Got up this morning and played through this fugue several times. Then I went on Spotify and queued up 23 versions of it, including one for strings and two for organ. Here’s the one for strings:

I remember reading about how Rosalyn Tureck interpreted these fugues years ago, but never bothered to actually look up her recordings.

I found two different recordings by her on Spotify.

I love the visualizations in this version:

When I first learned about fugues and Bach (9th grade or so?), I was very impressed with the idea of cleverly combining melodies that were constructed from the same little modules of note patterns. This fascinated me for years.

Now I distinguish between the craft and the beauty. Bach’s fugues are amazingly crafted but don’t always attract with the beauty of their musical ideas. This particular one really does it for me, however.

I decided it would be polite to just sit at the breakfast table with my wife (instead of pounding away at the piano first thing in the morning) and analyze this same fugue.

I knew there would be online versions I could quickly print up. Lo and behold I found one of this 5 voice fugue in score. This means there is a line for each voice and since Bach overlaps voices it is much easier to see the counterpoint.

(Little post posting note: I just found out that Bach’s entire manuscript is online to view. Here’s a link to a PDF of this prelude and fugue in his handwriting!!!!!)

I often use the interwebs this way. Yesterday, I introduced a new piece Tu Solus Qui Facis Mirabilia to my choir. I mentioned it in yesterday’s blog, I believe.

One of the sopranos started questioning the meaning of the words even though we were not singing the text yet (easier to skip the Latin the first couple of read-throughs).

I will probably blog about her specific question later.

But I came home and found numerous references and articles about this particular piece online.

Very cool.

I am loving the interwebs for sure.

Here is the Hilliard Ensemble recording of this piece. I am moving away from their lovely interpretation to one that is not quite so ethereal. But they do sound pretty good.

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Bookmarked several articles to read yesterday:

What Happens To Old And Expired Supermarket Foods – Forbes

Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television? : The New Yorker

Supreme Loser – By Ali Vaez | Foreign Policy

Why Iran’s ayatollah-in-chief always gets it wrong.

The Q Factor – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Q = Queer theory.

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The Folly of Fools — By Robert Trivers — Book Review – NYTimes.com

I have been very interesting the idea of deception and self-deception lately. So this book and the very interesting review caught my attention. I particularly liked this story the reviewer tells about Trivers:

Throughout the book, he recalls instances in which he lied — to girlfriends (he has apparently had many), wives (two), children (five) and colleagues. In one especially poignant passage, Trivers recalls walking down a city street with an attractive young woman, “trying to amuse her,” when he spots “an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling.” Trivers abruptly realizes he is seeing his reflection in a store window: “Real me is seen as ugly me by self-­deceived me.”

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More bookmarked to read:

Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral | The Economist

All They That Labored – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

This about the King James translators of the Bible.

On Neutrinos and Angels – The Express Tribune

Haven’t read this all the way through, but this excerpt will give you an idea of what it’s about:

Speed of light issues have often moved sections of religious people in rather strange ways. Way back in 1973, as a young physics lecturer at Quaid-i-Azam University, I had been fascinated by the calculation done by the head of our department. Seeking the grand synthesis of science and faith, this pious gentleman — who left on his final journey last month — had published calculations that proved Heaven (jannat) was running away from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His reasoning centred around a particular verse of the Holy Quran that states worship on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr(Night of Revelation) is equivalent to a thousand nights of ordinary worship. Indeed, if you input the factor of 1,000 into Einstein’s famous formula for time dilatation, this yields a number: one centimeter per second less than the speed of light!

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Edge : Conversations on the edge of human knowledge

A blog I have bookmarked to check intermittently.

By the way, I found a lot of these links on an excellent filter blog: The Browser. I am checking this one a lot lately.

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I found a particularly moving poem yesterday:

To an Iraqi Infant

by Sinan Antoon
December 2002
Translated from the Iraqi by the poet


do you know
that your mother’s nipples
are dry bones?
that her breasts
are bursting
with depleted uranium?

do you know
that the womb’s window
overlooks
a confiscated land?

do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?

do you know
that your mother is weaving
the slowness of her moments
into an elegy?
And she is already
mourning you?

(click here for the whole thing)

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As one ages one looks in the mirror more carefully, I think. The wrinkles, the age spots stand out more and more clearly. The stranger in the mirror becomes a more familiar. As do his well examined flaws.

One of my flaws I have been pondering is my own sensitivity.

Although I manage to conceal my overreactions more and more, I do notice that I tend to be thin-skinned. This is probably the flip side of the coin of awareness. But it’s actually a bit more self-centered than that.

On the inside, I tend to react quickly and often negatively to what I perceive as mistreatment or slights. Also on the inside, I mull my reactions around and often find them childish or way off base.

I spent my childhood watching my father do the same thing. At least, he seemed unable to help reacting and often in negative ways.

I think learning to control my responses more has been a step toward maturing.  Rabbi Friedman used to comment on the space between an act of bad behavior on someone else’s part and one’s own response. He got me to think about that space.

Although I have gotten better, I am reminded the standard of Friedman and his teacher Bowen for mental health is never more than 80% or so and more often we act maturely about 50% of the time if we are lucky.

This doesn’t have much to do with anything other than me figuring myself out.

Yesterday was a very busy day for me. I began working on a manuscript of an anthem for the choir to learn in the next semester. About half way through I realized I was setting myself up for a large task. So I gave myself permission to not have it done by today and turned balancing my and my Mom’s checkbooks.  Then I took my weekly look at bills.

I had the borrowed dishes and glasses in the dishwasher. I planned to return them to the church after they were clean. So I had to wait for the cycle to finish. In the meantime I returned to my arrangement (Tu Solus Qui Facis Miabilia by Josquin Desprez).

Basically all I was doing was putting the notes from an online version into my music software, changing the clef on the alto part (from tenor to a more usual rendering in treble), and adding dynamics and breath marks. I found a recording by the Hilliard ensemble of this on Amazon and bought the MP3 for 99 cents.

I didn’t ape their performance. But I did feel better about interrupting Latin sentences with breaths after listening to them do so.

So I did manage to get this arrangement ready for today. I gathered up the clean dishes and hymnals I had brought for church for the choir party. Loaded up the car.

Then I remember the choir wanted to sing today’s anthem in parts if possible. The only version available (in the hymnal) did not have alto, tenor and bass parts in their copies. So I plopped myself down and did that in my music software. It took about an hour.

Then I was off to check on my Mom. She was doing better after her fall Thursday night. No broken bones. But they have ordered physical therapy for her to offset her increasing number of falls.

I went to the church after that and unloaded stuff. Then I spent a good hour or so at the copy machine making legal copies of three anthems (including the two I had prepared in the afternoon). Stuffed them in the choir slots and then practiced organ.

I was pretty tired after all this. After all I’m an old man. Heh.

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The G.O.P.’s ‘Black People’ Platform – NYTimes.com

Racism alive and well in the land of the free.

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Last night was the choir party. I think it was pretty much a success. People seem to have a good time. Almost every choir member either showed up or let me know they wouldn’t be there due to illness or previous commitment. I try each year to broaden these social events to include all the music ministers. But this essentially ended up being choir members and significant others. Besides eating and drinking, we sang hymns. I brought over hymnals from the church (as well as dishes and glasses to use, clean and return).

