Reading Shakespeare

I am reading the play, Henry the Eighth. This play is included in the Shakespeare opus but there is much doubt about whether he authored any of it. The edition I am reading traces the story of the play directly to Holinshed’s Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577).

The editors say that it, along with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,  is not only the source for most of the play, but that a great deal of the play is simply Holinshed’s prose put into verse and cite copious amounts of the source inviting reader’s to compare themselves.

I decided to read this play because I was unaware that Shakespeare had included the story of Henry the Eighth in his historical plays. Now I understand why. But I am still enjoying it.

My Friday

I do enjoy chatting with my therapist, Dr. Curtis Birky. I feel a bit sheepish because my conversation with him compares to conversations I have with anyone willing to listen. Again at the end of the session yesterday I said that we continue to solve the problems of the world together and that I felt a bit embarrassed about that. He smiled and said it was fine with him. It seemed like he thought it was appropriate.

We talk a lot about current events. I keep him up to date with  my activities and interactions with people. What’s not to like?

After I returned to Holland, I stopped off at Grace to pick up some music. My violinist and I have decided to learn (relearn actually) a movement of  a Mozart Violin Sonata. I wanted to get the score so I could add it to daily practice. In addition, I printed up Barry Jordan’s organ piece that he wrote for Rhonda I mentioned here recently.

Then I drove to the Methodist church. It was after 11 AM, the time I was told the secretary would close up the building and leave. But there were cars in the parking lot so I walked up to the entrance. The sign on the entrance said that Friday hours ran to noon not 11 AM. I went in and frightened the secretary. She had not been informed that I had permission to practice and was uncomfortable with leaving me in the church alone as she was just about to close up.

I quickly agreed and left. It might be that I will only be able to practice there while the secretary is present. That makes sense.

I walked across the street to Hope Church where I have been practicing. With a little help from one of the  many construction workers who are refurbishing many areas of the church I got past wet cement and construction zones to the organ.

I have as yet to respond to the Roman Catholic dude who asked for my “schedule” for practicing so he could check the church calendar. I’m not sure what to tell him since I have had the luxury of pretty much practicing when i want and haven’t developed much of a pattern other than doing it daily as much as possible. I need to email him today. I am wondering if I will be able to find a place to practice on Saturdays since most churches are locked up on that day. We’ll see.

Yesterday was another long day for me. But it was a good day. I had a two hour lunch with my friend Nick Palmer. We haven’t seen that much of each other recently. I  fell off the Roman Catholic radar a while back when I quite working for that denomination. The last time I talked to Nick was a few years ago. He was just coming out of the closet. Since that time he has served as the Cathedral musician in Grand Rapids, divorced his wife, fell in love and married his new love a couple of years ago. And he has been active musically in Western Michigan. He has accepted a position at St. John’s Episcopal church in Grand Haven. He told me that since coming to this gig, he had the best December he has had in years last year. He definitely has looked much happier when I have bumped into him occasionally. And he looked happy yesterday.

I hope I wasn’t too incoherent in our conversation. We did talk quite a bit of shop and in our case this covers not only church music but composition and other topics.

I have always enjoyed chatting with this man. He is intelligent, perceptive, well read and a damn good musician and composer. What’s not to like?

He said he would have to have Eileen and I over a meal with him and his husband. He said he doesn’t talk that much to his husband about his colleagues. I suggested that he might want to tell him about me before inviting me. But it would certainly be fun for us to have more time together.

I barely made my afternoon trio rehearsal. It begins with me and the violinist.

Yesterday we decided to work on a certain Mozart sonata movement with the idea we would perform it sometime in a recital after we get the new organ. Then the cellist showed up.

It turned out that my violinist forgot to bring her music for my trio. So that slowed us down a bit. But after procuring another copy for her we rehearsed. I think we are going to give a credible reading of it Sunday. I showed this piece to Nick. We talked about tempo and he said that composers often take their own music too fast and that we would probably be happier with a slower tempo. I passed this on to my players. This piece is obviously a bit easier slower. My goal is to give a decent performance of it Sunday. We get two tries because I have it schedule for both the prelude and the postlude. It should be fun.

This morning I’m meeting with my shrink. My mom’s car is in the shop. Eileen’s mini is off the road for the winter. This means I will need to take my Subaru which keeps on running but is not reliable due to a leaky head gasket. I’m thinking of taking back roads so as to not push it too hard.

Beware hate speech, says Auschwitz Holocaust survivor – BBC News

Some historical reminders.

‘Swimming In A Trance-Like State’: Paul Simon On Philip Glass : Deceptive Cadence : NPR

Glass’s 80th is coming up. NPR is asking some people to write about him. Paul Simon. Cool.

