Yesterday while Eileen was off running errands, I had an odd experience. I could literally feel a bad mood coming over me.

It was almost a physical sensation of despair and sadness. It has abated this morning thankfully.

In the midst of this and also earlier in the week I have been turning to Mozart. I have been playing through his piano sonatas. I abandoned these when I began learning some of his violin sonata accompaniments and piano trios. Now I wonder why. I find Mozart intact in them and this is a refreshing experience.

My foot is healing. I can feel it. I am surprised at how quickly it is improving. I imagined that at the ripe old age of sixty-six my foot would take forever to heal. It’s not healed yet, but I am surprised that even yesterday morning I could feel improvement.

NYTimes: Why Trump Is More Father Coughlin Than Franklin Roosevelt

This article is by the Pulitzer Prize wining historian Jon Meacham. Bookmarked to read.

Auden uses the word, cancrizans, in his poem, “Metalogue to the Magic Flute.”

I didn’t recognize the word but was delighted to discover it means what I learned to call a retrograde inversion…  that is a musical line which reverses what precedes it or occurs at the same time. Cancrizans means literally walking backwards.

I love this word and wish I had learned it instead of retrograde inversion which now sounds very sterile to my ears. If you look closely at the quotes above you can see that the 1938 Oxford Companion to Music makes the very logical objection, that though backwards melody is called cancrizans which is related to the word cancer or crab, that crabs actually walk sideways not backwards.

Apparently Auden along with Chester Kalman, Auden’s lover and friend, were commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company to translate Mozart’s Magic Flute into English.

Instead they revised and adapted the original words and added three newly composed sections one of which was Auden’s poem, “Metalogue to the Magic Flute.”

This is a wonderful run down that imagines a character in the opera, “the singer player the role of Sarastro,” interrupting the opera with a “prorogue.” (another new word for me… it means a temporary discontinuance of something like a Parliament with stipulation it will be resumed later).

I recommend reading it for yourself. If you have a printed version of it in one of Auden’s collections use that one. The linked version seems to be a slightly different version with some significant differences.

Here Auden reads the corrected version. If nothing else, take seven minutes and listen to him. Very cool.

Author, activist and CNN pundit Sally Kohn on Recode Decode: transcript – Recode

Transcript of the pod cast where I learned about Sally Kohn. Yesterday at my therapist appointment, Dr. Birky was jotting down books I was talking about. This included Kohn’s book as well as Kendri’s Stamped from the Beginning.

As a willing warrior for Trump, Sarah Sanders struggles to maintain credibility – The Washington Post

A little behind the scenes look at what is decidedly not West Wing the TV show.

Yesterday stepping from my car to the curb at the library, I managed to distribute my weight to my toes in my right foot in a such a manner that I heard a distinct pop and down I went. Oops. I skinned my knee and seem to have jammed a couple of fingers in my right hand. But it’s my Achilles tendon that is probably  what gave way.

It doesn’t feel entirely ruptured. And is not that painful, only stiff. I elevated it with ice in a zip lock before going over to church to see what it will be like to try to play organ with a bum foot.

I did so because I have a funeral today after getting back from seeing my therapist. It turns out that I use my feet with a lighter agility than I thought. Even though my foot has restricted movement I was able to basically play organ. I only went through the prelude and postlude for this weekend (by Ned Rorem), the psalm and a couple  hymns. Then it was back home to elevate.

This morning I had a lovely video chat with the Chinese branch of the fam. Granddaughter Alex seemed genuinely pleased to see her Grandpa Steve on the screen. I am so proud of her and my daughter, Elizabeth, and son-in-law, Jeremy.  They are coming for a visit soon and i can’t wait. We will be interring the ashes of my parents while they and the English branch of the fam visit. Daughter Elizabeth has reached out to the California branch and invited my grandson Nicholas to be there are her expense. I can only hope he accepts. That would be very fun.

I am enjoying reading my new digital issue of Granta.

In his extended essay, “Slaughterhouse,” Arnon Grunberg ponders death and killing. Here is an online version of the essay if you’re curious.

He begins with the question: “In order to live, do you have to be prepared to kill?” He describes visiting various slaughterhouses and even participating in the killing. I was struck by this quote: “The sociologist Johan Goudsblom wrote: ‘Morality is wielding power without referring to it.’”

The entire essay is a critical consideration of the morality of killing, mostly to provide meat, but also suicide and war come into the discussion.

Another happy link from Jupe.

Zora Neale Hurston ‘Barracoon’ Excerpt

I’m reading, thinking, and learning about the history of American Slavery. I didn’t know Hurston was a trained cultural anthropologist in addition to being an author.This link is an excerpt of an extended interview with “Cudjo Lewis — or Kossula, his original name — the last survivor of the last slave ship to land on American shores.”

Bookmarked to read. I will probably get a copy of the entire work.

Burn out is closing in on me. I’m not skipping my evening martini as I had thought about doing. I canceled trio today to have a bit more time off. Music and poetry continue to nourish me in this time, but I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. My bi weekly appointment with my therapist is tomorrow and while I’m not looking forward to reporting failure at moderating my alcohol intake I am looking forwarding to seeing Dr. Birky and talking with him.