This was my first church party. I have kept a pretty low profile at church and have not wanted to rush into letting people into my private life. But now I’m ready. This group of singers is doing a phenomenal job. Plus I like each one of them quite a bit.

So the blog is going up a bit late this morning. I got up and cleaned a bit, then sat down and tried to prepare a score. The piece is “Tu Solus Qui Facis Mirabilia” by Desprez. It is beautiful. I found an online edition and am redoing it because the alto line was written in the wrong clef.

As I’m doing this, I’m adding interpretation as is usual in this kind of a score (16th century choral music). I have been listening to a recording of it by the Hilliard Ensemble (one of my favorite choral groups).

I decided about an hour ago that I’m not going to try and get this manuscript ready for tomorrow’s post service rehearsal. We have enough to learn and it’s not scheduled until mid-Feb.

So now I’m waiting for the dishwasher to finish cleaning the plates and glasses. After it’s done, I will cart all the stuff I borrowed back to church and then practice, make a couple anthems legally on the photocopy machine and put them in the slots for tomorrow.

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Chevron’s Ecuador case takes new twist – FT.com

Ray Hinkle linked this article in yesterday’s comment section. Warning, you have to register in order to read it, but it is free.

After doing some more poking around, I found that this disaster is under reported for sure. Petroecuador, Texaco and subsequently Chevron (who acquired Texaco) have ruined large swathes of South America plundering it for oil and leaving chaos in their wake.  Apparently this is the biggest environmental lawsuit in history (so far) 7 times bigger 1989 Alaskan debacle and comparable only to what happened in the first Gulf War when Hussein trashed Kuwait’s oil fields.

Chevron fights Ecuador pollution lawsuit – FT.com

Back in June, Naomi Mapstone (who co-wrote the first link with Ed Crooks) outlined the whole mess in the above link. There is also a slide show but I couldn’t get that to work.

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From Senator Bernard Sanders – Free Trade vs. Jobs – NYTimes.com

Senator Sanders continues to gain my admiration. This is a link to a letter he wrote recently.

He was recently on Stephen Colbert and kicked butt (link to the whole show).

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Study Says Looks Matter as TV Covers Congress – NYTimes.com

Is this surprising? Not to me.

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Study of Medicare Patients Finds Most Hospital Errors Unreported – NYTimes.com

Hospital employees recognize and report only one out of seven errors, accidents and other events that harm Medicare patients while they are hospitalized, federal investigators say in a new report.

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Meet the Online Mischief-Makers | Inc.com

My daughter, Elizabeth, is quoted at length in this article. I am very proud of what she’s doing!

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10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot | Primer

Also got this link from Emily Jenkins on Facebook.

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The title to this morning’s post comes from a William Carlos Williams poem, “The Flower.”

The phrase struck me as I read it this morning.

As you may know, dear reader, I have taken to rising and soothing my mind with poetry and non-fiction before starting my day.

I have to wonder if this procedure has allowed my blood pressure to fall (which it has ever since my last doctor visit in December). Of course it could also be a faulty sphygmomanometer (blood pressure machine).

I tend to rise in the grips of thought.

“Thought was never an isolated thing with me; it was a game of tests and balances, to be proven by the written word.”

William Carlos Williams (again), Autobiography xiii

WCW seems to concur with my brother’s observation that writing itself can be a process of self-illumination. This phrase from WCW’s autobiography was also one I read this morning over coffee.

As was this one:

“What becomes of me has never seemed important, but the fates of ideas living against the grain in a nondescript world have always held me breathless.”

William Carlos Williams, Autobiography xiv

Ah yes, ideas, the bane of my existence.

HE SITS IN THE SUN rearranging the past, and tries to keep warm. He knows words, says them, but has forgotten their meaning. They hand all about, sparkling, just out of reach, the crystals on a chandelier he can’t light. His memory rings like a wind chime, sounding clear and bright, then dwindles to random jingles and clinks.

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 151

I’ve been reading in the book my brother and his wife gave me for Xmas, 420 Characters by Lou Beach.

This morning several of the entries in it jumped out me as well. The one above seems to be a telling portrait of loss of memory.

In his author’s note, Beach says that “The stories you are about to encounter were written as status updates on a large social networking site. These updates were limited to 420 characters…”

Stories? More like poems to me way of reading. Beach is a visual artist. The book says it’s his first book of prose. They are just dark enough to keep one’s attention:

I FLAY my skin for you. It hangs from my chest and arms and back like a fringed jacket, like I’m going to a Neil Young concert, like I smell of patchouli and boo, like I stick to the seat of your VW. Except that the shreds have hardened and clink against one another. I’m a human wind chime. Hey man, can you hear me now?

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 151

So a big thank you to Mark and Leigh for this book. I quite like the poetry or whatever it is in it.

“LET ME IN!” The failed artist from around the corner, 6 ft. 4 in. of canned ham, and his wee wife, 5 ft. 1, a regular pill bug, was banging on my door. A bird had just shit on his head, an avian comment on his life. Drug-riddled and depressed he was making lots of money in the video game industry. “What should I do?” he asked. I thought he should shoot himself, but didn’t say so. I handed him a towel.

Lou Beach, 420 Characters: stories, p. 144

Finally, I close with another passage I read this morning. I think about what it means to live in artistic isolation and the relationship of journaling as I do in public. WCW puts it nicely.

“There is a great virtue in … isolation. It permits a fair interval for thought. That is, what I call thinking, which is mainly scribbling. It has always been during the act of scribbling that I have gotten most of my satisfaction.”

William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, xii

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Internet Access Is Not a Human Right – NYTimes.com

Ok. I guess you can make an argument that Internet access is not a human right, but this guy goes on and says it’s not a civil right. Is education a civil right? I suspect this writer’s motives.

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Ecuador – $18 Billion Ruling Against Chevron Is Upheld – NYTimes.com

From the people who underwrite PBS.  I usually yell during their commercials.

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Guilty Verdicts in 1993 Racial Murder Case That Changed Justice in Britain – NYTimes.com

Racism in the U.K. is just as hidden and perverted as it is in the USA. That’s saying quite a bit. When Dick Gregory arrived in the old Apartheid South Africa, he gave a bitter smile and said that he recognized the place…. it was like the USA.

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I have been thinking about how exactly one accomplishes expression on piano and organ. It’s not like string instruments where one touches the string or wind instruments where the embouchure is critical. Fingers on an organ keyboard basically only turn the sound on and off. On a piano keyboard they also affect the loudness or softness of the notes produced. But what about tone?

I have seen studies that say no difference shows up on an oscilloscope (or whatever one uses to physically measure the sound) between using a pencil to play a note on the piano and using your fingers.

As a student of piano I have learned that one can somehow make a good tone on the piano. This involves using as much of the skin of the finger in contact with the key, we are taught.

And I can tell when a pianist is doing this.

But I have to ask myself what am I hearing when I hear a good tone quality in music?

