found this on Richard Dawkins site. Originally on reDiscovery Institute. Sorry it’s bigger than the column but if I make it smaller you can’t read it. If you check out the reDiscovery site they have a series of “just a theory” links under Gravity, Solar System and Literature.

BBC Newsnight Report Oct 2004

Hope this works. I keep trying to embed this video. It’s a report by Greg Palast about “caging” which I mention in the post right before this.

Greg Palast (remember him?) blogs this today:
“Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.

Huh?? Tim Griffin? “Caging”???

The perplexed committee members hadn’t a clue – and asked no substantive questions about it thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling. If the members had gotten the clue, and asked the right questions, they would have found “the keys to the kingdom,” they thought they were looking for. They dangled right in front of their perplexed faces…”

“Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet – except the USA – only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.

Here’s how caging worked, and along with Griffin’s thoughtful emails themselves you’ll understand it all in no time.

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (“caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and – you got to love this – American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation – and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.

How do I know? I have the caging lists…”

the whole story here.

Playing through Touzet piano pieces this morning. I listened to Maria Letona play some of these on CD Baby this morning.

I know she did her doctorate on Touzet, but still. I’m not sure she captures what I hear in these pieces. She plays some of them inexplicably fast (the dance I am thinking of is marked Moderato). Once again I find myself on the outside looking in and wondering what the heck is going on.

I’m still working my way through Levine’s book on piano jazz. I am learning a lot actually. Not sure how much I can remember and apply but between Levine’s book, Rob Hodson’s book on Jazz Ensemble interaction and Nesinson’s book on the death of Jazz, I’m beginning to make some sense of how a lot of people look at and perform Jazz. I have always wondered how Jazz keyboard players do it. In the past when I examine what they are playing exactly, it makes musical sense. I had no idea, however, how they arrive at their ideas besides innate musical talent (at least that was my conclusion).

Levine is demystifying Jazz chords for me. His explanations (and also Rob Hodson’s) seem so simple and clear. And I sit down and transpose the patterns he teaches into all keys and then go through the tunes in the real books he suggests. I am able to see how to apply his ideas.

At the same time, I realize my musical world is a bit different from all this.

I trace my interest in Jazz through exposure to several specific musicians In the order I think I was exposed they are:

Charlie Parker

Dave Brubeck

Miles Davis

Duke Ellington.

I found out about Parker through a record my babysitter in Tenessee gave my parents.

I still have it. It’s one of his recordings with orchestra accompaniment, lush and hokey. But Nisenson mentions these recordings as examples of Parker’s best playing. Go figure.

Then I think I heard “Take Five” on the radio. I liked the idea of the time signature and kept my eyes open for Brubeck. I found some sheet music and fell in love with “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” I still love this piece. I’m not sure it’s exactly Jazz but I think it sounds good. Nisenson puts Brubeck in a “one of a kind” category. In other words, he can’t exactly trace his influences and style with the tools that Jazz music historians use. Go figure.

Then I think I bought Mile Davis’s “Bitches Brew.” I think that was my first record of his that I bought. I know that I bought it largely on the cover at Kmart. Kmart was where i bought a lot of records. I seem to remember they were about five dollars and I had the money to do it once in a while. Several of these records ended up influencing my interest in music.

I bought Leonard Cohen’s first record solely on the cover as well as “Strange Days” by the Doors.

I don’t remember anyone pointing me towards these, just being interested in their covers. Incidentally all of the covers above are the ones that I remember. I went upstairs and actually laid my hands on the old Parker record, as well as Bitches Brew.

Interestingly, I notice that I own a bunch of old Jazz music recordings. As I flipped through my old vinyls I could remember how the records sounded but not when I listened to them. So not only recordings by Ellington and Davis but also Coltrane, Django Reinhardt. I remember in a used shop north of Holten Lake purchasing a bunch of old Jazz records of Thelonious Monk and others. I still have these upstairs. I have a record player but not sure if it works. I should relisten to some of these.

I finished memorizing the first movement of the Haydn piano sonata I have been learning. This is one of his earlier pieces and doesn’t exhibit the form that he and Mozart developed in the last 25 years of the 18th century. But it is one I like. Even though I can remember it all, I am still in the process of solidifying the recall. This is the first thing I can remember memorizing in a long time. It’s been a great process and seems to fit in with what I am learning in the Piano Jazz theory books (believe it or don’t).

I have an upcoming gig on June 8th at LemOnjeLlos. Lately my songs have not been all that interesting to me. I am working on a new song but it is coming slowly. I showed what I have so far to Eileen last night. She said she was surprised that it was an uptempo energetic song. Heh.