Yesterday I bit on a Facebook ad from Granta magazine. They are offering a four issue digital subscription for $16. I have always enjoyed this magazine a great deal, finding excellent writing and interesting ideas in it. A digital subscription is a perfect solution for me since I don’t have  to deal with being unable to discard old issues that I have enjoyed so much.

Like this one which is laying around somewhere:

I have been thinking about Lenny Bruce lately.

His acerbic wit is what I need these days. Michelle Wolf, the comedian who appeared at the White House Press Corps dinner is a mild substitute for Bruce but she is helpful.

I even found Lenny Bruce popping to mind as I read in Siegel’s Mind book.

I’m in the section where Siegel hypothesizes about mind function (and brain function) regarding top-down and bottom-up perceptions. He calls the top-down reasoning construction. This is where we construct our reality usually using words in our thoughts. We see a dog. We don’t really look at it. We just think it’s a dog.

Siegel had a terrible accident after which he temporarily lost his ability to do this. Instead he was imprisoned in only bottom-up perceptions which he calls conduit perception. He would get hung up in the experience of drinking a glass of water, the amazing bubbles and color and so on. I think he compared it to being on LSD.

Of course he ends up calling for a balance of these two. But when the top-down dealy is over functioning, asserting preconceptions without factoring in what’s actually in front of it,  it reminded me of Lenny Bruce’s lovely little phrase “what should be is a dirty lie.”

He even sees this in some examination of brain function. Here’s a handy chart I found online just now.

He has a similar chart in his book.

I continue plowing through Sally Kohl’s The Opposite of Hate.  I mentioned her to my boss yesterday. In response Jen told me about an essay that had influenced her along these lines by the writer Beverly Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love.”

I couldn’t find the essay online, but apparently it’s in the above collection which I have just interlibrary loaned.

I need some time off, eh?

Contrary to my previous resolution, I have not been skipping martinis the last few nights. My BP and weight has been okay. When I combine that with my late season burn out, I am delaying skipping my evening martini until I am more ready to do so.  No doubt my therapist and I will discuss this when I see him Friday.

Instead of reading more poetry this morning, I remembered thinking last night that it would be interesting to look analytically at the Ned Rorem organ pieces I am learning for Sunday. I spent some time dissecting exactly how his Magnificat from Organbook II works.

I like observing the beauty of his develop of his musical ideas. It struck me that this is very similar to observing beauty in poetry I read aloud to myself each morning.

It also helps me remember something I enjoy a lot about music: the clever way composers put their pieces together.  This is a reason to like Bach. It’s also a reason I like Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s case, it’s the beauty of language, but I also notice the way he puts language together.

When I am reading a poem by a more contemporary poet, I often stop to consider how the poem is constructed. I have been reading some more conservative poets like W. H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht.

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)

These men are quite the craftsmen. I often wonder how they find rhymes and rhythms with such beautiful meaning. Usually they make it look effortless.  But I’m sure it’s not that easy. It must come out of their dedication to their craft.

Rorem has an interesting introduction to his Organbooks. Writing in 1990t, he comments that “in the United States the organ is an acquired taste, not only for musical laymen but for most professional musicians. Laymen connect the sound with church-going, an extramusical occurrence irrelevant to the concert hall. Professionals (except, of course,  for organists themselves) can find the sound over-rich, blurred, remote from the incisive linear flow they were taught to parse in counterpoint class.”

Ouch. I wince when I read that my life’s work is “an extramusical occurrence.” And Rorem’s description of organ sound definitely describes much organ music. However, I doubt if he would feel that way about my Pasi which makes beautiful, clear, and incisive sounds. At last to my old rock and roll ear it does.

I love Rorem’s music. If it weren’t for the fact that much of his opus is for the natural voice, I would listen to it more. But despite being the son of a man with a decent voice, I don’t enjoy the sound of the classical solo voice that much. I like Bach arias and adore Dietrich Fisher-Deskau’s recordings of Schubert lieder. But I admit that my personal aesthetic admires the sound that comes from Billy Holiday, Paul Simon vocals, Randy Neuman, and others.

Billie Holiday (1915-1959)

Once again I find myself in between worlds. It’s not a bad place to be. As someone who enjoys and values so many different musics, my life is enriched by them. Rorem seems to be still alive. He would be 94. I hope he’s being well taken care of.

Sally Kohn is my new hero (heroine?). I heard her on a podcast(Recode Decode hosted by Kara Swisher). I was impressed with her.  She talked about distinguishing between anger and hate. The former is needed, the latter destructive. She talked about positive patterns of behavior that she cultivates in her exchanges with other people.  I thought she handled Swisher with wit and decorum. Unfortunately, Swisher is at peace with her own hatred and her belief that some people will not change. Kohn didn’t challenge her so much as not respond to her and intelligently analyze situations looking for the constructive action.

I’m not writing eloquently about it, but Kohn bears checking out.

I know it looks kind of touchy feely, but I think I’m going to read her book.