Also when I was an organ grad student at Notre Dame my teacher, Craig Cramer, talked to me at length about thinking about producing a good tone with organ technique. He used to say that the beginning of any musical technique on any instrument is determining how to make a good sound.

This is borne out by a story Mr. Olson, (a clarinetist & teacher at Ohio Wesleyan University where I briefly attended) once told me. He said he was studying clarinet with some famous player in Paris. He went and played for him. The Parisian teacher stopped him. He said, play this note. Then he said, that is a good note. Go away and don’t come back until they all sound that good.

So Mr. Olson rented a church basement in Paris and played long tones attempting to match all of the notes in his register to the quality of the note his teacher had pointed out.

Tone is basic.

But I have come to suspect that the subjective experience of when notes occur in organ and piano playing  and how loud they are in piano playing creates a transmission of meaning and tone.

Another factor in my thinking is observing how technology allows complete accuracy in rhythm and pitch. One can either use it to make deadly accurate sounds or use it to adjust sounds into absolute accuracy.

The result is often curiously sterile.

So maybe the intention (usually not conscious) of beauty in sound on the piano and the organ causes tiny inaccuracies that end up sounding like meaning to the listener.

I recently was watching some YouTube videos of a masterclass by the pianist György Sebök.

I was startled when he made this comment: “”We play the notes sooner and later, and louder and softer, and technically that’s all we can do.”

He was actually trying to gently lead a pianist to a less subjective rendering of a Haydn sonata movement.

So when you play a note on the piano and how loud and how soft you play it can lead to more or less coherent actual subjective meaning.

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Frozen Dead Guy Days, a Festival in Colorado, Stays Put – NYTimes.com

Sick humor.

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The Iowa Caucuses – NYTimes.com

Partisan but on the money. I especially like the phrase “dark and disturbing” when referring to the images Republicans are putting forth.

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Oedipus Rex Complex – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd reminds us of the history of Mitt Romney and his dad.

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The Forgotten Wages of War – NYTimes.com

Essay that says something I often think, what about all of the people being killed in wars?

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Relatives of 9/11 Victims, Suspecting Hacking, Await Answers – NYTimes.com

Wonder if it will ever be known who was tapping this phones and if they used the information as this article implies.

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China Set to Punish Another Human Rights Activist – NYTimes.com

Blithely reading this article and ran across quote from Jerome Cohen. He is the boss/mentor of my quasi-son-in-law, Jeremy Daum.

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Manhattan Street Grid at Museum of City of New York – NYTimes.com

The history of cities fascinates me.

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English Pronunciation | The Poke:

My niece, Emily Bastian, put this one up on Facebook. I enjoyed reading the whole thing aloud. I love words.

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“The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar.”

So writes William Carlos Williams in a prose-poem marked 11/13 (presumably 1928). As I read this passage this morning I was struck how it still resonates despite the slightly dated feel of the sentences and words.

“Fragmentary stupidity of modern life….” This definitely describes the internet and other assaults on our sensibilities.

I maintain it doesn’t have to be an assault. But that requires more thinking, context and effort than many seem interested in making.

A “lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity..” also accurately describes the Interwebs.

But at the same time I insist that at this point access to online ideas is for me the same as having a vast reference library of not only ideas, prose, and sources but also musics of all kind.

It feels fragile like a bubble about to burst. Or rather it is hot and alive like a piece of cooling metal that will soon solidify into something that will be much less beautiful and wonderful.

By this I mean, that I have a foreboding that this magnificent tool of connecting humans with themselves and knowledge will soon be sort more of a Walmart experience. One can buy things that others are interested in, but eccentric interests will be left in the dust.

Christopher Logue observers in his introduction to his War Music that there are “those whom we may choose to count among the hopelessly insane: the hard core of Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers, Homer’s lay fans.”

I have played around with Greek with the goal of reading Homer in the original. I aspire to the kind of madness Logue speculates has kept Homer alive to lay readers for centuries.

It is just this kind of madness that might get lost in the dust of an evolving Internet for consumers. But we’ll see (assuming we both live long enough, dear reader).

Finished off The Given last night. I had to download it to Eileen’s netbook which she has graciously loaned me for the duration until I replace or repair my own.

As I approached the ending, the story became more and more familiar to me. I suspect I may have read this book a while back. The beginning 2/3rds of the book was unfamiliar. But I have found that I read so much more slowly and thoroughly than I did even 20 years ago that I rediscover prose I have passed through before in startling ways.

Also I think as one ages one can actually expand one’s understanding and horizons via the experiences of paying attention to being alive.

Hey. It could happen.

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Newt Gingrich Stumps in New Hampshire : The New Yorker

About half way through this article. Gingrich fundamentally disinterests me in the same way Evangelical preachers do, I find him boring, distasteful, woefully misinformed and basically obviously operating from a sense of self interest. But mostly I ignore him as much as possible. This article starts out pretty sympathetic so it’s probably a good idea for me to read it to get a bit of balance.

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Queens Libraries Serve 59 Languages – NYTimes.com

59 languages. This is so cool to me. I love libraries.

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Broad Institute Collaboration Began With a Disastrous Lunch – NYTimes.com

Broad Institute Director Finds Power in Numbers – NYTimes.com

Interesting couple of articles. Broad (pronounced to rhyme with “code” according to one of the articles) Institute represents an encouraging collaboration between institutions (Havard and MIT). But more interesting to me is the second article which profiles a fascinating thinker: Eric Lander. I love it when people jump around in disciplines and exhibit extraordinary abilities while ignoring accreditation requirements.

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In Play-Off Between Old and New Violins, Stradivarius Lags – NYTimes.com

In blind tests, violinists could not tell expensive old violins from newer ones. The proof is always in the sound. But subjectivity obviously plays a strong role in how we understand ourselves and what we prefer.

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Reaching Back 2,000 Years to Unravel a Curse – NYTimes.com

I love this stuff.

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Angkor, Seat of the Khmer Empire, Wilted When Water Ran Low – NYTimes.com

Why do empires come and go? Water supply in this case?

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Yesterday, I had a nice back and forth conversations on Facebook regarding this article.

Do the Classics Have a Future? by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books

I like that she mentions late Christopher Logue’s renditions of Homer since he is someone I read and admire.

Basically she reviews from an insider’s point of view the history and the arguments for and against the use of the classics to understand our civilization.

“.. cultural understanding is a collaborative, social operation.” she writes and I agree

For me, context is very helpful at this stage of my life and my thinking.

She uses the play, The Browning Version, and subsequent movies based on it as a springboard.

I have put the 1951 version at the top of my Netflix queue.

“Browning” is Robert Browning and the “version” is his version of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.

You can click on Mary Beard’s wonderful essay if you want a synopsis of the plot of the play and movie, The Browning Version.

In the conversation on Facebook yesterday I pointed out

that an understanding of history via the classics, the bible and other sources is necessary to an understanding of the arts. How does one understand great art if one doesn’t know the stories of what is being portrayed in the pictures? How does one understand Mendelssohn’s Overture to the Midsummer Night’s dream if one doesn’t know the play? (I love the way the 18 year old M orchestrates the hee haw of the donkey…. I guess this was actually a suggestion made to him by a friend…. M himself was a classicist and read Greek and Latin…)…

The conversation verged on actually talking about ideas online. Go figure. This is tantalizing since that was my idealistic (quixotic?) idea of what the Web could do when I first learned about it.

