smart phone as Eileen signs up for hers.

I have been doing a lot more lazing about in between my scheduled commitments. Mostly reading. I am practicing organ less. Upcoming music is not terrible challenging. I continue to replay my way through Schubert piano sonatas.

This morning I managed to sleep in until around 7:30 AM. This must be a recent record. Consequently I seem less verbose this morning and am putting up a “no thank you helping” of a post.

The postlude tomorrow is by Matthew Locke, namesake of my daughter Sarah’s partner in England.

I’m hoping they are related. I chose it because it’s pretty easy and sort of matches the choral anthem by Thomas Thomkins. Both British and lived with a hundred years of each other. Tenuous I know but there you are.

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Kevin Ayers, Rocker in Soft Machine, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com

I just checked and I still own three vinyls of Soft Machine. But none of them have this guitar player on them.

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Case Ends Against Five Ex-Blackwater Officials – NYTimes.com

It’s been awhile since local yokel Erik Prinz has been associated with Blackwater. Hell, it’s not even called that anymore. But still when it surfaces I am reminded of the evil floating just below the surface in places like good old Holland, Michigan.

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Syrian Television’s Most Outraged Bystander – NYTimes.com

Media manipulation being used by Syria taught to them by Iran. Same dude “spontaneously” appearing and being interviewed in multiple news reports.

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I can’t resist another quote from a poem for the title of today’s blog. I think it’s witty in a silly way. It’s from this poem:

Use Your Illusion

by Michael Robbins

It’s a gorgeous day, not a bat in the sky.
The topography’s square with the recon.
Contents may have shifted during rapture.
Let’s put the Christ back in Xbox.

This baby is disgusting. Fuck you, baby.
Get a job. You have the worst taste in art.
A real Winston Churchill, this one. Your lot’s loss?
So lose. Lose the attitude. Lose the dress.

I was saying something about a baby.
It had eleven dimensions, kind of
a dim bulb. The last of a tiny race.
Just a shadow on a milk carton now.

I saw myself in half then make myself
disappear. Maybe the other way round.
Let’s hear it for my lovely assistant.
She’s the lower half of my body, sawn.
I open the cabinet and poof she’s gone.

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I like this guy so much I’m reading  Aliens Vs. Predator, the library book of his poetry I have a second time.

I noticed that I am reading two books each of which relates to one of the two countries my daughters are living in.

Capital by John Lanchester is about a fictional neighborhood in London and the people who live there. It takes place in 2007 and 2008. It draws wry portraits of several recognizable Brit types (all pretty rich): the widow living alone pretty much waiting to die (she’s not rich), the unhappy financier and his horrible family, the football (soccer) star from Senegal and his dad, the spoiled young artist, the three Muslim brothers with varying degrees of devoutness who run the convenience store on the block. Everyone in the book is sketched with merciless accuracy. I am quite enjoying it. I’m about a third of the way into it.

Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan is one of several books I am interested in about China where my older daughter and her husband live. I’m over three quarters of the way through it. It is very informative in that the writer uses anecdotal stories about real people that illustrate what it’s like to live in China. There’s lots of frustration about trying to run a newspaper or report the SARS epidemic to the authorities in a country where the state controls so much. But the people are clearly and sympathetically drawn and once again I’m enjoying this one which my daughter and her husband have both read and recommended.

I have ended up buying and reading simultaneously two biographies of T. S. Eliot: one by Peter Ackroyd and one by the more scholarly Lyndall Gordon.

I fell into alternating chapters out of curiosity as they sort of began outlining similar material and I wanted to see the differences. Continuing to do so has been instructive. Ackroyd has a huge mind and knows tons of stuff. Both books are heavily documented.

Doing this with two biographies has made so much sense that I am planning to do so with two bios of Mao.

I started this biography a few years ago. My son-in-law said that it didn’t have a good reputation as being scholarly. This seems weird to me because it also heavily documented. Of course the sources in this case are mostly originally in Chinese.