Book review: Taibbi releases dispatches from campaign trail | Arts | fredericksburg.com

Bookmarked review to remember to put this on my list to read.

anxious jupe

After my meeting with my boss yesterday during which we discussed personalities at church and in the choir and their recent behavior, I approached last night’s rehearsal with more anxiety than usual. I wondered if people would act out and how I would handle it. But of course, I was confounded and we had a spectacularly good rehearsal. We are learning some pretty difficult choral music and it’s coming together. I and the group enjoyed this. Go figure.

finding more places to practice

After being rebuffed at Hope College but not Hope Church about practicing I emailed a couple of local church musicians asking about practicing at their church. I have already heard back from both of them. The Roman Catholic dude at St. Francis replied: “Sure… shoot me your times and I’ll check the calendar.” A bit different than the prof, eh? The  Methodist musician said she would talk to her staff about it. Cool.

One of the ironies for me is the apparent indifference of the music department at the college for supporting the arts outside of their halls. I think it’s weird. Sometimes I think I’m a bit thin skinned about local musicians/profs attitude toward my work and abilities. This is almost certainly true, that I am that way. But despite my sensitivity, it may still be true that there is a certain lack of vision in this area.

Free Sheet Music

I listened to Rhonda play some pieces she’s working on yesterday. One of them was a piece entitled “Letters from Lambarene” by Barry Jordan and is dedicated to her.

I quite liked it. I have met Barry. Rhonda invited me to have lunch with him when he was visiting her. He lives in Germany. Here’s a link to his composition page. This piece is there in a pdf.

The piece is based on interpretations of “letters” of Albert Schweitzer. As Barry points out, these are not really letters but reports written to people who were supporting his work in Lambarene.

Pantsuit Politics

 This is a podcast I have been listening to. It is the work of Sarah Steward Holland and Beth Silvers. Holland’s perspective is from the left, Silvers from the right. Their aim is nuance not screaming. I like the concept.

Success

Eileen and I managed to purchase new clothes for me yesterday. We went to a couple of shops. I purchased a new suit, 2 new white shirts, 2 new dress shirts that are not white, and underwear. Fascinating, eh? I mention this success because of my lack of success in yesterday’s secondary endeavor.

Fail

I walked to the music building of Hope College. When I got there, I wandered around trying to get the lay of the land. When I asked a student where the organ practice rooms were, she pointed me to Hew’s office. I peered through the window in his door and saw him sitting at a harpsichord with two students nearby. Though they weren’t doing very much besides chatting I decided not to bother them. Instead i walked around and explored. I walked past all the offices and rooms on both floors of this wing of the building, If this is all there is of the new music building, it seems a bit smaller to me than what they had before. Maybe there’s a north wing that I missed entirely.

i found no organ practice rooms. There was a hall of practice rooms only accessible with an i.d. and a code number. Presumably it housed them.

I went back to Hew’s office and decided to wait until he was between lessons and ask him about practicing at Hope.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes, the two students came out of Hew’s studio. I knocked on the door, then opened it to call to Hew. He was not a happy camper. He told me he was very busy and was sitting at his computer. I asked him about the possibility of finding an idle organ to practice on at Hope. He immediately said that they only had one practice organ and it would not be possible.

I told him I was without an organ temporarily due to the process of putting in our new organ. He did say that he was excited about that. I reassured him that I was hoping to connect with him and his department with our new instrument. I asked him about getting time on the harpsichord since my harpsichord is also defunct. He said he was too busy to discuss that and we could talk about it another time.

Fail.

Disappointing but not too surprising. Only a little daunted I then walked to Hope Church. I knew that the third organist practicing there had mentioned to Rhonda that she wanted to practice on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I also thought it was worth the walk to make sure she was using the organ. She wasn’t. I did. Bach consoled me.

Gay Greeks

At the end of the first act of Aristophanes’s “The Clouds,” there is a humorous battle between two characters. These two characters embody wrong argument and right argument and are called Wrong and Right.  Right of course is a pompous ass, Wrong much more shrewd.

When Right points out in the course of their argument that the penalty for unfaithfulness is literally reaming out a man’s asshole with a carrot, Wrong asks, what’s the big deal? Weren’t all the poets gay? Weren’t all the politicians? Wasn’t the audience made up of mostly gay men? All of which Right is forced to admit. Most ironically of all Right when vanquished jumps into the arms of some of the audience pointed out as gay implying that he himself is gay.

I found this intriguing in Alan H. Sommerstein’s 1972 translation. He used the word “gay.” The whole translation is obviously an attempt (successful in my view) to update the play.

