It’s been a busy morning for me already. Mom agreed to phone me before 8:30 AM if she would like to join me for breakfast. While waiting for her to call, I gathered all the cash in the house for a Farmers Market trip. I found $24 and decided I would zip over and check for basil. I figured if Mom called she would leave a message on the machine. I also kind of figured she wouldn’t call.

Miraculously found basil at the market. Spent all my money on it with the idea that I will make pesto today. I am freezing this ahead for my niece’s upcoming wedding. Since we are watching our pennies right now I figure I will  save a bit of it for Eileen and me to have this evening (instead of going out to eat as we have been…. ahem). Also am thinking seriously of making a blueberry pie.

Returned home and was unsurprised to see no message light from Mary. Considered going over to the church to pick a postlude for Sunday. Yesterday I decided to play a Shostakovich piano prelude and fugue for the prelude. I am planning to do  the D major from his Opus 87. (link to mp3 of this piece)The prelude is a charming chordal little thing and the fugue is a 20th c. rendition of the North German “knocking fugue.” That is, its theme utilizes repeated notes. It also is pretty charming. Not sure I can play it as fast as the recording by Sunday. It’s marked to MM=138  (that’s 138 quarter notes per minute). But still I think I can do a credible job.

Shostakovich. Didn't this guy take great pictures?

I looked over the hymns for Sunday and immediately saw how to write an interesting (interesting?  anyway interesting to me…) bulletin music note for this Sunday. (subtitled “Minnesota to Zimbabwe” because the opening hymn is the Lutheran  ”Earth and All Stars” and the closing hymn “If you believe and I believe” sounds goofy, but has its worth restored a bit by the fact that the tune was appropriated by Zimbabwe singers from the British colonizers and given anti-colonial words (”The Holy Spirit must come down and set God’s people free….”) Also it is on record as being sung by imprisoned anti-apartheid freedom fighters in South African jails.

So that one practically wrote itself.

Earlier I started recording my reading notes on Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22. I finished reading it last night. I enjoyed it tremendously. I was explaining him to my mother by saying to her that he pissed off the liberals with his pro-war stances on Bosnia and Iraq and pissed off the conservatives by his popularizing of atheism. Or as he himself said, he offends both absolutists and relativists. My kind of guy. Plus he is highly literate and can turn one hell of a phrase. I enjoyed his memoir immensely and have a bunch of notes on it.

Christopher Hitchens

I have been systematically reading straight though the poems of Dylan Thomas sort of aping my approach to lengthy musical works like the collected sonatas of C.P.E. Bach and Haydn.

I tell myself if I do this I will not have missed any poems by Thomas before I die.

Yesterday I was working on the first part of his poem, “When, like a running grave.” (link to poem)

Usually I am first attracted to surface images and the way he uses words: “Love in her gear is slowly through the house,/Up naked stairs….” Then I might notice his very eccentric use of rhymes and more likely near rhymes. “Stairs” occurs in the middle of the quoted line (line 4), but rhymes with “scythe of hairs,” which ends the second line in the poem.

After examining the rhyme scheme in the first five lines (quintain? as opposed to quatrain…), I notce that he changes the rhyme scheme in the subsequent stanzas. Then I notice that the entire poem is divided up into ten sections of five lines each making the entire poem a neat fifty lines.

The first 25 lines are one sentence. They are followed by an 8 word sentence: “Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.”

I found out much more about the first half of this poem, but I can feel your eyes lidding over as I write….. if you even have read this far…

Anyway, I mention all this because I noticed myself dragging my poor wife to the piano to explain to her some structural ideas that Shostakovich uses in one of his preludes in his opus 87 which is made up of 24 preludes and fugues.

No. 12 is in G# minor and is a chaconne or maybe more properly a passacaglia… These two forms are very similiar and involve a repeated pattern over which the composer develops musical ideas.

In this case, Shostakovich uses a 12 measure pattern:

Since it is in 3 and has a lumbering bass that repeats, I think of it more easily as a passacaglia (from the Spanish, passar to walk and calle street) than the elegant Chaconne which I think of as a bit more dance like. Both are slow. When I look up Chaconne I find that the etymology is not known. A couple sources speculate that it is the onomatopoeic rendition of the sound of castanets. This reinforces it’s dance like character. (Interestingly castanets comes from the Spanish for chestnuts which I guess were used to make primitive castanets or reminded people of them.)

Anyway.

