I have a bit of routine I guess. I’ll sit with the New York Times, read an article then come over to the computer and bookmark the article on my Times account. Sometimes, I do a bit of surfing to find out more about something or listen to music mentioned.

I don’t read too many articles all the way through, maybe one or two at the most each day. Sunday is usually a bit different.

Today, my eye was caught by the front page article, “After Iraqi Toops Do Dirty Work, 3 Detainess Talk” by Alissa J. Rubin. This article was disturbing because the Iraqis not only beat a prisoner to frighten other prisoners, but this seemed to elicit excellent intelligence which led US troops to a house were insurgents were building bombs, thus saving lives. Iraqi law forbids the beating of prisoners (as does US law) but apparently it’s not that unusual. The Iraqi army thinks the US army is far to easy on prisoners and that they pay the price when the insurgents persist in killing them via I.E.D devices. All I can say is I think war is obscene. I have sympathy for the US and Iraqi troops and understand the insane logic in their position. But I can’t help but think of it as another argument for the futility of war. When we (the USA) beat and torture our enemies, we escalate the hate and violence.

On the other hand, “Bush Adminstration Gains Support for New Approach on Food Aid” by Celia W. Dugger is a rare example of something Bush adminstration is doing that is not only sane but actually seems like a good idea. If I understand correctly, the Bush administration is trying to change the way we donate food to the rest of the world. Trying to spend less money on transporting American grown food and using the money to help people who are starving. Of course agribusiness is not happy.

Lastly, Frank Rich decimates the idiocy in the adminstration with some excellent partison points in “Iraq is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac” He voices my thought that Bush’s approach to the Virginia Tech murders seemed a bit too desperate and political. He also points out how the media is missing the point of the recent Gonzales/Wolfowitz debacle: “What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House.”

Book Beauty

Here’s the end of that story about the old woman who wanted
to lure a man with strange

cosmetics. She made a paste of pages from the Qur’an to fill
the deep creases on her face and

neck with. This is not about an old woman, dear reader. It’s
about you, or anyone who tries

to use books to make themselves attractive. There she is,
sticking scripture, thick with

saliva, on her face. Of course, the bits keep falling off.
“The devil,” she yells, and

he appears! “This is a trick I’ve never seen. You don’t need
me. You are yourself a troop

of demons!” So people steal inspired words to get compliments.
Don’t bother. Death comes

and all talking, stolen or not, stops. Pity anyone unfamiliar
with silence when that happens.

Polish your heart with meditation and quietness. Let the inner
life grow generous and handsome

like Joseph. Zuleikha did that and her “old woman’s spring
cold snap” turned to mid-July. Dry

lips wet from within. Ink is not rouge. Let language lie
bygone. Now is where love breathes.

by Rumi …. thank you So Many Books blog

Ran across another interesting opera. It’s called “A Scholar under Seige” and is by Michael Braz and opens tonight in Georgia. I ran across it on Arts Journal Daily’s music section (which I have on RSS feed on my google page). They didn’t link into the Washington Post AP article or the Playbill Arts article by Vivien Schweitzer. Instead they linked into the Atlanta Journal Constitution article which has a short excerpt you can listen to. I listened and I kind of liked it.

The story is apparently based on Georgia governer Eugene Talmudge‘s actions regarding segregation of George state universities and a couple of teachers.

I especially liked this quote from the composer, Michael Braz,
“I’m not an opera fanatic, but to me opera is not a bad way to tell a story.”

These two quotes were rattling around in my head from yesterday:

Our youth must be ready
to shed their blood generously
for the sacred cause of Spain.

Who ever is not with us
is against us.

We’ll exterminate the seeds
of the Revolution,
even in the wombs of their mothers.

Long live death!

From the libretto for Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”)
Composer: Osvaldo Golijov
Librettist: David Henry Hwang

&

“Preemptive strike… must mean not declaring war until your cameras are in position.”

From “Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

The story of Golijov’s opera is about the death of the Spanish poet, Lorca. The name, Ainadamar, refers to the fountain where he was killed by Spanish fascists.

It is striking that the librettist puts words that sound like a press release from the US government (okay just the middle part) in the mouths of fascists.

America is not exactly a fascist country but it’s not exactly free from the taint of  authoritarian state control, either.

We are sending our youth to die throughout the world. The supreme court has just ruled out the use of partial-birth “abortion.”

“Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men, reflects notions of a woman’s place in the family and under the Constitution that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer.” NYT Editorial

The current attourney general refuses to consider resignation even though it is clear that something is going on. Even if he does resign, his performance Thursday before the Senate committee raises suspicions that he is deliberately acting like a bumbler in order to hide something. Could anybody in his position really be so dumb? Is this an act of ultimate loyalty? Is he choosing to deflect the investigation from his bosses Bush and Rove or someone else?

While I love the USA, I am troubled by how corrupt the national government is right now. As a cynical participant/observer I expect a certain amount of corruption in politicians and government. But the direction of this country under Bush has been paternalistic lieing to the public coupled with the pursuit of private self interest-of those who govern and the corporations who control the government. It is hard for me to see how history of this time in the USA will avoid noticing that Bush and Cheney (two strong representatives of the oil industry) led the country into a war with a major oil producer.

I could be wrong, but boy does it seem obvious that while this country continues to have its own genius regarding diversity of peoples, idealism and openness, at the same time we are on a new path that is leading us away from these principles and toward something else. In Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell uses the word “Corpocracy.” Maybe that’s close.

I do think that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Gonzalez and others are acting more like good old American CEOs (i.e. scraping off profits and passing the buck and taking public stances that deny facts) than the leaders of our past (who admittedly combined corruption with idealism).

It does weirdly seem to be the government that the voting population of the US has chosen.

I had a nice conversation with Elizabeth in China this morning. I love the internet.

After we hung up, I immediately started working on compiling the music reports from my class. I look forward to this. It interests me to see what songs they choose for their report. And I usually make a playlist on Napster each semester for my own dining and dancing pleasure to listen to all of their selections (that are available). This is fun.

Ironic, that I bitch so much about teaching and then when I get free time (like today) I mess around some more with teaching. This looks dangerously like my obsession with music. God help me.

Cool web site: Free Albums Galore. I haven’t downloaded anything yet but I did the RSS feed to my google page so I could keep an eye on it.

Also, I was perusing the Clavier magazines my sister-in-law mailed me and ran across this NPR show I hadn’t heard off:
From the Top. It seems to be teenage musicians performing and talking to the host: Christopher O’Riley.

I had a conference with the chair of my department today.

Okay it wasn’t exactly a conference.

I was sitting on the floor outside my classroom while they did their student evaluations (teacher out of the room). The chair walked past me and said hi. This is exactly the second time I have seen him this term.

He asked me if I had my teaching assignment for next year, yet.

I had no idea what he was talking about so I said, “I guess not.”

He said that the executive administrator would be letting me know what it was and kept walking.

Administrating in the halls. Just like some churches I’ve worked in. Heh.

For all my resolutions not to teach anymore, I was given pause. I guess I was just figuring that they weren’t going to ask me back.

I guess they’re not exactly asking. More like giving me my next assignment.

After the student evaluations were taken to the office by a student, I told the class that I hadn’t received the evaluations from the previous term yet. But I had waited until after they had filled out their evals to tell them that little gem. Also, that it was distinctly possibly I wasn’t going to keep teaching. But I would like to hear things they wanted to tell me. They could tell me right now, I said (silence) or email me sometime if there was something they thought I could do better. I told them I could understand if they wanted to wait and email me after I had turned in grades. Heh.

They looked grim. They probably had just finished panning my teaching and the class. Anyway, I had fun.

Instead of playing recorded music for them before class, today I sat down and played an entire Mozart piano sonata for the lovely fuck of it. I have been in sort of a Mozart mood and played Mozart all morning at home anyway. I had fun. It felt like busking.

And also at one point today, I got them clapping cross rhythms: twos against threes. It actually worked as an example of polyrhythms (this illustrated the genius of African drumming which was partly the topic for today). I like getting them to do stuff.

Anyway, I’m done with classroom teaching. I have to give a final next week. if possible (and it usually is) I will stay at the college and finish grades before I come home.

I don’t know why I have been in such a weird space lately. I sometimes feel like I am losing my mind. But that’s a pretty familiar feeling I guess. Onward. Upward.

Here’s the GVSU Livejournal. No new ratings for Steve on Rate your Professor web site.

You know you can watch Gonzalez squirm live on C-Span, right?

Of course you have to click on it right now (Wed April 19 2007 10:00 AM).

As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria Line for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greenwich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The District and Cicle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he’s in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King’s buy valiums online Cross or Paddington, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don’t know the craftier short cuts, it’s as bad as how I imagine Tokyo. I had a professor once who asked us to prove that the Circle Line really does go around in a circle. Nobody could. I was dead impressed at the time. Now what impresses me is that he’d persuaded somebody to pay him to come up with that sort of tosh.

from “Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

Around 4:30 AM, a repeat of the BBC World Book Club featuring one of the last interviews with Kurt Vonnegut came on my radio. Dam. I couldn’t sleep through it. Vonnegut said his experiences in Dresden left him radically antiwar. And that he didn’t know how he wrote such a book as Slaughterhouse Five,only that he was “lucky.”