A quick perusal of my Greek text of the play and its edition confirms my understanding that homosexuality was seen more as a part of sexuality than as a totally exclusive sexual stance (more the way it is seen today).

From K. J. Dover’s introduction to the Greek edition: “It was universally assumed [in Aristophanes time] that the coexistence of heterosexual and homosexual desire in the same person was natural and sound.”

Eileen has agreed to help me pick out some new clothes. I desperately need white shirts for work. The ones I have are getting too worn. I will look at suits as well probably. It helps to have Eileen along on these trips. Both of us are not excited about clothes shopping. I also need new shoes but that will have to wait.

After lunch I am planning to take my organ music and shoes and force myself to go to the new Music building at Hope and see about practicing.

Yesterday I put in a couple of hours at Rhonda’s church. Her instrument is a three manual instrument which is the basic organ for a great deal of organ literature. I am grateful to Ray Ferguson for teaching me how to adapt literature to smaller and/or inferior instruments. But working on a three manual was helpful in understanding some of the music I am learning more clearly.

There is another organist besides Rhonda who practices at her church. She practices on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I would like to have at least two places to go and practice. it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to accommodate three organists for some practice at Rhonda’s church.

Rhonda and I will probably get together tomorrow for some chat and possibly for me to listen to some of the pieces she is working on. Organists do this sort of thing. it is very helpful to have a pair of organists’ ears out in the room where you are performing. It is also flattering that Rhonda continues to connect with me despite my local outsider status.

It is this status that makes me dread going to Hope’s new Music building.

But I am determine to leave no stone unturned in terms of finding instruments to practice on while I have no organ at my church.

That’s all I have time for this morning.

I think part of suffering from the doldrums yesterday afternoon was the fact that I had to return to church in the evening for an annual meeting. I also have a funeral today. I’m still feeling a bit overwhelmed.

I decided to title my piano trio: “Stirred Hearts and Souls.” I took the phrase from the hymn, “Blessed Jesus at thy word.” I use the melody from this hymn in the B section of the piece. We are singing it next Sunday and I’m planning at this point to perform the piano twice: once for the prelude and once for the postlude.

I admit that I plopped the hymn tune into the trio after basically composing the A section which is repeated after the B the section. I deliberately looked at the hymns scheduled for the Sunday I wanted to perform the piece and chose the tune from one of the hymns. So it’s not related motivicly, but I still think it works nicely.

It looks like I will probably be able to practice organ today at Rhonda’s church. I still plan to approach the teacher at Hope College, but today is already full and Rhonda and I have been texting back forth about this possibility.

Review: Jeremy Denk and His Piano Take a 600-Year Tour – The New York Times

 Six and a half centuries of music in two hours

 Music review: Pianist Jeremy Denk – Richmond Times-Dispatch: Music

This are three reviews of what sounds like the same concert given three different times. I am a fan of Mr. Denk.

And I like creative programming. I hope to do some of this myself soon at my church. I especially like the breadth of his program and that he included a Philip Glass etude. I continue to practice and learn these.

Sunday afternoons are usually not high points for me. But today is a bit lower than usual. The whole Christian thing pales a bit for me sometimes. Usually I’m more tolerant of the whole silly religious thing. Friedman has a theory that if you are being sabotaged it is evidence of effective leadership. I had some sabotage today, but nothing worth complaining about. instead, I am just feeling a usual distance from all things Christian.

Having said that, church went very well again today. The piano trio played the prelude and postlude and though Eileen thought the music was a bit hokey (it was), I was glad to do them even if both movements had bit of a Lawrence  Welk ending with pizz strings.

The strings added immeasurably to today’s anthem which was originally for organ and choir. I think it was as hokey as the prelude and postlude, but still very effective. In fact these two composers, Frank Bridge and W. K. Stanton probably knew each other. Bridge’s claim to fame is that he was Benjamin Britten’s teacher.

Holland High School finally got around to asking me to accompany Solo and Ensemble players this year. I had already talked to Rhonda about this, since I am pulling back from some of these extra things I do. I recommended her to them. Hopefully that will work out.

I walked over to church yesterday. What I have been expecting to happen finally took place: the organ was no longer usable because they have begun work on the back of the church.

This means I will have to get up off my sorry lazy ass and find other places to practice this week.

Rev Jen stood in front of the assembly today at church holding a pipe claiming to have evidence that they have finally begun the work. Clever.

Lying from the git go.

I did manage to get some relaxing in yesterday. Eileen and I didn’t watch the inauguration. I read President Trump’s speech. I am still finding him unpredictable. His rhetoric is simplistic and vague. I think I’ll know more as he begins to govern more.