Right now I feel more interested in Touzet, Haydn, Bach (I have been playing through his G major English suite and loving it), Brahms and Jazz. But I’m sure I can pull a performance out of my hat. Especially since Jonathon Fegel will be calling the shots. He got the gig and invited me. Initially he said that if I was his warm-up act we could basically spread out over the whole evening. Not sure he’s still thinking that way, but I will be prepared to do my part and hope that I will get to play with Jon and some other people in public.

I voted for Nader in 2000.

I’m basically very sorry about that because I agree with Jimmy Carter that this administration is one of the worst in history. I think it has fundamentally changed what it means to be American moving us closer to a country dominated by state secrets, business interests and stoking the flames of hatred for political purposes.

But.

After the vote yesterday in which the Democratic leadership (except Pelosi) capitulated to the President on the funding for the war, I find myself listening to Dennis Kucinich

That’s Kucinich on the left. On the left.

Kucinich is kooky, yes. But he’s one of the few people making sense to me. It reminds me of Eugene Debs:

You know this guy. He ran for president time and time again.

He said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” and lived it. Vonnegut repeatedly refered to Debs throughout his works.

I’m starting to feel that way again. I understand that all “governments are jerks” (This is a quote from a woman I met in college from Romania. She convinced me this is true.)

And that corruption is probably inevitable. But on a continuum of idealism vs. corruption, the US is way over in the corrupt area from my point of view.

The War? I guess we’re fighting the war for the troops, right? That’s the way the funding has been FRAMED (as they say) by the people voting for it. Wait a minute. Don’t the troops do what the civilian leadership tell them to? Don’t they want to come home? Help the troops? Let’s stop funding this war and let them come home.

And the whole immigrant thing is FRAMED as good law abiding citizens (read “white middle class”) vs. thugs, criminals and free loaders (read “brown people”). Good grief.

Either the “sermon on the mount” makes sense or it doesn’t. Either Debs makes sense or he doesn’t. I think “do unto others” and “if anyone is hurting, all are” make sense.

And don’t get me started on Gonzalez and Gooding.

Just my opinion.

” ‘The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.’ The music and words of Utah Phillips. That’s one of the quotes environmentalist Paul Hawken uses in his new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. ” Amy Goodman interviews Paul Hawken.… there seems to be a significant typo in this anecdote in the interview:

There was a wonderful quote from Martha Graham, and she was with Agnes de Mille, and they’re both choreographers, of course, and Agnes de Mille was just really devastated by one of her shows, which had won awards on Broadway and then collapsed six months later. And she was bemoaning her fate to Martha Graham, and Martha Graham turned to her and said, “You know, we’re artists, and we’re never dissatisfied. There is this queer dissatisfaction that makes us march and makes us more alive than the other, this blessed unrest.” And so, to me, it was a term that had arms big enough to hold this vast and complex and diverse movement that is trying to restore justice and the environment in the world.

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UK Licensing rules are messing up live performers and club owners

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15 painfully unforgetable cartoon theme songs
Man. I didn’t recognize but one or two.

A Fair(y) Use Tale

this is pretty funny. The video uses bits of Disney to teach copyright and lambast Disney.

woke up a bit grumpy this morning. Here’s pictures of peonies from the yard in the morning light.

Last night I made “Potato Pea Curry” from The Clueless Vegetarian.

I love this cookbook. This is a simple recipe: potatos, onions, peas, …. you have to have garam masala (which is just a middle eastern spice mixture… ) and fresh mint or cilantro.

It turned out great.

This morning I decided I wanted to have chutney with it today. I have read that people who eat chutney regularly make their own. This makes sense to me because imported chutney in a jar or can sometimes tastes pretty weird to me. Although I never had any chutney in a restaurant that didn’t taste great.
I cobbled together some chutney using what I have on hand (apples, ginger) and looking at some recipes on line. I think the important thing for chutney is the fruit, ginger, sugar and vinegar. I always add the obligatory cayenne pepper to make it spicey.

I have it in the pot now and it’s simmering. Mmmmm. Smells great. I put in garlic, lemon, lime, onion, mustard seed, a handful of raisins, garam masala. I decided to use a 2 to 1 proportion for brown sugar and red wine vinegar to see how that works.
Chutney and yogurt go great with a curry.

Instead of booting up the computer this morning I put on a recording of the Bach B minor Mass and listened to the first few movements.