The predictable outrage over the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – Columbia Journalism Review

 How Michelle Wolf Blasted Open the Fictions of Journalism in the Age of Trump | The New Yorker

Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because whites were loath to destroy their own property.  Ta-Hanisi Coates

Yesterday I pushed on in my reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. I’m just about done with it. It makes good reading while treadmilling. The title by the way comes 1895. South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention when he said, “We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt th ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”

Coates goes on: “By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been painted as a fundamentally corrupt era of ‘Negro Rule.'”

I wonder how many people who find Coates troubling know that the title of his book doesn’t come from a comment about Obama’s years although it’s an obvious pun on both 1895 and 2016.

In the 2016 election, Trump dominated white voters in most categories. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, he won white women, white men, white people with college degrees, white people without them, young whites (age 18 to 29), adult whites (age 45 to 64), and senior whites (age 65 and older). Coates attributes some of this to the fact that Trump ran as a Republican which has come to be the party of white people. But “By his six month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every singly demographic group. Every demographic group,that is, except one: voters who identified as white.”

So liberals who have trouble understanding the election of 2016 have to discount what is obvious: Trump is the party of white supremacy. Coates grants that not everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot or a white supremest, just people who chose to put one in the white house.

He finds the focus on the white working class as the base of Trump’s support puzzling, “given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism.” Escaping the truth that “racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of the country’s political life.”

My reading of history confirms this.

I’m not feeling much like church this morning. I got up and took a shower listening to old rock and roll and Motown. That helped a bit. Yesterday I decided to schedule a couple of organ pieces by Ned Rorem for a week from this Sunday.

Ned Rorem

He wrote four Organbooks before he died. In many of them he brings his developed sense of song to bear. In fact one of the two pieces I plan to play is simply entitled “Song” (from Organbook I). The other, “Magnificat,” comes form Organbook II and is equally lyrical. It is consoling that I can do good music in the course of my job.

The ability to adapt well to a troubled world is not a sign of mental well-being.

a poster on a wall in Romania, quoted in Siegel’s book Mind

Eileen is a happy camper. She finally got a local company to come and begin removing our bat colony. She engaged a different company last year but they quit responding to her. While she and Stacy from the bat removal service were traipsing around our house, I walked over to Evergreen Commons and treadmilled.

It’s been a tough month or so for attending to my ongoing health stuff. But after my doctor’s appointment Thursday, I picked up the pattern and am trying to lose some weight, get my blood pressure down by doing so, and moderate my drinking. Exercise is part of this.

Not a day goes by that I don’t do some music. But I avoided going to church yesterday. Instead I played Bach and Mendelssohn on the piano as well as the Walther chorale preludes I am performing tomorrow at church.

I’m also knee deep in reading about Bach. in addition to the Williams’ book,  Bach: A Life in Music, I have returned to the updated Bach Companion which is a wealth of new information.

Recently I discovered that the Michigan Secretary of State has some cool online stuff. You can check into line from their website before arriving if you wish. Also, you can make a specific appointment time which speeds up things considerably. Earlier I had made an appointment for yesterday afternoon. We are switching Mom’s car into our name (since she is dead). It only took about fifteen minutes. Wow.

We dropped by the library and my eye fell on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s memoir, Unmasked.

I came home and did some serious escape reading in this book. It’s kind of trashy, but it gives me another window on life and the arts in the good old U.K.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society

Jiddu Krishnamurti, quoted in Siegel’s book, Mind

My check up went well. My doctor was happy with my numbers while encouraging me to continue to attempt to lose weight. She also, unfortunately, agreed with Eileen that my drinking habits are not healthy. This despite the fact that my liver numbers in  my blood test are not enough to warrant concern. So I will continue to monitor my calories, skip my evening martinis on some evenings and exercise.

I stopped at church after my doctor’s appointment to practice organ. After I came home I seemed to have gone into a physical and emotional stall. This is logical, I guess. I keep seeking ways to allow myself some time to repair my tired mind and body and recapture a sense of energy and flow.

I haven’t exactly lost those things, but I know that I am due for some refreshment.

And this morning I do feel more refreshed.

My doctor had just returned from a visit to Mexico City. We chatted about this city. She affirmed my notion that it has many bookstores. I have read that it has more bookstores than any other city. My kind of city.

We also discussed the current toxic environment in the USA.

She has both a USA passport and a Mexican one. She said she received no hassle at the borders, that she presents the Mexican one when entering Mexico and the American one when coming back. In both cases, they say “welcome home.”

However, she does have family that will not come to the USA right now. For family visits they meet in Canada.

It was funny how we both assumed the other perceived our times and our president as a bad thing.

As we said good bye I told her we had been solving the problems of the world.

NYTimes: The Supreme Court and the New Civil War

In her latest article linked above, Linda Greenhouse describes the state of the United States as one of civil war. Definitely we have warring factions or groups of people who cannot understand each other. I watch misinformation flow by on Facebook from both family and friends on the left and on the right.

The concept of discerning fact from fiction has been lost as it becomes more and more difficult to extract oneself from one’s echo chamber.

Confirmation bias is rampant and being exploited by people on the left and the right. Admittedly the people on the right are a lot a better at it and have been doing well at doggedly pushing an agenda onto the rest of us who disagree with it.