My netbook died last night. Bah.

I will have to replace it soon. I can use Eileen’s old one in a pinch (treadmilling)…..

Planning this upcoming Sunday, I chose to have my choir sing “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam” in English.

There is a solid version of it in the Hymnal 1982 which preserves the rhythmic treatment of the original.

I am planning to pick out a postlude and prelude based on it, probably by Bach. I play a couple already. I need to get to the console and goof around to make this decision.

I have been in a foul mood for most of the holidays despite the wonderful company of my wife and the rest of my family. Yesterday Eileen put it well when she said that I seem to be somewhere else.

A small part of this mood is a determination that quality work is its own reward.  Although I feel appreciated at work, I would be naive to ignore the basic irrelevance of my interests and work to most people who hear my music. Hence, I want to do stuff at church that is of the highest quality so that the mundane and banal are challenged (complemented?) by the presence of well executed quality stuff.

If few take notice (as it sometimes seems), then I still get to do good music. So what the heck.

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The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online – NYTimes.com

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Four Attacks in Queens With Homemade Firebombs – NYTimes.com

You heard about the LA burnings, but did you hear about the ones in Queens?

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Gay and Afraid in Uganda – NYTimes.com

Intelligent comment.

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Nobody Understands Debt – NYTimes.com

I believe this.

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In China, the Grievances Keep Coming – NYTimes.com

Explanation of the unusual two tracks of Chinese national government and local governing.

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Homeward Goes the Dust Bowl Balladeer – NYTimes.com

Woodie Guthrie as dang liberal and communist.

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I got up this morning and read poetry, non-fiction and then played some Beethoven on the EP with the headphones (Eileen is still in bed).

There were about 50 people at church yesterday morning. No one commented on the prelude (Mov 4 – The Word from Messiaen’s Nativity). Here’s a solid performance of this piece from Youtube. He plays the slow section even slower than I did. I like it that way.

I had problems with the organ during the performance of this piece. Somehow one of my presets reverted to a wrong setting. This sometimes happens with older organs. I managed to save the performance despite playing it on some of the wrong stops. It’s difficult to know what kind of meaning this kind of music has for the people who heard it. Music is such a background phenomenon in the United States. I did have a bulletin note explaining Messiaen’s intentions in it.

But I’m very glad that I have now learned and performed several of Messiaen’s meditations on the Nativity. I think it’s pretty solid music. And very beautiful to my ears.

During the offertory a soprano sang a Ned Rorem song (“Christmas Carol”). In the middle of it her cell phone began ringing.

She continued to singing and tried to turn off the phone at the same time. Here’s a nice little Youtube of the song she was singing.

The postlude was “Allegro” From Concerto 5 in F Major by G. F. Handel, op. 4 No. 5, HWV 293.

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The truth is the best bullshit – Boing Boing

Interesting explanation of bullshit and lies from Apple, Google, & Facebook.

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Now That the Factories Are Closed, It’s Tee Time in Benton Harbor, Mich. – NYTimes.com

Totally missed this extended article about a local Michigan town. Ran across it yesterday.

Letters in response:

The Strange Second Life of a Michigan Factory Town – NYTimes.com

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Do the Classics Have a Future? by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books

Bookmarked to read.

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After reading some William Carlos Williams, I then finished off Given by Wendell Berry.

Here’s one of the ones I marked to go back and re-read.

It takes all time to show eternity,
The longest shine of every perishing spark,
And every word and cry of every tongue
Must form the Word that calls the darkest dark

Of this world to its lasting dawn. Toward
That rising hour we bear our single hearts
Estranged as islands parted in the sea,
Our broken knowledge and our scattered arts.

As separate as fireflies or night windows,
We piece a foredream of the gathered light
Infinitely small and great to shelter all,
Silenced into song, blinded into sight.

I copied this from another blogger (too lazy to type it in if I can find it someone else has). I found some misspellings. I guess that’s the danger of doing that sort of thing.

I have been keeping track of books I read via the online (free) bookmarking service I use (http://www.diigo.com). I made this particular bookmark a permanent public URL: http://www.diigo.com/list/sbjenkins0/books-read

I note that the last two books I have finished reading use a form of the word, give, in the title (The Gift by Hyde & Given by Berry). Interesting serendipity.

I find a URL which features the book in order to put it on this list. This morning I was on this one. It’s the google book link. I noticed that 25 people had reviewed Berry’s book of poems. This was a bit startling to me, because I really have no one in my life right now that talks to me about poetry (or music for that matter).  Once in a while I feel sorry for myself about this sort of thing, but as I age I have come more and more to accept the solitary artistic life as one that has many consolations and rewards.

It’s nice to think there are 25 people out there who have actually read this book. Forgive my cynicism but many years ago (as a bookseller) I decided that owning a book has little to do with whether you actually read it or not. Most people do not read books it seems. And even the ones who have them, often do not do so.

So I like thinking that there are 25 little shards of light on google books that have read Berry’s book.

I found the book uneven. Berry is struggling with the whole pastoral thing he has made his own. We live in ugly times. He has responded with sermonizing about local economies and farming. But inevitably as a poet he must confront the ugliness in his work. He does some of this in this book. These are the poems that interest me the most. Also the ones about old age.

But he doesn’t seem as strong to me as William Carlos Williams (of course). Williams can write a poem in the 1920s that describes a scene of nature and to me it rings as clear and true as Japanese Haiku or pastoral Chinese poetry as I read it in this century.

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The Damage of 2011 – NYTimes.com

I think this editorial sums it up pretty well. I know it’s partisan but what the writers say seems to me to have happened.

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Kirk Douglas on Trumbo – NYTimes.com

Hey. Kirk Douglas wrote a letter to the NYT. Coolness.

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Cities’ Cost Cuttings Leave Residents in the Dark – NYTimes.com

Highland Park, Michigan is one of the cities.

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Keynes Was Right – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman makes sense to me.

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Norman Lear on fighting for the food fight – latimes.com

Wow. Norman Lear is still alive and keeping the liberal flame alive.

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A couple of artists who are new to me:

jonasburgert.de

Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

My brother and his wife gave me a book by the latter artist as an Xmas gift.

Ta-Nehisi Coates mentions in passing in an interview from this week’s On the Media that he feels that blogging is something that one can only do for so long, then one should probably quit (due to burnout?).

I find that pretty startling. I guess it’s because I am not a commercial blogger or something. Coates is being interviewed because of his adroit managing of the comments section of his Atlantic blog. My “blogging” (which actually historically preceded the term) has much more to do with my life-long habit of keeping a journal. The adjustment for me was doing a public journal and keeping it appropriate. I guess I’m still learning about that. Thank goodness it’s so easy to delete something that I find was inappropriate in retrospect.

In another section of the OTM show, Rebecca Rosen who also writes for The Atlantic described an idea of online conversation on the Internet that has not been realized.