One thing I have been realizing is the paltry, distorted view that so many people seem to have of events and information. Right now I have heard people for and against President Trump express themselves all mostly completely by statements about an envisioned “other.” On the right, the liberals, on the left, “how could people vote for such a man?”

More than ever, I think we need to take responsibility for our selves and our actions. Also, it would be helpful to diminish our reliance on the superficial cartoon-like defining of each other by our politics.

But I can see that many people are genuinely upset. Reading Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land is helpful to a point.

Yesterday I ran into a young man recently elected to the Michigan House of Representatives, Jim Lilly. I have known him since he was a child singing in my children’s choir at Our Lady of the Lake.  Needless to say, since he got elected in my conservative little town, he is a Republican. I shook his hand and congratulated him on getting elected.

He smiled and gracefully acknowledged my congratulations. “Now the work begins!” He said.

I have no idea what that means. I have noticed a nod to the rhetoric of “bi-partisanship” coming out of our State Capital but I don’t see how this can last in the present environment.

I see it as a time to wait and see.

And stay as informed as I can.

BOOK TALK

I finished reading the small collections of poems, Notes on the Assemblage, by Juan Felipe Herrera (Poet Laureate of the USA) this morning.  I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with it. There is a good line here and there, but I found a lot of it a weird mixture of activist politics and wide ranging erudite allusions.

I’ve been reading Paul Beatty’s weird novel, The Sellout. I’m about a fourth of the way into it. It mixes pop culture with an odd African American view of life and I do mean odd. At first I thought it was taking forever to get started. From the inside jacket description: “Born in the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens, on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to fate of lower-middle-class Californians, ‘ I’d die in the same bedroom I grew up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since the ’68 quake.” Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologists, he spent his childhood as a subject in racially charged psychological studies.”

Sarah Silverman writes a blurb on the back cover: “The Sellout is brilliant. Amazing. Like a demented angel wrote it.”

I don’t plan to stop reading it yet. But it’s not a book I could recommend at this point.

I’m hoping today will be more of a day off than I have had this week.

Yesterday culminated in a rehearsal with my piano trio for Sunday. We also read my new trio. It was fun and interesting to hear it played with real instruments. I think the players are up for a public performance a week from Sunday. I need to edit the score some more to reflect what I learned yesterday. After that I will post the score in my “free mostly original sheet music” section here.

So today is Donald Trump’s inauguration. I read some more in Strangers in Their Own Land by Hochschild. It’s hard not to think that the misinformation in Trump’s campaign was critical to his election. I note over and over again that people who  support him cite odd reasons peppered with false facts about  health care, immigration, poverty, you name it.

It does seem difficult to me to stay informed if you rely on TV and an uncritical use of the internet.

From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece – The New York Times

I just went and looked up this article that I read yesterday. I find it appalling that there is just economic incentive for fraud to be committed in this way.

It completely demeans the idea of educating the people and they will govern themselves.

Then there’s this tempest in a teapot.

Trump’s inauguration plans too ‘traditionally American’ to include Kanye West – LA Times

I read an article about this this morning. I love American music and the eclecticism it represents in my mind. However, the discussions are on a par with fake news as far as I’m concerned. No context and of course no mention of classical music that I have found so far. NPR probably has the best thing I could find on the music at today’s Inauguration.

This has been an intense week for me so far. The burst of composition energy on Monday was followed by hours with Finale. Yesterday i was surprised at how much time and energy it took to prepare a piano version of Sunday’s anthem. I also pulled out some lines in the original composition for the violin and cello to play. I was working on all this up until about  an hour before the evening rehearsal at 7 PM. I had intended to move on to editing and preparing a better version of the Trio I wrote on Monday but that didn’t happen.  That’s this morning’s project. So far I’ve resisted it. I did do Greek and a little poetry, but I am missing my quiet morning time and think I will do a bit more reading before breakfast and then work on editing the Trio after breakfast.

My friend Nick Palmer reached out to me about his new Episcopalian gig. I think we’re going to meet up next week. That will be a delight.

I am going to stop and get back to morning relaxing.

Fox News was the dominant news source in the 2016 election, Pew survey finds.

This article helps me understand how rare it is for people to seek their news outside of TV sources. No wonder this country is crazy. None of these cited are ones that I use. I watch Newshour with Eileen but I think it’s consistently terrible. I look at Googles News regularly which leads me to many other sources. Looking at what sources are doing what stories is very helpful. And then there’s Real Clear Politics. It gives nice overviews of current discussions by simply perusing headlines again noting the sources.