Then in the 5 AM NPR Morning Edition, there was a bit on Douglas Feith who was an architect of the Iraq debacle and is now safely defending it as a prof (at Georgetown?).

The combination of Vonnegut’s radical love of life and hate of war with a pompous Bush war advocate (still defending the choice to go to war) was too much for me.

I got up and made coffee.

I fussed about with this site today. I managed to link in some MP3s, sheet music and lyrics. Also, family links and David Byrne. I am having to go in and edit html language in order to do this. I still can’t fix the glitch in Explorer. Bah.

I seem to be in a very burnt out mood.

I spent time with Mozart and Prokofiev piano sonatas today. That helped.

It is an ancient and unresolved debate here, whose core is the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution of 1789. The much-misinterpreted text guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” — a defensive measure against assaults by the young state on its citizens. That may apply to muskets, but not to AK-47s.

The view from Spiegel: “America’s weapons, America’s Tragedies” by Marc Pitzke

How to live without a car — little fantasy of mine

This explains to me why there was a delay between reponses to the first shooting and the second. Seems like the police were being very reasonable in their investigation. They thought they had the shooter for the first incident. Maybe they did?

Between Virginia shootings, police chased a false lead

By Shaila Dewan and John M. Broder, International Herald Tribune Published: April 18, 2007

Wet burps in opera singers…. “Italians reveal hidden perils of opera singing” by John Hooper in Rome Tuesday April 17, 2007 The Guardian

Some lovely stuff in “Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell. I’m about half way through this, Mitchell’s first book. It’s structured like the previous book I read by him, “Cloud Atlas.”

By that I mean that each section starts a new story with new characters and ideas. The difference is that in “Cloud Atlas” it quickly became apparent that every story was related somehow. Not so in “Ghostwritten.” But he still is keeping me engrossed. In fact, I can’t really see how he will tie it all together but supect that he will.

Anyway in the fifth section of the book called “Mongolia” the point of view suddenly switches to that of some kind of spiritual parasite that can switch from body to body. This unnamed narrator is searching for a story that he/she thinks will reveal her/his own story. Consequently he prompts his various hosts to get others to tell stories.

Example: (warning, this is a bit long but worth the read)
Now: long, long ago, the camel had antlers. Beautiful twelve-pronged antlers. And not only antlers! The camel also had a long, thick tail, lustrous as your hair, my darling…..

At that time the deer had no antlers. It was bald, and to be truthful rather ugly. And as for the horse, the horse had no lovely tail, either. Just a short stumpy thing.

One day the camel went to drink at the lake. He was charmed by the beauty of his reflection. “How magnificent!” thought the camel. “What a gorgeous beast am I!”

Just then, who should come wandering out of the forest, but the deer? The deer was sighing.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked the camel. “You’ve got a face on you like a wet sun.”

“I was invited to the animals’ feast, as the guest of honor.”

“You can’t beat a free nosh-up,” said the camel.

“How can I go with a forehead as bare and ugly as mine? The tiger will be there, with her beautiful coat. And the eagle, with her swanky feathers. Please, camel, just for two or three hours, lend me your antlers. I promise I’ll give them back. First thing tomorrow morning.”

“Well,” said the camel magnanimously. “You do look pretty dreadful the way you are, I agree. I’ll take pity on you. Here you are.” And the camel took off the antlers and gave them to the deer, who pranced off. “And mind that you don’t spill any, erm, berry juice on them or whatever it is you forest animals drink at these dos.”

The deer met the horse.

“Hey,” said the horse, “Nice antlers.”

“Yes, they are, aren’t they?” replied the deer. “The camel gave them to me.”

“Mmmm,” mused the horse. “Maybe the camel will give me something, too, if I ask nicely.”

The camel was still at the lake, drinking, and looking at the desert moon.

“Good evening, my dear camel. I was wondering, would you swap your beautiful tail with me for the evening? I’m going to see this finely built young filly I know, and she’s long been an admirer of yours. I know she’d simply melt if I turned up in her paddock wearing your tail.”

The camel was flattered. “Reallly? An admirer? Very well, let’s swap tails. But be sure to bring it back first thing tomorrow morning. And be sure you don’t spill any, erm, never mind, just look after it, all right? It’s the most beautiful tail in the whole world, you know.”