Frustratingly they don’t seem to be in the majority. But they are winning.

My brother came up with the brilliant notion that if my church could give me some extended time off I might be able to delay my retirement. Jen and I have been discussing this idea. Yesterday she mentioned an organist we both know who will be vacationing for the summer locally and had actually inquired if I would like to take some time off. He was offering to sub some for me.

Jen is contacting him to find out how many Sundays this summer he could cover.

This is especially apt this week because I am feeling overwhelmed and a tad burned out.

I have difficulty taking time off. Neither Jen nor I knew exactly how many Sundays I am allowed off a year now. She is very interested in keeping me working as long I am able and wish to. I guess I wish to as long as I am able. Anyway that’s the working premise.

As usual for the late choral season we had a small group of singers at rehearsal last night. However, the morale seemed pretty good and they entered in to the rehearsal with their usual good humor and enthusiasm (Hi Scott and Barb!)

I phoned Nick Palmer to tell him I wasn’t planning on doing the Messiah a third time next year with him and his group.

I have a doctor’s appointment this morning for a check up. I love it that I can review my lab results online as soon as they are done. My numbers look pretty good. They provide norms along with your numbers. My cholesterol is a bit higher. I’m expecting my doctor to comment on that. I’m hoping that my health doesn’t indicate increasing meds.

My BP and weight are falling. But BP was up a bit this morning. I love having higher blood pressure from worrying about higher blood pressure.

NYTimes: So the South’s White Terror Will Never Be Forgotten

Today is the first day that America has significant materializations of the twin travesties of slavery and lynching. Two new museums.

NYTimes: ‘Fightin’ to Keep Slavery’

White Americans continue to keep African Americans repressed. Ugh.

Used up most of my morning blogging time thinking about and listening to Bach cantatas. It occurs to me that the online resources for this are pretty amazing starting with the superb Bach Cantata website which has tons of information on it.

If you like Bach cantatas it is a wealth of information and discussion about them.

I listened to BWV 1 in its entirety this morning, cuing it up on Spotify and pulling up the full score on IMSLP What inspiring music!

Earlier while showering I listened to Procol Harum’s 1967 album

I love this album. I much prefer this music from the sixties to other music that was being made at this time like what passes for B3 Jazz organ at Hope college. The keyboard player on this old album plays b3 and piano. It started my day off right.

I’m planning on taking it easy for the rest of the morning, then meeting with Jen at 1:30 for our weekly check in. Choir tonight. Doctor appointment tomorrow. No trio. I’m still trying to get some perspective by taking time away from work.

I had a nice chat with my friend, Peter Kurdziel, yesterday. He drove over to sit in my living room and shoot the shit. God I miss doing that.

But, toujour gais, Archie, toujours gai.

NYTimes: ‘You never see that point of view in mainstream press.’

Readers report on what they think they want from the newspaper of record.

Eileen is off getting her hair done this morning. This is a special kind of self pampering that I thoroughly approve of and support and encourage. I have already been up to the lab to have a blood draw for my Thursday check up. I am listening to the St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach. I continue reading in Peter Williams’ J. S. Bach: A Life in Music. That’s why I’m listening to this piece.  In the famous Bach obit penned by his son and another man, it says that Bach wrote and performed five passions. (Passion = passio, suffering).

Williams sorts this out. One of the five is most certainly an anonymous one he inherited with his Leipzig gig and rewrote. Of the other four I think only three are certain: John, Matthew, and some of a Lucan one.

Anyway, Williams always inspires me to listen to and/or play through the music.

I was bogged down in the book because I couldn’t figure out what a citation meant. In two places in the book I found a parenthetical reference  pointing to FN 4. What could it mean? I scoured abbreviation lists,  bibliographies, and the like to no avail.

After googling and chatting with Eileen about it (who saw it as another puzzle to think about), I messaged Greg Crowell and put up a query on an Organist Facebroken Page.

It didn’t take Greg too long to inform me that it was referring in both cases to a nearby footnotes. FN = footnote. One of them was not on the page of the reference but a few pages over. Oh! Good to know.

This weekend I used my harpsichord in public for the first time in several years. As I mentioned here, we played the Bach Violin Sonata in B minor mov 1 and the choir performed “Flocks may safely graze.” It all sounded pretty good. Actually the violinist was spectacular.

Last night Rev Jen and I gave an AGO talk about clergy-musicianship relationships. She and I prepared coherently. We started off with a couple of anecdotes (one each) then interviewed each other alternating between four prepared questions for each other. Q and A started up right away. After we were done, Jen said we should do it sometime for the parish. I told her that now she had a program up her sleeve and she could schedule it at leisure.

Of course my anecdote was about jinxing a good thing by talking about it. David Farr wrote a pamphlet pompously entitled “The Working Relationship Between Principal Priest and Chief Musician.” He presented a session about it at a Chilton Powell Institute (an Detroit Episcopalian conference that used to occur from time to time).

After the conference, he flew home and was fired.

Hopefully if Jen and I open ourselves up to the community about how we work together so well, we don’t jinx it.