I cast about for something a bit more reputable and landed on Phillip Short’s book.

I read enough into it to know I wanted to own it so I purchased a copy. Both books are waiting for me to return to them. I’m thinking of reading them the way I have been reading the T. S. Eliot bios. I was surprised that Short seems to be so oriented towards understanding China’s recent history under Mao from Western sources. I think comparing the books as I read them might help me understand the story of Mao better than either one separately.

At any rate it will wait until I’m done with the Eliot books.

I notice that these two biographical subjects also represent the countries my daughters live in even though Eliot is American he is basically faux English and the bios take place mostly there.

The Red Poppy

by Louise Glück

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

*****

I read this poem yesterday morning. It struck me enough to mark it to read again this morning. It is from Glück’s collection The Wild Iris. I finished reading this book this morning in a collection of Glück’s poetry.

Michael Robbins the poet/critic says that it is the poppy speaking in this poem. And that many of the poems in this collection are from the point of view of the flowers in Glück’s garden. This makes sense. But for me, there is a voice of the poet and the voice of the poem itself. Someone speaking the way they do (whether in words or swaying like a red poppy) because they are “shattered.”

I see red poppy petals scattered but I also see shattered people sitting and lost maybe on a street in a city.

And the cheerful inanity of the first line attracts me. It captures my mixed feelings about the contemporary way to think or not think. I would be grateful if I could abandon the mental stuff sometimes. It would be a “great thing.” At the same time the next line captures the assumption that I carry into each moment that my feelings are a wave that are always present and presumably distorting things the way conceptualizing stuff with a mind can also distort things.

This poem is what we were like before we were human, before we bought into the stuff that takes away our ability  to “open.”

That’s how I see it.

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College Degree Required by Increasing Number of Companies – NYTimes.com

When I was in grad school, the chair of the music department said it was a buyer’s market for PHDs. This article talks about “degree inflation” and uses the same phrase for employer’s in general about all college degrees.

*****

Supreme Court to Hear Campaign Finance Case – NYTimes.com

Money is speech and corporations have individual rights. This stuff never fails to amaze me.

*****

A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry – NYTimes.com

This is a good behind the scenes look at how corporations shape legislation and subsequent law to their advantage and to the disadvantage to the society at large.

*****

The Memoto camera-narcissism or media for the masses? | The Media Freedom Foundation

Document your life with a little cam that takes a picture every few seconds.

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“I don’t think I could write something every day in a blog,”my younger daughter who is one of my regular readers said on the phone yesterday.  I reminded her that I have been doing this since before the term, “blog,” was in use. Originally I wanted to build a web site where I could have conversations with readers and friends. Now I have the site and blogging is a rage of many different kinds of writing but the conversation I have is most often with composers and poets I examine and listen to.

So be it.

On Monday my improvisations for ballet class left an odd taste in my mouth. I felt disconnected. Subsequently I dragged Schubert’s dances along yesterday and dropped a few in. This seemed to help even though composed music is not actually flexible enough to do the trick easily. In one combination (as the ballet people call it), I matched a little Schubert waltz to the rhythm outlined by the teacher. Then the teacher repeated the exercise at a much quicker speed. Although she had expressed approval of my use of the Schubert waltz, she suggested I might want to change the music. When I attempted the waltz at her speed, she pointed out that it was too slow. I just changed and improvised something appropriate. Much better.

Schubert has been on my mind. I am playing my way once again through his piano sonatas. I have recently played my way through Bach’s English suites for keyboard. I guess these are my conversations. Schubert glides quickly and satisfyingly (to me) into chords that surprise and melodies that stay with me. I play him even though critics have sometimes assigned his piano sonatas as so called “lesser works.” I still find them very satisfying.