I will need to spend another day working with Finale today. I didn’t finish the piano accompaniment version of Sunday’s anthem yet. And I need to make another pass at the Trio I am composing. I sent off parts to the players yesterday, printed up the piano part and rehearsed it. I found a couple of errors in the piano part, but more importantly I think I need to change all the horizontal accents to tenuto signs. I’m hearing the piece more legato and even a bit quicker than at first.

At any rate, here’s a link to a pdf of the current draft: working.draft.piano.trio.2017. I promised my friend Rhonda I would put it up in case she wanted to look at it. And here’s the finale mp3 again just for the heck of it.

I don’t think these two are precisely matched, but they are close.

Eileen and I actually went out to see a movie yesterday. She has mentioned that she thinks we (I) need to get out more so I suggested we go see “Hidden Figures.” It’s a weird feel good movie about the historical mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.

I would dearly love to know what these real people thought of this movie. I’m tempted to read the book this  movie was based on to find out if the movie glossed over the struggles of these individuals the way I suspect they did or if the book does this also turning it into a story about their amazing achievement without arousing the viewer’s ire by showing the obstacles more clearly. Jes sayin.

I think I spent six hours or more composing yesterday. It’s the activity I enjoy the most. It leaves me relaxed and alert. Today I need to spend some more time with Finale. The anthem scheduled for this Sunday, “Christ is the world’s true light,” comes from the Oxford Easy Anthem Book and was composed by Stanton. I put it down a key for my choir. It is written for choir and organ and that is how we have performed it in the past.

I was taught how to conduct a choir and play organ simultaneously by my beloved undergrad teacher, Ray Ferguson. Apparently he was taught this technique when he was on his Fulbright in Germany by Helmut Walcha. It involves thoroughly preparing both the accompaniment and the conducting, deciding how to reduce some sections to free up the conducting hand.

I noticed last Wednesday that playing the accompaniment to this Sunday’s anthem on the piano from the organ score and attempting to cue in the choir at the same time was challenging. I decided I should return to the arrangement in Finale and make a specifically piano reduction of Stanton’s organ part. That’s the project for today.

I had to dash off yesterday’s blog in order to have time to go practice organ. I left out a bunch of links. I’m including those in today’s links.

On the Media Podcast | WNYC

On The Media has offered a five part podcast on poverty. I recommend it. I’m half way through the second installment. This episdoe has a good history of welfare in it. Most of the history I recognize from having lived through it (not the Civil War or even the President Johnson’s War on Poverty).

If you click on the link above, it will take you to the On The Media Podcast page.

Here’s Busted #2: “Who Deserves to be Poor?”

 5 Hidden Features Of Google Chrome : TECH : Tech Times

One has to be careful with these. I did however install the audio mute plugin (or whatever it is). Ironically the first tab I used it on was this Tech Times article which has an annoying little piece of music it plays in the background.

Last night I awoke at midnight and heard the beginnings of a trio piece in my head. Around 5 AM, I got up, took my BP, weighed, fed the cat, and began writing a little piece for my piano trio. This is what I heard in the night”

I quickly decided that the open strings on the violin ostinato wasn’t quite the ticket. So I began revising and making up more of the piece.

Usually I don’t talk about composing when I’m in the middle of a project. It seems to short circuit it sometimes. But by this afternoon I had an entire 148 measure draft done.

I would like my trio to learn this and play it for the prelude and postlude a week from this Sunday. I’m not sure we can learn it that quickly. When I got to the middle of the piece, I checked on the hymns we are singing that day looking for melody for the middle.

We are singing “Blessed Jesus at thy word” as the Sequence Hymn that Sunday.  I decided to loosely base the middle section on this melody.  I think it works.

I’m going to let it sit until tomorrow. Then I might change a harmony, but it’s mostly done I think. Then I’ll email parts to my trio and print out my piano part and start practicing it. If you’re curious, here’s my Finale program singing the first draft in VST (Virtual Studio Technology).

Wow. Comments from three beloved family members yesterday, Sarah, Mark and Elizabeth. Cool.

I finished Ackroyd’s little book on Ezra Pound yesterday. I don’t think I’ve actually read a bio of Pound. It’s a sad story in some ways, but I still find him inspirational despite his malignant anti-Semiticism (which he weirdly always insisted was abstract not personal since he had many Jewish friends and colleagues).

Ackroyd put a lot of Pounds work in perspective for me. I’ll keep plugging away at the Cantos now but also some of his other work as well.

Margaret Atwood is a living writer I greatly admire.