Robert Reich has a BaseFook video about the Universal Basic Income. Back in 2016 I first learned about the imminent approach of the loss of most if not all jobs: The book was People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy by  Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols.

The book is about possible futures which concluded that the work ethic will go away in the face of robots doing everything. We have two alternatives: either we become slaves to the economic masters or we reevaluate the whole work ethic thing and provide a universal basic income to all so that we can continue to work on being good humans.

Interestingly, in order to find this exact book reference I had to do some searching in old blog posts since it didn’t appear on my current list of books I have read. In doing so I kept running across other references to the Universal Basic Income. Cool.

NYTimes: We Don’t Need No Education

Krugman explains lowering taxes has destroyed important infrastructure.

NYTimes: Ai Weiwei’s Little Blue Book on the Refugee Crisis

I’m a fan. He has a book out. Here’s a short interview about it.

NYTimes: 10 Treasures, Unearthed From the New York Philharmonic’s Archives

Some very cool stuff in the archives. Check it out.

NYTimes: Holstering the K-Pop, South Korea Silences Propaganda at the DMZ

Music as weapon. Nice.

A meditation on origins

(I wrote this journal entry a few days ago. Eileen read it. Now you can if you want to.)

My parents would not recognize or understand many of the things that are most important in my life. I’m thinking of poetry and music.  I wonder just how I came to this point, being their son. I think I can see some of how.

My mother left her family to marry my father. She not only left the family she left the part of the country where they lived. Her life seems to me to be in pursuit of something, something that her own parents would not recognize or understand. In that way, I can see how I am like her.

Her father did not know his own father. Definitely there was a gap of recognition and understanding between them, although he knew his own mother.

My father’s parents would definitely recognize some of the thing that were important to him in his life. And they would understand a lot about how he lived his life and maybe a bit about why.

I think of the hymns, the preaching. Although my father spent his life moving away from the conservative part of his tradition, still to the end of his life, he was connected to hymns and even the preaching in a way.

I think he might recognize or understand some of what is important to me in life, the music, the poetry.

I think of him as a young up and coming Church of God minister moving from the south (Greeneville, Tennessee) to the north (Flint, Michigan). I think we had the baby grand piano in south. I don’t remember the stereo console where I heard so much music and watched tv until we moved to Flint.

Dad thought about become a choir director. He also had thoughts of being a “youth leader” in the Church of God. I know he loved music.

I have a multi volume anthology of poetry that his parents gave him on his 21st birthday.

Before he died, when he was deep into his dementia, he asked to come listen to me practice organ at church. I brought him along. He moved around the room as I practiced. I remember not playing very well particularly. But when I was done, he seemed satisfied with an air of finality.

I am beginning to see how I grew out of my background. My mother was a changeling. She moved away from her family and its understandings in a different way from her brother and sister. My father pointed me to the arts while at the same time not exactly recognizing and understanding them very much in the way I have come to value them.

They are both constituent parts of me. I see that now.

‘It feels like having a limb cut off’: the pain of friendship breakups | Life and style | The Guardian

Reading update

This is the Basquiat painting Kevin Young poem bases his poem of the same name (VNDRZ) on it from my morning reading. I do like Basquiat and I like Kevin Young.

I finished Comey’s A Higher Loyalty. My takeaways include the following.

Comey observes that people from the Attorney General office of the United States are often believed by strangers when they talk. This stems not from their personal credibility, but “because of those who had gone before them and, through hundreds of promises made and kept, and hundreds of truths told and errors instantly corrected, built something….:”

He labels this the “reservoir.” “… a reservoir of truth and credibility built… by the people you never knew, by those who are long gone. A reservoir that makes possible so much of the good that is done by the institution you serve.” (p. 54)

Obviously, this relates to the climate of falsehood and distortion that permeates our public discussions now. Comey’s belief in his institution convinces me. I admire it. And he is aware of the reservoir’s fragility.

“…. the problem with reservoirs is that they take a very long time to fill but they can be drained by one hole in the dam. The actions of one person can destroy what it took hundreds of people years to build.”

This comes from a speech he gave to fifty new prosecutors and their families as the newly appointed U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. I’m sure he includes it to remind the reader that this reservoir of credibility and trust is being quickly drained by Trump and his supporters.

It’s a beautiful concept and difficult for me to accept without a dash of my own skepticism of institutions in general.

Elsewhere he cites his wife’s notion that leaders benefit from realizing one thing: “It’s not about  you, dear.”

“… whatever people were feeling—happy, sad, frightened, or confused—it was unlikely it had anything to do with me,” Come writes, “They had received a gift, or lost a friend, or gotten a medical test result, or couldn’t understand why their love wasn’t calling them back. It was all about their lives, their troubles, their hopes and dreams. Not mine.”

This is a general helpful insight to me. Comey identifies how this is important to him in two respects: “First, it allows you to relax a bit, secure in the knowledge that you aren’t that important. Second, knowing people aren’t always focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspectives of another ‘me.’ Some seem to be born with a larger initial deposit of emotional intelligence, but all of us can develop it with practice. Well, most of us. I got the sense that no one ever taught this to Donald Trump.” (p. 239-40)

This is one of the more gentler assessments and descriptions of Trump in Comey’s book. Recommended.