From Bow To Baton: Violinist Joshua Bell Conducts Beethoven : Deceptive Cadence : NPR

I listened to a bit of this NPR interview with Joshua Bell yesterday. I found it “quaint” when Bell and the interviewer discussed his role as conductor from the first chair of the violin section.  There has a been a bit of a move to break out of the constraint of the traditional conductor vs. orchestra set up of the 19th and 20th century. I find it exciting. But Bell seems locked in the idea that one person leads an orchestra.

I was reminded that it was Bell who several years ago unsuccessfully tried to busk in a subway station.

He is a great player. But in both cases he seem to be working from a weirdly naive point of view.

I have been reading in Musicking by the late Christopher G. Small. It’s sitting on my Kindle and I read in it once in a while.

I find his ideas reinforce some notions of my own, like the idea that music is more verb than noun… i.e. “it’s something you do.”

He also spends several chapters examining the orchestra concert situation in the late 20th century. He outlines a shrewd and careful examination of the actual roles of the participants (listeners who gain access through purchase of a ticket but are not allowed any role but the one of passive consumer, expert symphony players who disdain the audience’s taste even as they willingly perform the music chosen, conductors who lead and composers who provide the notes to be played). He also mentions context as determining a large part of the meaning of the music that performers and listeners expect.

In Small observations I think he had Joshua Bell’s number. In the first case, it would seem to me that the whole celebrity conductor thing is expanding to include other ways to do music, especially when the Western tradition eases its stranglehold on how we think of music. Bell seems stuck in the past here. And as far as context, I wasn’t surprised that one of the finest players in the world was treated with indifference on the street. I continue to find that the quality of both the music being played and its interpretation is something that listeners need some guidance on otherwise they are likely to ignore it.

You know, like in church.

Heh.

I’m convinced that daily is the way to go with blogs.

When I check blogs and they haven’t a had an entry for several days I think of them as stuck somewhere no longer touching the “rolling present.”

On the other hand, writing a daily blog is a bit like sitting in a room with one way mirrors.

You’re never quite sure if you’re being watched.

Or maybe it’s like writing a daily note and putting it in a bottle. (Pace to the dozen or so readers and responders to this blog.)

The difference is I’m not stranded, but prefer large amounts of solitude. This solitude allows me to read, think and practice.

I know that it’s informed by the love and care of my wife and a few other people. Without that I’m pretty sure it would be bitter.

Actually it’s hard for me to imagine. At this point I carry the ones I love around with me. They’re thoughts (as interpreted by me) continue to inform my daily life, little conversations with ones dead or gone.

And then there’s the poetry and music itself.

Yesterday I played through the first two piano sonatas of Schubert. I do this more and more carefully, slowing down to get every note and rhythm as correct as I can.

It’s weird that my technique has improved over the years. Logically one expects it, I guess. But I see people stagnate into one place of being or another. Plus the technique I am striving for I know is not that advanced. I once read or heard the statement that the reason most organists are so bad is that so many of them didn’t have the technique to give a sophomore piano recital. Also after I quit school at one point and was sipping wine with a disgusted prof, he confided in me that most piano majors in the school couldn’t play scales in all keys. Both of these things have nagged at me in the back of my mind as I try to develop my abilities.

But I have made strides by myself in front of keyboards since leaving the care and guidance of teachers years ago.

It feels like my personality is evolving at the same time and I require myself to look harder and harder at those mirrors. Even the one way ones.

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In Korea, Changes in Society and Family Dynamics Drive Rise in Elderly Suicides – NYTimes.com

This reminds of the article I read recently about a Chinese family sacrificing so that their daughter could go to college, get a good job and take care of the parents in their old age.

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Supreme Court to Hear Alabama County’s Challenge to Voting Rights Act – NYTimes.com

Eileen and I watched an NPR special on Hubert Humphrey recently. In it, Jimmy Carter said on camera that Americans might need reminding that it wasn’t so long ago that Jim Crow was the law of the land, upheld by the Supreme Court. Racism is alive and kicking in the USA.

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