This is the first volume of her first comic (I think comic is probably the most accurate description of this genre). It’s fun. She peppers her story with little factoids about cats. I look forward to reading the second volume

Recently on Basefuck there was an interesting conversation that I sort of lurked through. Gregory Cowell, a Grand Rapids musician, put up a quote from Peter Williams which he interpreted to be a comment on Bach tempo.

Peter Williams was an influential Bach scholar. I regularly return his works for information. He died last year. Here’s the quote Cowell put up:

“The steadier tempo was traditional in Germany, the ‘standard 4/4 found in so much music of the previous generations, when only exceptionally is the crotchet [quarter note] fast. Today, as they constantly search for excitement, many historically informed performers approach the ‘Brandenburgs’ and solo concertos at a speed not at all clearly appropriate to 1715.”

 There were many many responses to this including one from the local organ prof, Huw Lewis. I didn’t comment but read most of the comments.

Cowell did not source his quote. I remember hearing Huw Lewis comment in an AGO meeting a few years back that Peter Williams had advocated taking Bach at a much slower tempo than most people do. Lewis said he thought Williams was right but that he lacked the courage to change his tempos or something like that.

I decided the quote came from J.S. Bach: A Life in Music by Williams published in 2007 and made a note to check the book out sometime. Yesterday I was reading in Williams book on Bach’s organ music and noticed that the 2007 biography of Bach was sitting on my shelf.

I took it down, found the quote and decided to read the book. It seems to be a book length fleshing out of the famous obit of Bach written in part by his son CPE.

A Remarkable Event in El Salvador: A Day Without Murder – The New York Times

When people want to leave El Salvador (as apparently about 40% of the population does) they have some strong reasons.

A Rampage in Florida Shines a Light on Alaska – The New York Times

Some interesting history and information about mental health treatment in different states.

Justices Will Hear Challenges to Mandatory Employee Arbitration – The New York Times

Undoubtedly the corporate friend court will rule against the employees.

Chinese State Media Denounce Rex Tillerson’s Call to Block Island Access – The New York Times

It seems to me that part of what this article reveals is that world wide leaders can see through Trump’s rhetoric and bluster. Trick stuff.

Podcasts from the National Constitution Center – National Constitution Center

This is a bit arcane but I listened to most of the recent podcast. Distinguished scholars talk about how our government works.

This morning my blog is basically notes I have taken on this week’s episode of On The Media.

When you repeat Trump, you help Trump

George Lakoff has made some very important observations about how framing and thinking work. In this week’s episode, he specifically talks about how to analyze and respond to Trump tweets.

Here’s the list I made:

Taxonomy of Trump Tweets

1. pre-emptive framing
2. diversion tweet
3. trial balloon
4. deflection
5. salient exemplar

You can just listen to his comments for yourself at the link above, but I’ll flesh these out a bit here.

1. pre-emptive framing

This is the basic Lakoff insight. “Don’t think of an elephant.”

When Trump refused an answer from the CNN reporter this week and called CNN fake news, this was an example of pre-emptive framing. inextricably linked to this action was the fact that Trump treated Brietbart as real news and had brought his staff with him to actually cheer and clap in the news conference. Apparently this is similar to how Putin handles news conferences in Russia but more on that later.

When you detect framing the question to ask yourself is “What is being avoided?” “What is the actual content?”

2. Diversion Tweet

Changing the subject. Trump’s tweets on Meryl Streep and Hamilton are given as examples. Instead of talking about and reporting on controversies about Trump, news agencies jump in and talk about Streep and Hamilton, much more juicy and content free.

2. Trial balloon

Throw something out in a tweet like a reference to “nukes” to judge where the issue is on people’s radar so that you know how to frame it in the future.

3.  Deflection

A bit like “changing the subject” but much more malicious: Attack the  messenger. This is a favorite of our president elect. The trick Lakoff says is “Keep going back to the substance.”

4. salient exemplar

An “exemplar” is one example, say insisting that when a foreign government rents one night in a Trump motel it does not constitute a “emollient” or gift forbidden by the Constitution.

Saying this is “salient” means that this example represents the entire idea of allowing foreign governments to rent your hotel rooms so that if a government rents rooms for a month it also does not constitute an “emollient” when in face it would.

I like this one a lot because it is rooted in grammar. In grammar there is such a thing as “direct causation.” Lakoff says that languages all over the world have this in their grammar. It is a necessary and clear part of how communication works. But it differs from

systemic causation

which creates a general principle so that the initial direct causation is not just a particular instance or FRAME but is presented as how it functions in a system.

Wow.

Ned Resikoff and Managed Democracy

I can see that I’m being verbose this morning and don’t want to write another 1000 words describing the next two important parts of this week’s On The Media, so here are a couple links that elucidate Resikoff’s comments.

Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy.