For two days in a row, I have not put on my organ shoes. This means I haven’t practiced organ in a very long time for me. It does seem as though goofing off around the house, reading and playing piano and guitar, has helped a bit.

Yesterday I had a fruitful discussion with Curtis Birky, my therapist. Then I stopped at church and practiced harpsichord. I am using it for the prelude and anthem Sunday. Today I have to go over and tune it and also meet with the guitarist for tomorrow.

These are little things to do. I deliberately came home after practicing harpsichord at church yesterday to do more relaxing. This seems to be helping.

I’m almost done with Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty. Eileen and I watched the full interview he did with Stephen Colbert last night. I’ve also caught bits of his other many interviews. I think he is mostly sincere in his stance and I admire his attempt at shaping the public discussion in way it needs to be beyond partisanship and more about integrity, morality, and clarity.

I’m on chapter 13 out of 14 chapters. I want to finish it soon, but found myself wanting something a bit more meaty to read this morning in my morning session. At this point in the book, Comey is a bit gossipy about meeting and dealing with Trump. It’s mildly interesting to read, but I’m not that interested in Trump as personality. And I’m familiar with the incidents he describing. I look forward to his conclusion where I expect him to end with clear statements about what he thinks we need as a country and what leadership can be.

But even in my poetry reading this morning, I was drawn to deeper content and picked up Auden’s Collected Poems where I left off reading them.

Googling to figure out some words I stumbled across John Fuller’s A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden.

Looking at a page of this book on Google books I noticed that it’s cross indexed to my edition of Auden’s collected poems. I interlibrary loaned this book instantly and will probably purchase a use edition soon if it’s as good as it seems.

In order to cleanse my weary mind this morning I spent time with Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

He’s not kidding with the “definitive” in the subtitle. Did you know that the term, “mulatto,” was coined to reflect the concept that mules being the result of crossing donkeys and horses are infertile? It was a not so subtle reference to racist separation of peoples into subspecies. Yikes. I learned this this morning.

Kendi has a steel trap mind. He delves deeply and critically into the 18th century Enlightenment movement, citing it’s major figures’ on race. It’s not pretty. Voltaire and subsequently Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were all convinced of the inferiority of peoples with dark skin. It’s helpful to remember Kendi’s three classifications of historical attitudes towards race: segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist.

Basically segregationists insist on the idea that humanity is divided up into types (races) which are clearly hierarchical. Guess whose at the bottom?

Assimilationists are all about the colonial notion that uncivilized races can become more like white people. In the early days of this thought, many insisted that if dark skinned people moved to a more temperate climate they would whiten up. Sheesh.

Both of these ideas supported pro and anti slavery types. It’s interesting to read Kendi’s analysis of this.

Antiracists are what you might think. Basically it boils down to disagreeing with any generalization about a group of humans that identifies them as having basic differing traits that sorts them into races. This is not as easy as it sounds.

In the 2017 article I recently linked, Kendi frankly examines his own change of mind about racisim, moving from some assimilationist ideas to more conscious antiracist.

Anti-racist ideas hold that racial groups are equal. That the only thing inferior about black people is their opportunities. “The only thing wrong with black people is that we think there is something wrong with black people,” a line that Kendi uses like a mantra.

Yesterday I did not practice. I did not exercise. I went into a bit of a mental/physical stall. This morning I feel better as a result of it. I told Eileen I needed thirteen more days like that one. I spent the day moving back and forth from my reading chair to the piano and guitar. I would play some Mendelssohn on the piano or some Gervaise and Bach on the guitar, tire quickly, and return to reading.

Consequently I finished Albright’s Fascism: A Warning and read a good deal in James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. It quickly became apparent to me that Comey’s book was his first and that Albright’s book was her sixth.

Comparing the two books is a bit of an apples and oranges conundrum. Albright’s book is incisive and lays out the workings of a keen mind. Comey’s prose style seems to be lifted from Scott Turow or John Grisham, two other lawyers turned writers. This is ironic because in her acknowledgements Albright thanks Bob Woodward for his help with her books. Woodward’s prose style (what i can remember of it) seems closer to Comey’s than Albright’s.

I am enjoying Comey however. He leaves some things about himself and his wife unsaid.  I think they are probably Catholic. I thought of this as he described his wife’s incredulity at someone using the phrase “It’s God’s Will,” when expressing sympathy at the death of their newborn daughter.

This someone was probably a Roman Catholic priest. I remember the first time I heard a priest use that phrase to a mourner. The mourner was a young husband burying his wife. I looked at the widower and wondered which of us was going to hit the priest. Neither did. But the shock of it is firmly imprinted in my memory.

So fae I am finding Comey almost convincing in his attempt to “bring the reader into his mind.” Unfortunately, the book reads like it’s under the influence of one too many  “how to write” books. It will probably be a best seller.  The prose is easy. The topic popular (a memoir about people in the current or recent spotlight). Hell, I pre-ordered it

This morning I drive to Glen Michigan to spend forty five minutes with my therapist, Dr. Curtis Birky. I plan to discuss the gloom and sadness that I have been living through recently. Of course, this morning I feel chipper. That’s the problem. When I’m down I’m not usually scheduled for a therapy session. By the time they roll round, I am more in a reporting mode than a therapeutic one.