Napster refused to play tracks for me on Saturday, so my attraction to booting up is diminished when I am thinking of listening to music.

I pulled out the Dover score after a bit and followed the “Christe Eleison” duet. The Dover score has the women’s voice parts written in the soprano clef. It occurred to me to attempt to play them. I have always thrown myself at clef transposition and had limited success.

But one of the insights I have had recently is that often in my musical education I have attempted material far to hard for me. For example, an organist told me that he prepared for the FAGO exam (a difficult accreditation given by the American Guild of Organists. If you pass you are a “fellow.” A bit sexist, eh?) by taking Bach chorales and transposing them in all keys. I tried it. I found it (and still do find it) very difficult. Hence my transposing didn’t improve as much then as later.

My friend Nick Palmer told me that when he was in undergrad school he was pointed toward the piano accompaniments of Schubert lieder for transposition exercises. When I looked at these I found them much much easier than a Bach chorale.

So when I was thinking of stretching my musical muscles by attempting to play through the “Christe” vocal parts I realized that I should concentrate on the two lines in the difficult score and only add the bass and the obbligato when I could. This worked out pretty well.

Then for some reason I was in the mood to think about Haydn. Picked up Charles Rosen’s book that I have been reading (“The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven”). One of the many things I like about this book is that he provides pretty complete excerpts of works reduced for playing at the piano. Played through the exposition section of a Haydn String quartet in Bb major, op. 50, no.1. Rosen is very convincing about Haydn’s cleverness. But I don’t need convincing. I have thought Haydn was clever ever since I took a grad course on him.

Rosen demonstrates how Haydn takes two simple musical ideas (a simple repeated note begins the pretty easy cello part written for King of Prussia to play and a slightly elaborated turn figure – Eb, F, G, Eb, D) and uses them as the structural unit for the entire movement.

Haydn tends to take a musical idea and development it structurally in ways that are economical and amazing.

I like the fact that Rosen points out that it’s easier to hear Haydn’s musical ideas than see them on the page. In other words, Haydn is writing for the ear not the eye.

I have been noticing lately the difference between an extended theoretical discussion of the building blocks of specific music and the experience of playing and listening to it. Nothing beats playing and listening.

I’m off to play through the exposition section of this string quartet once again. If my Napster were working, I would see if it’s online. Hey I haven’t been kicked out of GVSU yet. Maybe I’ll check for it on Naxos (which is provided for teachers and students at GVSU).

“I’m not in Kansas anymore. I would love to be in Kansas.”

Paul Reubens

Mark Helprin has a frustrating article in today’s New York Times: “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” He thinks it’s self evident that ideas (art, music, books) deserve the same protection as real property. Good grief. It seems so naive to me to think that your take is the only one that makes sense. He ends this way:

“No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.”

This seems like an example of false causality to me. Or at least a false connection.

Admittedly I am on the other side of this discussion, but the free flow of the work of the spirt and the mind is necessary for any artists, musician or thinker (emphasis on “free”) to do their work in the first place. So from my point of view, it’s not “disfavor” to make ideas free. It’s actually “favor.”

I guess we won’t even need the word “reification” anymore. Since in Halpren’s estimation ideas and things are the same thing.

I wonder about the idea that creators own their creations. What exactly have they created? The alphabet they used? No. The language? No. The words? No.  The ideas? The stories? Hmmm. Can’t all stories be reduced to some awful formula like “boy meets girl” “boy loses girl” “boy fights war to get girl back” .
My usual reaction to artists who don’t want to share beauty and truth is that they can keep their little corner on it. There is so much beauty, truth and great stories out there. It’s hard for me to think I’m going to miss one person’s take on life. Especially since I am not thinking of J.S. Bach, Charles Dickens or Charlie Parker.

The idea that people who want to learn more about life and experience art or read books need to be paying an admission charge reduces one of the best things in life to a transaction. It makes ideas not only things but things for sale, commodities.

It’s not that I don’t think creators should have a place to sleep and food to eat and books to read and the internet (some of my basic needs, ahem). I’m a creator for heaven’s sakes. I just think that usually the protections do not end up protecting creators so much as other people’s investments.  By all means, pay the creator. But I always secretly liked the idea of stipend, paying someone to free them up to do what needs to be done.

Recently, I was listening to someone talk and she used the word, Jew, as a verb meaning to argue someone down. It took my breath away. I gently suggested that maybe she didn’t want to use that word as a verb. She immediately agreed.

I hate being the PC Police of course. But I do think about words. I think our vocab is built into our subconscious. I continue to examine the way I speak to see if I am saying things I really want to say.