This is basically the content of what Resikoff talks about in the program.

Here are a couple other links.

Vladislav Surkov – Wikipedia

Resikoff mentions the Russian  Surkov’s ideas of managed democracy in the context of incoherent presentations of “truth” whereby eventually what is important is to preserve the right to self expression and to dilute any purchase on actual facts and truth.

in October of last year, the BBC did a documentary called “Hypernormalization” about how governments are capitulating to a “fake” reality. The title comes from a book by Surkov: Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. On Nov 2 of last year, this documentary was put up on YouTube. Here’s a link. I’m pretty sure my daughter Sarah recommended this documentary a while back but I didn’t get to it. Now I probably will.

Hope in the Dark

Again in the interest of brevity, I am mostly putting up links about this interview with the author, Rebecca Solnit.

Her book was offered free as an ebook right after the election. it’s still available for $5.99 at this link or $8.26 at Amazon.

Solnit’s basic insight is that the future is unknowable or “dark.” She attributes this usage to Virgina Woolf writing at another terrible time of history that the future was “inscrutable not terrible.” Another book for Jupe to read.

‘We Have to Resist’: A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit : Longreads

I’m blogging in the afternoon again. This morning I had to go to see my shrink. He is a good guy and I enjoy chatting with him, but it feels an awful lot like just bullshitting with a friend. If I’m not working on something in myself I guess it still provides a little relief to Eileen from hearing me talk all the time (not that she complains). Birky (my shrink) says sometimes you just need to talk. He has said that the last two meetings when I have expressed sheepishness about talking on and on about stuff that interests me but is not necessarily about working with my own head.

Today I taught him how a clavichord works, about the origin of harmony in the history of Western Civilization, how Socrates is only mentioned by Aristophanes and Plato (I think that’s true), and a bunch of other stuff which sounds an awful lot like how I have chatted with people for much of my life.

I just googled it and Aristotle and Xenophon also mention Socrates, the latter being a student of his. How bout that?

I have been able to practice organ every day this week at Grace church. I went there immediately after my appointment with Birky and still nobody around and nothing moved in the church area. It’s okay with me because I don’t have to bother people about letting me practice on their organs. I should say that I’m mostly dreading talking to the famous Huw Lewis and that Rhonda (Hi Rhonda) has made it clear that she will arrange for me to practice at Hope Church.,

I had good rehearsals with my piano trio people yesterday. We decided to play some Frank Bridges for church a week Sunday. It’s pleasant, light music and we own the score. What the heck.

You can a taste of the  music if you like from this video. We decided to play the second and third movement. We only need two movements.

Ryan Gosling’s piano playing skills – Susan Tomes

I follow this woman’s blog.  She is a British dyed in the wool classical type, but I enjoy here comments. This is a good one about learning music by ear and why it’s important to be able to read music and have good solid technique.

backing up and redoing some Greek

Sigh. A few days ago, I decided I needed to back up a chapter in ,my Greek studies. The array of verb tenses I am supposed to know at the end of the sixth chapter is daunting. I need to spend more time drilling them (i.e. copying them over and over). I am also planning on re-translating all four sections of Chapter five. In the course of doing this I plan to carefully identify and describe the verbs.

The text is very systematic. The learner not so much. At the end of chapter 6 I figured out exactly how they presented the new tenses:

Chapter 5 sections A and B introduce Imperfect tense  in both active and middle voice. Chapter 5 sections C and D introduce future tense in both voices.
Chapter 6 sections A and B introduce  the first aorist tense (aorist means simple past tense) in both voices.
Chapter 6 sections C and D introduce the second or “strong” aorist tense in both voices.

This is eight different patterns of verb conjugation. Oy veh!

I think I can master them with some thorough (slow) review and study. But good grief!

list of organ music I’m working on

Similarly, I’m lining up some organ pieces to learn during this period of not performing organ music in public. So far, I have been working on the following

Vivace from Bach Trio Sonata in G major BWV 530
The Prelude from the Bach C major Prelude and Fugue (the 9/8) BWV 547
“What a Friend We Have In Jesus” by William Bolcolm
“The Primitives” from Five Dances for Organ by Calvin Hampton
Allegro (mov 1) from the Fifth Organ Symphony  by Widor

No workers have shown up at church yet so i have had unfettered access to the old organ. This will undoubtedly change soon.

This book keeps popping up on my radar. My boss, Rev Jen, has done some reading in it. Apparently it talks about the Devos money as well as the Koch. After I finish Strangers in Their Own Land by Hochschild, it will probably be my next political read.