Although this is another passing comment, I was delighted to hear someone else entertains the expectations that I have had since the inception of the Web, that is that it might provide a way for humans to converse and learn more from each other.

Rosen bemoans that this has not happened.

I found it interesting that when discussing comment sections online, neither Rosen nor Coates mentions the way back and forth conversing occurred in the BBS listservs. If you don’t recognize this, the Internet before the Web allowed one to basically trade email-like comments back and forth with a group of other interested individuals. There was much less flaming (but of course there was still that sort of thing). The comments were much easier to moderate.

I guess it’s ancient irrelevant history. So much thinking seems to ignore any contextual ideas beyond the popular notions and understandings of the moment.

I guess I’m feeling a bit glum this morning. Physically I am more rested. Negotiating my way through the tricky jungle of family relations is exhausting and my emotions are as deflated as my body was yesterday.

But toujours gai, archie, there’s some life in the old gal yet.

I’ve been up reading poetry and non-fiction.

Then I played through a bunch of Mendelssohn piano music.

I have been thinking about the idea of purchasing a video cam.

What might push me over the edge is that I am working on a difficult prelude and fugue by Bach (the D major). I’m actually reviving this one from Grad school.

While I was in undergrad, I attempted to learn and perform it on my own. The performance was particular disastrous. I was playing an awful electronic organ (it was basically a theater organ) in a converted gymnasium church where I worked in Trenton. When the quick pedal statement of the intricate fugue subject came in, I chickened out in the performance and did something I had never done before: play the entire piece on the manuals. It was a horrible experience even though I managed to make the piece sound about right.

When I went to grad school one of my goals was to learn and perform the piece well, which I did.

My overall technique on both piano and organ has been pretty much transformed in the last ten years. So my learning approach is much more thorough and meticulous than it ever was in college.

I suspect that I might be wavering a bit in my playing of the fugue subject (especially in the pedals). So monitoring my practice via taping would be a good idea, I think.

In addition, I would probably post recordings of me playing on occasion.

But we’ll see.

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My brother, Mark,  and sister-in-law, Leigh, just left for the next leg of their Xmas marathon throughout the Midwest.  The next stop is in Ohio which is where Leigh was raised.

While Mark was here, he made a very interesting comment that he views his writing as an end in itself to pursue insights (to paraphrase him). I like that a lot. It certainly fits me and my use of writing here and other places (private journals, what have you).

Putting words together to make meaning helps me think more clearly and understand my self and my ideas better.

So I persist in this endeavor which is now called blogging ( I used to think of it as having my own web site).

I recently ran across a new take on the blind men and the elephant.

Triarchy Press: the axis of praxis: Idioticon – The Missing Elephant

The above link is a synopsis/sales pitch for a book.

Basically it shares Donald Michael’s take on the story that when the parable is considered in a more contemporary context the person who is most blind in story is the person who thinks they can see the whole elephant. The author of the blog entry linked (Idiotcon… probably staff writer[s] for Triarchy Press) says it this way.

“In today’s world there is little chance that any of us will ever know more than one small piece of the elephant. And there are now so many different pieces, they change so rapidly and they are all so intimately related one to another, that even if we had the technology to put them all together we would still not be able to make sense of the whole.”

The parable of the elephant has been a defining one for me. I have experienced life as listening to many people with different parts of what seems like wisdom to me.

But I quite like this new take.

Idiotcon shares six salient insights Michael put in his book called “ignorance generators.”

I’m still working this stuff out, but here’s a quick glimpse of the first four. All of them are sketched at the link above and presumably come from the book.

1. At this point, we have both too little and too much information simultaneously. We can’t grasp the whole. There’s not enough time given the huge amount of data and input one comes up against.

2. Too many bifurcated understandings and little or no common values exist in our society and our public discussions.

3. In such an array of confusion, how does one establish contextual thinking? I think of context usually in terms of history of a subject or idea, common defined vocab and current conversations/understandings in a given area. As our technology continues to shave us and our discussions into discreet unaware echo chambers, a historical fact or an insight from another informing a discussion or exposition of ideas is a rare phenomenon, indeed.

4. Linear thinking is less and less helpful. I can remember my first experience with the idea of hyperlinks.

It was with a software program developed around the poem, “Ulysses,” by Tennyson. The poem itself was linked to definitions, exposition of themes and ideas in the poem. There were many different videos of famous readings of the poem (including Ted Kennedy’s moving use of it in eulogy to JFK).

At the time I felt like hyperlinking was a concrete expression of how the human mind works (non-linearly, if you will).

I recall that this was before the World Wide Web, but after the Internet was up and chugging away.

Linking (non-linear thinking) became very easy and natural after WWW. I  would even say necessary to me.

Drawing straight lines doesn’t work any more in terms of thoughts, ideas and communication. I think this lack of straight line thinking is pretty wonderful but it is definitely a problem to many and especially those who don’t notice how they think.

I am figuring out how to get a copy of this book. Might have to actually buy the sucker. It’s available on Amazon, of course.

I just called the local bookstore to order it (trying to buy local). They might have to sell me a used copy via a distributor but what the heck.

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The Big Lie – The Daily Beast

Newsweek writer, Michael Thomas, sounds the alarm and predicts a wild response to the inequities in American life.

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Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill – NYTimes.com

About half of the members of Congress are millionaires. Sooprise, sooprise.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

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San Diego’s Civic Organist Survives to Welcome Another Year – NYTimes.com

A city organist. Cool.

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Stephen Glass’s Road to Redemption – NYTimes.com

A public liar works his way to redemption.

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Putin’s Children – NYTimes.com

Bill Keller, former NYT editor, parses out the recent Russian stuff using his time on the ground there and people he knows.

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Andrew Geller, Architect, Is Dead at 87 – NYTimes.com

Interesting architect.

He designed the house where Khrushchev and Nixon had their famous kitchen debate.

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Federal judge allows registered sex offenders in Michigan homeless shelters | Michigan Radio

Ever since reading Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks I have been more aware of the box these criminals are put in by our society. As always the people who are the most outcast interest me. They tell us so much about ourselves.

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Didn’t have time to blog yesterday. Hosting my brother and his wife. It’s nice to have fam visit. My Mom wasn’t up to a meal with the five of us at my home, so we joined her for lunch at the nursing home.

I did manage to get some practice in. I hope I can do so today as well.

In the evening Mark and Leigh consented to let Eileen and I continue on with the recent TV series we have been watching on Netflix.

As I age I find moving images less and less interesting.

But at the same time I like to spend time with other humans I love and it is a common way to do so. Eileen and I have been taking time to have movie dates. It does seem to be a good thing.

We stumbled across “Breaking Bad.”

I heard a recent radio movie critic comment that the upcoming closing episodes of the fourth seasons was as good or better than any movie he was reviewing. I checked on Netflix and found that there were 33 old episodes. Eileen and I watched a couple and got predictably drawn in.

I was interested in Mark and Leigh’s reaction to this series since they are much more movie/tv literate than Eileen and me.

They seem drawn in enough to watch a couple episodes with us. Surprisingly they found it “dark” (Leigh’s word). “Darker than Dexter.” I’ve never been drawn into Dexter since I find the premise pretty distasteful, even though I like the actor who plays him quite a bit.