Take the word “gyp.” The online American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “to defraud or rob by some sharp practice: swindle; cheat” when it’s a verb and “a swindle or fraud” when it’s a noun. It suggests the etymology is a “back formation from Gypsy.”

I’m not sure what a “back formation” is exactly. Probably a usage that reminds people of a word or something.

Under the word, Gypsy, they suggest that the 16th century origin was a corrupted form of Egyptian in the mistaken belief that the Roma people originated in Egypt.

Anyway, I can occasionally overhear myself thinking about something “being a gyp.” Then I remember that the word is related to the word Gypsy and has a bigoted slur implied in it.

I believe all people have unreasonable and stupid assumptions built into their head (and their language – not just the obvious perjoratives by the way…. When I was in my twenties and the Magazine MS. had just come out, I got it into my head to write a freelance article on the origin of sex words. Of course, I didn’t have the writing chops to actually get an article published, but I did have the audacity to think I did. Anyway, the article bogged down in the research when I discovered that “woman” comes from “wife” of “man,” and that “fuck” has a strong history that connects it to “strike” as in “hit someone.” Yikes, I remember thinking as I tucked my 3 by 5 research cards away.)
But the implications of our involuntary thoughts and unconcious expressions of hate do not absolve us from the responsibility of monitoring if we are indeed saying what we mean.

Apparently word people conclude that Shyster is not related to Shylock in Shakespeare.

The word, shyster, “appeared first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in July 1843, at first in spellings such as shyseter and shiseter but almost immediately settling down to the form we use now.

The Tombs prison

In the 1840s it was infested by ignorant and unqualified charlatans, who pretended to be lawyers and officers of the court. Before shyster came into being, pettifogger was the usual term for them, a word of obscure origin for lawyers of little scruple or conscience that dates from the sixteenth century. Mike Walsh, the editor of The Subterranean and the first user of shyster, summed up these plaguers of the Tombs in this passage:

Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves make up, with but few exceptions, the disgraceful gang of pettifoggers who swarm about its halls.”

This is lifted from World Wide Words.

It continues:

“Professor Cohen concluded the word derives from German Scheisser for an incompetent person, a term known in New York through the many German immigrants there. Mike Walsh considered it obscene because it derives from Scheisse, shit, through the image of an incontinent old man. This is plausible, because British slang at the same period included the same word, meaning a worthless person; the usual spelling was shicer, though it appeared also as sheisser, shiser and shycer. It’s recorded first in print in Britain in 1846, but must be significantly older in the spoken language. (It was taken to Australia and from the 1850s was used there for an unproductive gold mine.) It may have been exported to New York by London low-lifers.”

Looking back over my many years of learning about music, I can see how pieces in a puzzle were waiting to fall into place. Maybe a good teacher or two could have shown me this. Maybe not. But at any rate, I see the value now in memorizing.

This morning I got up and kept working on memorizing the Jazz standard tune, “All the Things You Are” by Kern and Hammerstein. In Levine’s Jazz Music Theory book, he has a list of tunes you should know if you are going to be a Jazz musician. Then in this list he marks the indispensible tunes. I thought to myself, what the heck, why don’t I memorize a couple?

I made a note of a few of the ones he recommended and pulled up mutliple recordings of them on Napster. I played these as I cleaned house yesterday. I found that I really liked the tune, “All the Things You Are,” and kept sitting down to play along with Ahmad Jamal, Django Reinhart or Parker and Gillespi. Before you know it, I had half the tune in my head from memory.

I refered to Levine’s piano book for a few voicings of the chords. And this is the basic insight I am getting from this study: that jazz chords are not nearly as mystical as I always thought they were. Usually I already know them in some form from playing so much music and doing some experimenting with chords on my own. In fact I have found only one chord that is actually new to me (a sus flat nine if your interested… spelled from the lowest note in the key of A: E, F, A, B, E).

As I memorized this piece I began to understand several things. First, that memorization can internalize music in a way that helps me understand what I already can hear. I had a friend in college (Phil Pilorz) who developed a sort of relative perfect pitch. He could hum any pitch but it took him a second to find it in relationship to the one or two pitches he remembered from playing rock music over and over.

In the same way, “All the things you are” is built on one basic interval over and over in different keys (the Perfect fourth is what musicians call it). I have no trouble remembering the sound of this melody in my head. But if you asked me to sing a certain pitch from memory, I would think to myself, “I don’t have perfect pitch.” But I can remember these pitches. Hmmmm. It seems to me that memorizing could help my self confidence. So what the heck, eh?