Since then many days and years have passed, but the deer still hasn’t given back the camel’s antlers, and you can see for yourself that the horse still gallops over the plains with the camel’s tail streaming in the wind. And some people say, when the camel comes to drink at the lake he sees his bare, ugly reflection, and snorts, and forgets his thirst. And have you noticed how the camel stretches his neck and gazes into the distance, to a far-off sand dune or a distant mountain top? That’s when he’s thinking, “When is the horse going to give me back my tail?” And that is why he is always sad.

from “Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

According to Eileen who taught school for years, it is very normal to be burned out at this stage of teaching. I pointed out to her that I only teach twice a week and she taught everyday. But she insists that it’s normal even for me.

After teaching yesterday, I went to my “perch” office and copied down the point totals for each student at this point in the course from the online Blackboard system.

I like to hand in their grades the day of the final. Since my position is very tentative at GVSU I’m not absolutely certain I can use my “perch” office right after the final exam next Wednesday. But now I have enough info that I can figure out each person’s grade and fill out the bubble sheet (!) and hand it in.

I have to have students do student evaluations on Thursday. Interestingly enough I haven’t received the evaluations results from last term yet. It’s starting to feel like I am working for the government. heh. I  used to be interested in what these evals had to say, especially because I was so fascinated that I received so many comments about my appearance (negative ones).

I used it as a sociology experiment and last term I taught every class with my uniform: black suit and tie, long hair in a bun. I wondered if that would bring forth comments from students on their evals. I am still wondering but caring less and less. Fuck school. But not the students.

I begin to trust my own gauge of students more and more after having taught several terms and compared my reactions to them with their written evals.

Also students do sometimes give me indications on their written work what they are finding helpful and/or confusing. Very nice.

On another college/journalism note, I find the recent coverage of the killings at Virginia Tech revealing. It seems that journalists as usual (at least on NPR and the internet) have lost a grasp of their first responsibility to report “who, what, where when and why” and substitute smarmy emotional “I” centered reporter bias stuff. Good grief. It was almost like the NPR reporters were trying to talk the students and teachers they interviewed from Virginia Tech into a response they expected (“Aren’t you going home so you can be with your family and feel safe?” “No. I’m staying here with my friends” then later I heard this same reporter in a different report  say that many were going home so they could be with family and feel safe. I think that reporter should go home to her family and feel safe. Fuck a duck.)

I’m still waiting to find out (maybe this has been reported) if there is a clear connection between the first shooting in the dorm and the later mass killing in classrooms. It seems to me that is a basic important part of the story. But what do I know?

I also note that our society has all kinds of weird stuff around death. sooprise, I know.  We don’t remember that we all die. And we use all sorts of fake shit to insulate ourselves from the reality of a brutal and tragic death.

The cynic in me also noted how Bush jumped all over this one in an attempt to generalize this incident into national tragedy. This may be a national tragedy but leaders should be sources of honest comments at this time especially. Nothing disillusions people (at least this is true for me) more than dishonesty at a time of grief. But Bush has demonstrated he has no idea how to strike the right note in times of crisis over and over again as president. Just my opinion.

I had to temper my cynicism a bit when they delayed the Gonzalez hearings, but maybe that is political as well but just from the Democrats side. Good grief.

I try to remind students how much technology shapes their expectation of recordings.  I remind them that techology can make musicians sound more accurate note-wise and intonation wise. I ask them to report on their experiences of listening to live performances of musicians whose recordings they have heard.

I also teach them how a recordist can pan tracks from left to right and adjust the amplitude of these tracks to create a three dimensional field of sound.

This kind of rambling can leave me wondering just how full of shit I am. Or at least how relevant to my listeners.

Enough.

Today was my penultimate lecture (music theory word… next to last). I talked about recording a bit today. It felt disjointed. On the drive home I was feeling pretty incompentent as a lecturer. Then I kept thinking of how many ideas the class seemed surprised about.

I talked about Les Paul and Sound on Sound. I even linked my first myspace.com site on my Blackboard site. I found one that had a recording of Les Paul and Mary Ford’s hit,  How high the moon. Napster didn’t have this historic recording. It’s historic because Les Paul is using the basic dubbing recording technique to record himself and his wife playing all instruments and doing all the singing. Here’s the link.

Oops. Gotta skate. more later maybe.

Cleary University in Howell Michigan. She is getting paid 30K plus expenses. Obscene. Here’s the link to the story.