Today we are doing more family xmas.

Mark’s adult kids and their significant others are coming over for the day for some food and presents. Since my meal for yesterday was canceled we have more food than we need to feed everyone. I look forward to seeing everyone and chatting.

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Eileen is at the orthodontist having her braces removed! Hurray! She has been wearing them for over two years and is ready to get her teeth back.

I continue to be pretty exhausted. My brother and his wife arrive this evening, so we’ve been re-arranging the house so there will be a bit more room than usual for guests to get around.

My daughter, Elizabeth, made a link to some places my father and his father lived on Google Maps. I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

Paul Jenkins Memoirs places

I just got around to reading Sunday’s New York Times yesterday….. Usually they do significant deaths of the year some time around Xmas and New Years. This year they turned over the mag to Ira Glass and company. They outdid themselves telling some very cool stories.

I recommend the entire thing:

Link to These American Lives Interactive

So far here are a couple I thought were especially interesting.

A First Time for Everything

Hundreds of 2011 obits have something in common. The people who died were the first African Americans to fill ordinary and extraordinary roles in our society.

The Whole Truth

A sworn deposition that tells a helluva story.

Like I say, I recommend you browse through it (assuming the web site lets you…. ). I haven’t read a dud yet.

300 Free eBooks: Download Great Classics for Free | Open Culture

Open culture has a cool list of free ebooks.

Lieberman wants Taliban blocked on Twitter – Boing Boing

We apparently become what we abhor.

Eileen and I had a nice quiet Christmas.

And all the music for Christmas at work came out fine.

I relied a lot on my own abilities this year, specifically exploiting organ accompaniments to add interesting sounds to choral anthems. I also prepared several pieces by Bach and one by Messiaen.

Yesterday found me actually sitting and choosing organ music for the following Sunday just before the Christmas Day service.

I had already decided to play the fourth “Meditation on the Birth of Our Lord,” “The Word.” by Messiaen as a prelude for next Sunday. I wanted to pair it with another piece of decent organ rep. Landed on a Handel organ concerto movement.

This morning I awoke pretty exhausted.

Yesterday after church we went and checked in with my Mom and then drove to Whitehall for the annual Hatch Xmas.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mentioned to Eileen that all the Hatch children at the party were “characters.”

I like it when kids aren’t afraid to interact with me. I also enjoyed handing around small glasses of the micro brewed beer I had brought with me for people to taste.

Eileen and I stayed and helped her Mom return her trailer to normal (moving chairs and stuff back into their usual place). I was glad we could do this because this usually falls on Eileen’s sister, Nancy and her husband, Walt.

This morning I got up and got right to work on preparing info for next Sunday’s bulletin. This included writing the following bulletin article:

Listener’s guide to today’s organ music and vocal solo Olivier Messiaen composed “The Word” as the fourth of nine “Meditations on the Birth of the Lord.” Last week we heard “The Shepherds” which was number two of the nine. In “The Word,” Messiaen once again paints a picture in sound. The loud pedal solo of the first section, Messiaen believed could make a listener think of “the long trumpets of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and also certain themes for trombone in Wagner’s scores.”  Either way, Jon Gillock has written that the first half of the piece is a “vivid aural depiction of the phrases from the Psalms that Messiaen has enscribed this movement with: The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son, From his breast, before the dawn existed.” Gillock continues, “It is about the conception of the Son by the Father—from the Son’s point of view…. [seen] in an outward, fiery manner.” First, we hear a bit of a whirlwind. Then dramatic sounds from the organ pedal division mentioned before which suggest the voice of God speaking to the Son. Then a fanfare followed by a quick irregular rhythmic section. Could this section be the tenderness of the love of God begetting the Word from his own breast?After this the pedal solo returns one last time suggest God calling Christ by name. The second half of piece is much more meditative. Messiaen has said it “symbolizes the Utterance of the Word…..  [and] comes from sequences of plainsong in its phrases, Hindu ragas in its character, and ornamented chorales of Bach in its arabesques, which highly decorate the solemn melody.” Ned Rorem composed today’s vocal solo. Born in 1923, Rorem is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings. Today’s postlude was drawn from Handel organ concertos Op 7, HWV 306–311. Handel composed six organ concertos for organ and orchestra in London between 1740 and 1751. They were written for performance during his oratorios and contain some of his most popular and inspired movements. submitted by Steve Jenkins, Music Director

Laurie, the soprano mentioned in the article, asked if I could use the Rorem solo, “The Christmas Carol,” at one of the services around Xmas. When I offered her the Jan 1 spot, she took it. I love Rorem anyway, so it actually makes a nice piece for next Sunday.

Anyway, dear reader, I hope you are having a good holiday season. I know I am.

Up this morning reading poetry online. Here are a few I liked.

A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary by Gwendolyn Brooks

A Stable Lamp is Lighted by Richard Wilber

Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot

An Xmas Murder by Alfred Corn

Taking Down the Tree by Jane Kenyon

To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year by Philip Appleman

Dang. The package I mailed to my daughter, Elizabeth, in New York was just returned to my back porch.

I mistakenly sent it to her old work address. Poop. Just chatted back and forth with her on Facebook and got an address update and a quick check-in.

So Christmas is looking pretty calm and good from the church music job point of view.

I am playing three pieces by Bach and one by Messiaen in the next two days for services. I have been working hard on them and also preparing a couple of more extensive organ accompaniments to choral anthems for this evening.

I just finished working on some of the more tricky sections in the Messiaen piece I want to play next Sunday (Le Verbe). I can do this on the Electric Piano with headphones so I don’t disturb my lovely wife who is still resting.

Also threw in some Schubert this morning. I have been playing through a bunch of piano pieces by Schubert, Prokofiev, Beethoven and a piano reduction of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. I find  Tchaikovsky unnervingly tricky even though the music is familiar. It’s about time I added it to my playing repertoire, I guess.

I am reading Auden’s Age of Anxiety. It’s a long poem about four people in a bar in New York. They seem to be expressions of his personality and speak in alliterative un-rhymed verse.

I plan to then listen to Bernstein’s Symphony (no. 2) based on this poem.

Finishing up reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I think this book is better written than Stephen King’s 11/22/63 which I recently completed reading. Have been contemplating a re-reading of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but I can’t lay my hands on my copy of it.

I would like to re-read my copy because I tend to put notes in my reading copies.  If I can’t find it, I will eventually purchase a cheap used copy. I don’t think this particular book is one I want to read as an ebook. It has lengthy convoluted footnotes to footnotes which might make an ebook copy cumbersome.

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Chicago Democrats Obeyed Law During Redistricting, Court Says – NYTimes.com

Gerrymandering makes me crazy.

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Bradley Manning Awaits Decision on WikiLeaks Trial – NYTimes.com

Transgender issues seem to be figuring prominently in the coverage….  Also,  it looks like Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame got kicked out of the courtroom during this hearing. The future is fun.

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Washington Monument’s Damage Is Detailed – NYTimes.com

Remember when they were rappelling on the Washington Monument? This is what they found out.