I can remember years ago listening to a Paul Simon song (Try a Little Tenderness) and hearing a chord that I remembered from a certain Palestrina or Renaissance piece. I pulled out the other recording and sure enough there was not only the chord but it was the exact same pitches.

I think my interest in Jazz right now is like being interested in a puzzle I can understand. I’m not turning into a Jazz aficionado but I do seem to be studying Jazz right now. Hmmm.

“This book is for anyone who is tired of living life on the surface, tired of letting cable news or daytime talk shows tell you what to believe, how to live, and what to think. It’s for people who want to learn how to read literature or better understand their book club’s latest selection. It’s also for those who’ve always wanted to read great books but never thought they could. It’s about changing your life one page at a time.”

“If you want to learn to read then you must read. That is the secret to reading, and that is the only secret worth knowing. Everything else is a distraction from that one fundamental truth. To read better you must read more. All the time. Every day.”

“I found my Mom’s copy of The Grapes of Wrath when I was fifteen years old and read it in a week, completely caught up in Tom Joad’s journey. Two years later I had to read it in high school, chapter by chapter, study question by study question, vocabulary word by vocabulary word, it was utter torture. I couldn’t believe this was the same book I had read and loved.”

from “ROMAN reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life Through Literature” by Nick Senger (blogs: ROMAN Reading and Literary Compass)
Nick Senger goes on to point out that books usually need to be read straight through the first time…. that books are in the phrase of John Gardner, “an organized and fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind.”

He also makes the comment, “One reason we read books is to change our lives.” I think this also applies to music, poetry and art.

Just as Senger (and Mortimer J. Adler before him) envisions reading as chatting with another human being, I feel that playing through music is a similar experience. I have chosen about six short piano pieces by Rene Touzet to learn. As I learn these pieces the logic of his mind comes through to me as a performer and interpreter. It’s very much like being in the same room with his elegance and interest in Cuban rhythms.

In his case, this is all the more intensified because I know he is pretty obscure. Apparently the only place you can get his music is music store in Coral Gables that his wife brought his remaining stock of published pieces. So he has left an interesting but hard to find path for pianists who are interested in his piano music. He had a performing and recording career and has left recordings of his songs. But these piano works (written in his retirement) make me think of Scarlatti. Scarlatti wrote most of his keybaord sonatas living in the shadows of the Spanish court. I say that because his genre was much less in the limelight in the court than opera. And like Touzet, he was doing it largely for its own sake. He didn’t have to develop the idiosyncratic language that comes out of his composing. He easily could have reeled off insipid tunes. But instead he created a little world of ideas and feelings all his own.

This puts me in mind of Touzet and others.

All of it ends up being conversations with other human minds not limited by time or space.

Kind of like the Internet, heh.

“It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? …
“Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems…
“Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason…

“We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas…

“The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content.”

Al Gore discusses the current situation in , “The Assault on Reason (book excerpt )” Time, May 16, 2007. Excellent article.

This has been a good week for me. I had nice chats with my friends Jonathon and Fuzz. Jonathon and I did some recording. I lost my head and told him that I would help him with a web site where he could put up more than the four mp3s that Myspace.com allows you and even figure out how to do a tip jar (via Paypal?).

Hey. Jonathon’s my friend. He’s on his second CD and his music isn’t easily available.

I worked on one track for his new CD (played piano for him) and listened to another. I really like this guy’s music.

And I’ve been working on my Jazz chops as well as memorizing a Haydn sonata movement.

And I’m working on new song.

My church finally gave me a copy of the software that makes the several hymnals searchable.
Life is good.

I’m going grocery shopping.

Pennsound is a site with free mp3s of poets and other writer types reading their work.

I didn’t see any Dylan Thomas but they do have several trax of Getrude Stein reading short excerpts of her work. (I’m downloading them even as I make this blog entry.)

More that caught my eye:

Pennsound link to Donald Hall reading his work.

Adrienne Rich

Samuel R. Delany’s radio play, “The Star-Pit”

Vachel Lindsay

Norman Mailer

Finished “Spring Snow” by Mishima last night. Went right on with the second in the four volume series, “Runaway Horses.”

“Spring Snow” is about two young men and one young woman. Their story apparently haunts the rest of the four books. Pretty cool.

One of them dies. One ends up in a convent. One survives. The survivor continues on in the second volume. The themes include war, transmigration of souls, the beauty of nature and its relationship to human development, and ancestor worship among many others.