Reading Peter Ackroyd’s little book on Ezra Pound has sent me back to looking at poems I have loved all my life and finding new ones. Pound has a reputation as an insane traitor to the USA  who embraced Mussolini’s Fascism and supported Hitler. .

He also was instrumental in promoting the talents and work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, both writers I treasure.

I have temporarily interrupted my reading of his Cantos to read Ackroyd. He describes Pound’s publication of Cathay.

It purports to be a “translation” of Chinese poets. This aspect of Pound’s work has always baffled me, since it’s not clear that he had mastery of the Chinese language. Ackroyd helped me by pointing out that Cathay “represents (a) firmness of image and hardness of outline” it “achieves a quite new thing in English poetry. Its eloquence comes from the clarity of its statements… it pins down precisely, with a kind of brutal lyricism, the nature of anxiety, loss and regret…. description rather than association…. direct images rather than analogy.”

Published in 1915 Cathay was actually an “imagist” work which “a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry” (Wikipedia)

This articulated something I have vaguely felt about some of Pound’s poems I love. Poems like

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

by Rihaku

Asian-American Group The Slants Head to Supreme Court – Rolling Stone

Rocking in the Supreme Court.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, Plays Hardball With Her Wealth – The New York Times

Yikes. Did you know there was Devos money supporting Citizen United? Good grief.

The Hazards Justices Face by Owning Individual Stocks – The New York Times

An inside look at recusing and divesting in the Judicial system.

Memphis Bookstore Not Likely to Be Saved, Says Owner

 Independent Booksellers End Year on High Note

A couple articles from Publishers Weekly. I can’t help but stay interested in bookselling even if at an extreme distance.

The secretary from the Hope College Dance Department emailed me yesterday. She offered me a sub gig for one of the accompanists beginning in late January. In the email, she told me they  were now paying accompanists $50 an hour.

I had to laugh. Last summer I was locked out of online resources at Hope. When I emailed this same secretary and asked why, she replied that only employees have access to them.

For the last few years, I have questioned the poor pay that dance accompanists received at Hope. They were slow to respond to my concerns. After a while I only took gigs from them if they paid me $50 an hour.

It has been a relief not to have the dance accompaniment on my schedule. And schedule is the reason I quit. They would only offer me days that I asked not to be scheduled on, specifically Monday morning.

Also one teacher that I had worked with for a few years reproached me for not thinking that the pay was sufficient. I distinctly remember her saying that $100 for a week’s work was quite a bit of money in her household. This was, of course, disingenuous but no matter.

I emailed the secretary back yesterday that I thought I was no longer on their payroll. I reminded her of our emails in the summer. And that I was far too busy to add dance classes to my schedule. I also told her I was glad to hear they were now paying $50 an hour.

Since no one from the department has told me about this, I have to wonder how much I had to do with the pay raise.  Sheesh.

special exits by joyce farmer

I finished reading Special Exits by Joyce Farmer. This is a sad, lovely, brutal little book. Not for people who think the elderly are gross.

I especially liked the dying father character, Lars.

His attitude towards his life is admirable. Towards the end of the book, I began to realize how good humored he really was in the face of enormous difficulty.

The book is basically the story of two elderly people living alone and coping (or not) with the disastrous infirmities of aging. Also about Lars’s daughter and her relationship with her father and step mother.  I have to agree with R. Crumb’s blurb that it is “one of the best long narrative graphic comics I’ve ever read…. right up there with Maus.”

marimba and stuff now out of the church

Yesterday afternoon, Eileen helped me move everything out of the choir area in the church. Despite both of us being tired, it wasn’t too bad. It definitely helped to have Eileen there. So now the marimba, a podium, another shelf, and percussion instruments are living in the choir room. I will need to straighten in there soon.

I need to get off my butt and make sure I can find places to practice organ soon. I left a stack of music in a pew near the organ at church, but I’m not too optimistic about being able to do much more practicing there.

what are you doing jan 20th?

because my former teacher, Craig Cramer, will be celebrating the installation of a ginormic pipe organ at Notre Dame.

jupe needs time off

Despite the fact that I need to do some work around changing next Sunday’s bulletin, I’m planning to attempt to do some relaxing today. I am physically and mentally exhausted this morning. Not surprising. I tangled with Greek verbs this morning and they basically won. Ah, tomorrow is another day.

Eileen got up early, had a banana, played boggle with me, then left to go exercise at Evergreen. Now is the time for me to quit blogging and do some reading and practicing piano and electric harpsichord.

What the Chief Justice Should Have Said – The New York Times

Linda Greenhouse is excellent. I try not to miss any column she writes.

Japan Recalls Ambassador to South Korea to Protest ‘Comfort Woman’ Statue 

Art in the news.