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Arlington National Cemetery Markers May Have Errors – NYTimes.com

Inefficiency always fascinates me.

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Michigan City of Troy, Led by Tea Party Mayor, Rejects Federal Dollars – NYTimes.com

The Tea Party Mayor is also on record that since New York recognizes same sex marriages, she will no longer carry her New York bag and referred to the gay people as “queers.” Nice. Good old Troy Michigan. God forbid they should be the ones to get Federal dollars. The monies they rejected will not go to pay for the deficit or anything. Just to another community. Hopefully one a bit more interested in investing in itself (although there was  no initial local cost involved here and according to this article maintenance required a minimal amount of city monies).

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I haven’t been putting up many links in the last few posts, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been bookmarking articles I have read or intend to read. It just seemed that since I was indulging in such lengthy verbosity, albeit with “pictures,” it might be a bit much.

So today I am thinking more about links.

I’m reading Limits of Power for a second time. This morning I took note of a couple of articles in the footnotes I wanted to run down line and possible re-read:

The first is from October 2002: The Struggles of Democracy and Empire by Mark Danner Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

Bacevich says that Danner

“… got it exactly right. The strategy devised by the Bush administration in response to 9/11 was ‘comprehensive, prophetic [and] evangelical.’ It derived from the assumption that , ‘for evils of terror to be defeated,’ most of the Islamic world needed to ‘be made new.’ The ultimate aim of that strategy was nothing less than ‘to remake the world’ or at least what the administration referred to as the Greater Middle East.”

Bacevich, Limits of Power p. 59-60

Bacevich is retired colonel from the U.S. army and speaks with expertise. It’s interesting the week we supposedly came home from Iraq to review the whole mess. Danner’s article is written on the eve of the invasion. He (rightly I think) says that the invasion of Iraq was a basic turning point in way the United States was beginning “a new imperial season,” shunting aside the words of John Quincy Adams . “That America, despite its great power, ”goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

The second article also comes from a Bacevich footnote:

Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy? – New York Times

Written in 2006, this article is a good balance not only to the present holiday season of consumption but to our American life styles in general.

Finished reading Stephen King’s 11/232/63 this week.  It only took me 15 days. Ahem. I’m pretty sure I could have whipped it off quicker but I tend to spread myself thinner than just reading one book.

This book left me a bit like his The Stand, not a bad read, not a bad plot. Probably the most fun stuff is the recreation of America in 50s and 60s. King’s ear is calibrated well to this period. At least this boomer enjoyed reading the nostalgia the main character has as he spends time in the past.

I also ran across another alt-history title and have interlibrary loaned it for fun.

In his The Alteration, Kingley Amis re-imagined a world history in which Luther became Pope and there was no Reformation. I think that sounds like a fun read especially at the droll hands of the elder Amis.

The Burning Babe. Robert Southwell. 1909-14.

I always re-read this poem around Xmas. It’s a bit of a antidote for me personally to the way so many people see the Christ as a baby. I of course am not sure if there is God…. most of the time I’m pretty sure there isn’t. But I’m always sure that Jesus grew up and doesn’t exist as a baby. Despite the Infant of Prague that festooned a Catholic school I worked at in Detroit for a few years.

I remember Raymond Brown being good about this kind of misunderstanding.

I dont’ have this laying around since I got rid of a lot of my religious books in the last century. But from my training I remember Brown as that odd thing: the sane Roman Catholic liturgist/bible dude.

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Looking for a Place to Die – NYTimes.com

A nurse talks about the difficulties the law sometimes present to those of us who die…. that would be everyone, right?

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North Korean Mourning Blends Emotion and Coercion – NYTimes.com

I like the way the press that I read has identified the weird blend of realism and ritual in the public mourning in North Korea. It rings truer than the usual way Americans see the “other.”

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Terrorism Suspects – NYTimes.com

It’s only fair to link in Senator Levin’s defense of his horrible bill in this letter to the editor. I remain unconvinced. As I said in my email to him and the other Michigan Senator, I still wonder what in the world they were thinking?

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A New Kim. A New Chance? – NYTimes.com

Nicholas Kristof provides some further history and understanding about what’s happening in N. Korea. I especially was fascinated by the loudspeakers installed in every home with no off button or volume button. Wow. George Orwell, or what?

I discovered the world wide web back in the 80s. This means I have been goofing around with this form of communication for easily  over two decades.Initially  I used dial-ups to connect to what we called “list-servers” and BBSes or bulletin-board-systems. Via these I had conversations with people who were interested in what I was interested in.

As soon as I understood it was possible I began building my own web site.  After glimpsing the initial “Celestial Jukebox” of the first incarnation of Napster, it became clear to me that the connecting with other people online was limited only by one’s imagination.

I imagined a conversation, a library, a listening room, a seminar and other things. Also a way to distribute my own ideas and creative work.

Now it hasn’t exactly turned out that way for me.

What has happened is that I use the internet much differently than many people. But I have figured out that I basically live my life much differently than many people.  The life of the mind for its own sake is not something that has ever caught fire among many people.

Jefferson imagined that if a society educated itself it could govern itself. I believe in this idea.

But I also find that the number of people interested in reading, history, the full gambit of art, music, poetry, literature and ideas in general is a small one.

Occasionally, I do manage to connect back and forth with people who are interested in interesting conversation and ideas and thinking online. This excites me. But of course this is not very usual in the day to day online world for me.

I have come to realize that people online are like people offline. They don’t read that much or very carefully. Ideas for their own sake are not that important to them. They don’t go to libraries. They aren’t all that curious about stuff.

A small number of them are. And the more people online the larger this number is as a proportion of the people out there.

So I have settled into a sort of daily routine of blogging, anyway. At this point it serves two purposes for me. First of all, it’s an outlet for my buzzing brain. I often awake with ideas rattling around in my head. Here’s where I can work them out in prose.

A few years back I began busking, that is played music on the streets of my local town. I have played some pretty cool music there, I think. People can stop and listen or walk on by. It’s their choice. Blogging is  for me a kind of busking of ideas and other stuff here on my website. If you’re interested you can stop and browse and even comment. If not, you can click away to someplace else or even unbookmark me.

The second reason I write is that my extended family is a world wide one.  Also I have known many many people in the course of my life. If any of these people want to take my temperature, see what’s going on in my head, the blog is here for that.

I know I enjoy checking blogs of others.  I don’t necessarily expect to be read. But judging by the 40 or so hits a day I get I don’t think I’m entirely ignored either. If you scroll to the bottom and see my counter, you will see that I have just passed 40 k hits since late 2009. Somebody is opening up my blog in their browser.  Many thanks to them and you, dear reader.

P.S. As I have come to realize that images have overtaken words as the medium of exchange between many many people, I have tried to adjust. I usually don’t write much over 500 words in an entry (today’s about 700 so it’s unusually verbose). I have added pictures in the spirit of what we used to call collages. I think they might help readers skim through and find anything that might interest them. And of course there are the links.

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Pharmacist Don Colcord Sustains Nucla, Colorado : The New Yorker

This is an amazing story of real people in America. Bears reading.