I told Eileen last night that today I get to tell my shrink my wife said I’m drinking too much. Although that’s how she phrased it, I think what she meant was that my drinking habits in the light of some recent health thing she read are not good. I told her I was willing to go with her take on it, but that what troubled me was her own feelings of anxiety around my mortality.

At least I wish I had been that succinct and clear. That’s probably some of what we’ll talk about this morning. So of course after a day of mental stall and time off, I skipped my martini and wine last night, doing the dishes one more time before bed instead. Also, removing myself from the playing of the PBS News Hour on the living room computer which I am beginning to despise. Come to think o fit, maybe I’ve despised the News Hour for a while.

I have a semi annual check scheduled next week. I have been keeping an eye on my BP and weight realizing I will have to have them measured in the office next week. They haven’t been too bad. Skipping drinks will probably help those numbers. Ah. Getting old is goofy.

I have been listening to Borges stories on New Yorker podcasts. He is an amazing writer. After listening to Paul Theroux read and discuss his “The Gospel According to Mark” this morning, I got up and found my copy of his A Personal Anthology sitting conveniently by my reading chair.  I immediately read “Death and the Compass” in it (link to pdf).

I have been feeling glum lately. When I consider this logically, it’s no wonder with all that has happened to and around me in the last few weeks. Yesterday Eileen told me she thinks I’m drinking too much. This is very discouraging, but I would be dumb not to heed this. So I had my martini and wine last night after rehearsal. But I have told myself if someone I loved were to express concern about my drinking I would do something about it.

I had thought that would take the form of bad behavior on my part instead of concern for my aging body. So anyway at the least I will be skipping my evening martini more often now.

I continue spending time with Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning. She is a brilliant person and it is rewarding to spend time with her prose and her understanding of history. She systematically considers one leader at a time with a dispassionate understanding of what makes (or made) them tick. Many of them she has spent time with in her role as Secretary of State.

When I got the chapter on Putin, I was inspired to play and listen to Prokofiev’s piano sonatas.

Albright says Putin is primarily a power grabber who is love with all things Russian. And certainly I can usually find things in most societies to admire.  Prokofiev is someone whose compositions I have spent quite a bit of time with. I say this because I read completely through his first piano sonata yesterday and this morning.

Admittedly I am playing under tempo, but my ability to play it accurately testifies to many hours that I have spent in the past with it. This is evidenced not only by recall but also by many meticulous notes I put into the score.

I’m not sure why, but I am definitely attracted to certain Russian composers. I have read Shostakovitch’s autobiography and spent time with his wonderful preludes and fugues for the piano. This morning I listened to his string quartets while cleaning the kitchen. I listened to the news for a while but quickly lost patience with the inanity of what is being reported most of the time (even on NPR). Time for some music.

I have reached Chapter Sixteen in Albright’s book. Chapter fifteen was the first time she began to talk about Trump. Her insights are invaluable in understanding him and the effects of his presidency (not good, of course). She is very specific about the damage he is doing to our country especially from the eyes of someone who knows a bit about the global politics.

Here are some excerpts from this morning’s reading (I highlighted them in my ebook).

IN commenting on Trump’s penchant for speaking well of dictators and tyrants around the real she observes,

“A spoonful of sugar can be as helpful in dealing with foreign diplomats as it is in child psychology, for these are not unrelated fields.”

But of course this is part of the damage he does. She delineates clearly and specifically how leaders around the world respond to Trump by increasing their own violation of human decency going much further than Trump has.

“The real question is: who has the responsibility for human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.”

Concerning putting America first:

“This premise—that every nation can be expected to look out for its own interests–is hardly a revelation. Who would assume anything different? What the assertion ignores is the stake that all countries have in the fate of others.”

Concerning Trump’s penchant for framing the world stage as a cynical Darwinian battle battle between competing interests.

‘Globally, there is hardly an economic, security, technological, environmental, or health-related challenge that any country can better address alone than through a joint effort with  neighbors. It is the duty of diplomats to foster that cooperation.”

She doesn’t think Trump is unintelligent, but “unpredictability is a trait, not a strategy.”

Finally SHE quotes a great quote:

“When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached ‘not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.’ If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned.”

Levi’s list reads like a litany of Trump trouble. Unfortunately it’s not definitive and there is more damage being done daily right now by our blustering leader.

J3.03 Round the Bend – Annotations for Jerusalem by Alan Moore

I also happened to finish Chapter Eight (“Round the Bend” from Moore’s Jerusalem this morning. It is luscious Joycean romp with hilarious appearances of historical and pop culture figures. It ended with Lucia returning from her time travel through madhouses of history hearing a song on the radio which she knows she is changing the words to in her own head. Moore gives several verses of the song. Lucia has just been thinking about “I am the Walrus” but the song parody didn’t seem to be to that.