Found it here;

The Sidney Awards, Part I – NYTimes.com

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Will North Korea Become China’s Newest Province? – NYTimes.com

Speculation about the future of North Korea. Wonder what will happen.

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Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President, Dies at 75 – NYTimes.com

obit of an amazing man… here’s a link to a synopsis of one of his famous essays:

Havel, Power of the Powerless, 1978

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Gingrich: ‘I will arrest judges who give controversial decisions’

I have to say that Gingrich seems to be searching for the most outrageous comments he can make… Will it make more people vote for him in the primaries? Is that his purpose? Hmmmm.

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Xmas time is coming…. so many people I see seem very unhappy this time of year.

When I was growing up, there was a phrase bouncing around: “The Age of Anxiety.”

As far as a quick glance online, W. H. Auden seems to have popularized (if not originated) the phrase with his book length poem.

Bernstein’s 2nd symphony was based on this poem.

I’m listening to it right now. Very nice.

But I think we have moved way beyond the anxiety of the 20th century.

It seems to me that it is in 21st century America, it is hysteria that dominates public and private discussion, rhetoric and interaction.

So I thought I would share some little anti-hysteria maxims and info today.

First, I want to pass on a definition of maturity:

Maturity: the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.

What I think this means around Xmas time is focusing more on your own head than other people’s heads.

This means examining our own feelings and sorting them out a bit.

At least that’s how I see it.

In order to think more clearly about one’s own stuff here are some good ideas are to emphasize.

First of all we need to identify and support strength in each other and ourselves not our pathologies.

Sounds easy, but right now hysterical pathology sets agendas in families AND in congress.

I think we need to emphasize challenge in our lives, not seeking comfort. If possible it helps to try not to run away from challenge.

Better to commit oneself to a lifetime project of being willing to be continually transformed by our experiences not running from.

This time of year people seem to be seeking weird levels of comfort with impossible expectations of themselves and others. It is the challenges in life that will help us live life more fully.

Finally it might help to emphasize self-definition (differentiation) over herding.

Right now it seems to me that often people are caught up in group think with the people they think they agree with.

It doesn’t occur to them to rely on themselves, at least not at first.

But the more we try to manage ourselves and quit willing others to change, the more we will be able to take responsibility for our own stuff. After all the only one you can really change is yourself, right?

All of this hard to do in a society that is more oriented toward safety (BE CAREFUL) than adventure.

It helps to remember that usually things are going to be okay.

Christmas hysteria seems to focus on children.

So here are three laws about children and parents.

1. Children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation.

I take that to mean that if you’re doing ok, you’re parents probably had a healthy attitude about loving you and bringing you up.

And that if you have children, most of parenting is once again focusing on your own stuff not willing your kids to do a certain thing.

Good to remember that nobody really does any of all this good stuff more than half the time.

Secondly, unfortunately it is the rare child that raises itself above the maturity level of its parents.

Scary but this one seems pretty true. It doesn’t mean one can’t rise above the level of maturity in one’s parents. Just that it’s very hard. And rare.

Lastly, parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed-up with their child’s behavior.

If you’re still reading this and you know me, you have guessed by now that I am basically passing on Ed Friedman quotation and insights.

I usually find myself for one reason or another re-reading this man’s work this time of year.

Heh. Go figure.

Managed to submit all the material for the upcoming bulletins yesterday. This involved finalizing the organ and choral music for Xmas eve and organ music for Xmas day. It’s all by Bach and Messiaen.

I wrote a listener’s guide for the bulletin for the Messiaen:

Listener’s Guide to today’s organ music The music of Oliver Messiaen (the composer of today’s organ prelude) sprang from his deep Christian faith. His music was conceived as painting pictures with sound. In “The Shepherds,” he has written that the first section is presented in “the color of stained glass: blue-violet, a touch of red, gold, and silver.” Jon Gillock writes that Messiaen creates a “revolving quality” in the beginning of this piece. “During this music, the shepherds have arrived at the stable and are kneeling before the baby Jesus. It is night, the stars are shining, the earth is turning silently, there is a very gentle breeze in the air.” One can hear Messiaen painting the stars in the quiet staccato chords in the background. The louder chords could suggest a breeze. Suddenly the music changes. The shepherds are getting ready to leave. They begin warming up their flutes. Then they launch into a dance that suggests a 16th century French Noel with a bit of a Middle Eastern flair. When I play this section, I picture a shepherd playing on the side of a mountain then stopping and listening while his entire melody returns quietly to him as an echo. The postlude today is based on the Lutheran Christmas Chorale, “Vom Himmel hoch” found in our hymnal at number 80. The shape of the melody suggests Jesus descent from heaven as God’s gift of love to humanity through his birth. The hymn begins: “From heaven above to earth I come….” submitted by Steve Jenkins, Music Director

The trick is not write too much and to write simply in this kind of thing.

It’s kind of ironic, I guess, because we are expecting a very small crowd on Xmas day. We don’t usually do a Eucharist on Xmas day, but since it’s a Sunday we going to this year. I don’t count the number of people who will be listening, I guess.

Gillock’s book on Messiaen is very illuminating as I mentioned yesterday.

Here’s a Youtube recording of my Xmas day prelude:

And here’s one of the Bach Postlude for Xmas Day:

Also spent a good deal of time practicing organ and piano yesterday. Actually found time to include some Sweelinck Echo Fantasies and chorale preludes. It never fails to amaze me that I never see the local Dutch Reformed people using Sweelinck. Probably too esoteric or something.

I received an email from the chair of the ballet department offering me about 13 hours a week of work for the spring term. Will probably do that.

Today I meet with my boss to review the final bulletins for the weekend. I want to run the ballet hours past her as well.

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Wait Time | veteranjournal.com

My son, David, has written his first online article for Veteran Journal.com: “Veteran’s Wait Time Audit.”

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Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. – NYTimes.com

Enough is enough. Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.

Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality.

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Pulp Friction: The Kindle Debate – NYTimes.com

The debate continues. Eileen and I still haven’t made up our minds. Right now we are considering purchasing two Kindle Fires or one IPad2 (for her).

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‘Beethoven in America,’ by Michael Broyles – Review – NYTimes.com

Interesting take on the idea of “Beethoven” in Americans’ minds.

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Etta James Is Terminally Ill – NYTimes.com

Another wonderful musician.

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Repressing Democracy, With American Arms – NYTimes.com

This article reminds me a bit of a Madeleine Albright story I read this morning regarding the half million Iraqi children who  died as a result of U.N. & U.S. sanctions (under Clinton).

“A 1996 UNICEF report estimated that up to half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. Asked to comment, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, did not even question the figure. Instead, she replied, ‘I think this a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.’

“No doubt Albright regretted her obtuse remark.”

Andrew J. Becevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

No doubt.

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The last link makes me want to end with this poem I read this morning.

A mind that has confronted ruin for years
Is half or more a ruined mind. Nightmares
Inhabit it, and daily evidence
Of the clean country smeared for want of sense,
Of freedom slack and dull among the free,
Of faith subsumed in idiot luxury,
And beauty beggared in the marketplace
And clear-eyed wisdom bleary with dispraise.

Wendell Berry, Given: new poems 2005

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