Finally I googled and found an entire page of annotations for Moore’s book. It’s good to know this is there. It’s also satisfying to me to realize that I made it through this difficult chapter without it. But it was kind of disappointing to learn that Moore was using a song he had written “You Are My Asylum.”

My piano trio people helped me move the harpsichord to a position just before the organ bench in the little inset originally designed for the piano. The change in sound was drastic from where we had been rehearsing. I had been thinking of possibly using organ to support my singers instead of harpsichord. I guess this is still an option. However, the sound is amazing.

Plus the piece we are playing for the prelude is beautiful. It’s the first movement of Bach’s B minor violin sonata, BWV 1014.

My violinist plays the hell out of it. I can’t imagine it not striking listeners with its beauty.

This recording is a bit fast, but I chose it to share because it uses harpsichord. There are many recordings of it on YouTube using piano.

For the rest of this poem, click here.  I read this yesterday morning and was intrigued by the sestina form.

Image by Phil wink – Own work, CC0, Link
from Wikipedia: “The oldest-known sestina is “Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra”, written around 1200 by Arnaut Daniel, a troubadour of Aquitanian origin; he refers to it as “cledisat”, meaning, more or less, “interlock”.  Hence, Daniel is generally considered the form’s inventor,though it has been suggested that he may only have innovated an already existing form.”

 Arnaut Daniel

I think the form is elegant.

The poem is from the current issue of Poetry magazine (April 2018). There is also a section of poems and art by pediatric patients in four Chicago hospitals. It’s worth checking out.

Click here to see the poems and art. You have to use the slide show. Be sure to scroll down to read the poems.

NYTimes: 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Full List

This year Kendrick Lamar won the music prize. First time a rapper has done so.

Dos Cabezos, 1982.

I continue checking out paintings upon which Kevin Young bases his poems. I like them so much, I just put them here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

After the Eucharist on Sunday, several of the choristers remembered that I asked them for help moving the harpsichord in place for the following week. But since I had not heard from my violinist I demurred and we left it where it sits in the back of the choir area to the left of the organ.

Of course, Monday morning around 9 AM my violinist texted me and Dawn the cellist to suggest some rehearsal times this week. I had previously indicated to her that if we couldn’t get together before the Wednesday evening rehearsal we would postpone the trio’s appearance.

So today I am meeting with the trio at 11:30 AM to prepare for the Wednesday rehearsal and Sunday’s performance. This means I need to get my butt over there and tune the harpsichord before we rehearse. I’ll have the choristers help me move the harpsichord at the beginning of rehearsal on Wednesday.

I also edited the cello part restoring Bach’s bass line and emailed her a copy yesterday.

However, I continued rehearsing accompanying this piece on the organ. I may end up using organ instead of harpsichord on it Sunday if I need to reinforce the choir parts. But we will still play our Bach violin sonata movement with the harpsichord.

This is kind of a pain having two plans for a Sunday, but it’s what I need to do. I am wondering about getting some time off soon. Rev Jen and I are supposed to do an eval and discuss adjusting my duties to reflect my waning energy in order to keep me working for her and the church longer.

This morning I am listening to a Bach cantata (BWV 75) after reading about it’s genesis as the first cantata Bach produced in his new gig at Leipzig. It’s interesting because Williams (the author I am reading) suggests that Bach himself possibly wrote some of the texts of his cantatas. BWV 75 is certainly charming. If I ever retire I will not lack the pleasures of music in my life, both playing and listening.

I continue to read To Repel Ghosts: The Remix by Kevin Young. It helps to be able to search for images of the Michel Basquiat paintings the titles of which figure significantly into Young’s work.

Unfortunately, the poem, “Rinso,” is not online to be linked.

Grace Jones is in this poem as is Warhol.

As is Jones’ husband, Atila Altaunbay.

I guess Bansky knows who Basquiat is.

Anyway, yesterday was a snow day at church. I had about eight singers. I also accidentally picked up Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier (dover edition) instead of my Sweelinck (dover edition) confusing the two. I only noticed a few minutes before it was time to perform the Sweelinck postlude. I decided it would be apt to play something from the Bach, so I turned to a prelude in the key of the closing hymn (G major) and played it as the postlude. I think it turned out to be a better choice. I had registered the Sweelinck in a full (Grand Jeux) sound. The Bach seem to lend itself to more gentle flutey sounds better for a snow day Eucharist of 32 people. I played the piece on two manuals with the bass line on a flute 8 and 16.

Eileen said it sounded nice.

We postponed the afternoon recital a week due to the terrible weather. This also hampered my brother’s drive home. But he finally took an alternate route and managed to find good roads.

It’s just over a month since my Mom died. I have been feeling the  the weight of all that has happened since then. But this morning feels calmly hopeful if mixed with the usual Monday exhaustion from the weekend.

Tracy K. Smith: By the Book – The New York Times

This is the poet laureate of the USA. She mentions writers I like like Kevin Young and Danez Smith which makes me think I should check out some of the writers she mentions that I don’t know.

NYTimes: Don’t Call Me a Genius

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer I admire. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, which is sometimes called the “genius grant” which prompts some witty observations about genius. Recommended read.