I was taken with the way Shostakovich cleverly began an iteration of the long theme in one voice one measure too early at one point. Thus instead of imitating the theme in a usual baroque echo-like way, he seemed to create a foreshadow of theme. Very clever writing, not to mention beautiful. Here’s a link to a recording of this piece. I’m listening to it right now and think that the miking is poor but at least you can get an idea of it.

So even though I tell myself that musical analysis does not equal musical understanding, I find myself over and over drawn to trying to figure out how music works….. likewise poetry….

This does not remove the mystery and beauty for me. It’s more about my curiosity than anything.

I guess I should mention that I was hired yesterday by Hope College Dance department as a rehearsal pianist for two classical ballet classes this fall.

The chair of the dance department called while I was in California. I returned her call yesterday and agreed to play for these classes.

So now I am again affiliated with a educational institution.  I begin on Friday. This involves getting up and arriving at 8:30 AM every weekday. They pay $26 dollars an hour and I think I am working about 8 hours a week. This will continue the entire semester assuming they are happy with me and I am happy with them.

Also began prep for accompanying tryouts for Grand Haven High School’s upcoming musical. The tryouts begin next Monday.

Today I have to get going on church tasks.

Summer is over I guess.

I keep getting fuddled at other people’s online communications and comments. I think that it’s sometimes hard for people to understand the nature and context of platforms like Facebook or websites. Hence comments are often cryptic, especially when they are made rarely.

Found a couple of interesting comic book links recently:

Whatthingsdo.com is an online compendium of comics. Very cool.

The Imp is a short lived magazine which discusses and reviews comics….  click here to get three pdfs of this interesting magazine.  I recommend exploring the rest of Dan Raeborn’s web site. He is a writer and puts a lot of his stuff up to read free.

Taylor Branch the civil rights historian had an interesting take on Glenn Beck’s recent DC rally yesterday: “Doctor King’s Newest Marcher.”

Guilty pleasures: reading the NYT mag article on William Shatner. Actually sort of thought provoking for me. I like Shatner’s existential comments about playing himself playing a role.  ”The Many Iterations of William Shatner” by Pat Jordan Don’t miss the video on this page. It’s kind of fun as well. I like it when he says he keeps learning stuff as he gets older. Just now learning how to act. Cool.

Before I started feeling bad I made fruit muffins yesterday using the raspberries and blackberries I had left in the fridge. Supplemented with some frozen blueberries. Also fried up some cooked potatoes. I don’t think this is what made me sick. Eileen had some and she was okay.

Ended my vacation music fast with a bunch of Brahms and Bach on the pianer. Ahhhh. Good to be back on the keys.

Eileen took me for my first ride in her new (used) Mini Cooper. I don’t really like cars all that much but am very very happy that Eileen has her dream car. I was afraid she was going to have to wait for my death and use the insurance money to buy it. Nice to actually see her get it.

I hope I can do some relaxing today. I don’t feel like I gained the perspective that can be afforded by a good time away from stuff. But what the heck. I’m glad I went and did the annual California Jenkins fam visit.

One of four huge palm trees in my son's backyard.

My son is a little antsy about what is posted about his fam on the internet, so I’m not posting stuff here. Check my facebook for more pics.

I’m afraid even though my visit with fam in California was relaxing I’m still stressed.

Ah well. At least I don’t have to do church today. A sub has been hired.

Life for this introvert often resembles a bit of a balancing act. I try to balance my inner passion with what people can stand to hear.

I want to concentrate on relaxing with lovely wife for the next 48 hours. Then back to the grind I guess.

Had a couple of books waiting for me when I got home, both by the scholar C. L. R. James.

C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989)

My copy is not this cool. I love the cover of this one however. The blurb on the back says that it’s “A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World.” This refers to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 which was apparently inspired by the French Revolution.

Christopher Hitchens knew this guy and mentioned these books in his new  memoir, Hitch 22. That’s how I got a line on them.

Took this with me on vacation but read three volumes of the Fablehaven series instead.

Read my grandson's copy of these three on vacation.

The second book by C. L. R. James waiting for me when I got home was Beyond Boundary and is a book about the game of cricket which I know nothing about despite the fact I have been reading English novels for years that talk about it.

Apparently this book uses cricket as a foil for some interesting philosophic observations.

Puts me in mind of the current cricket scandal (link to google news search).

The night before I had an involved theater dream in which I was an actor. As a teen who did some acting in high school, I began having anxiety dreams around forgetting lines that have persisted over my entire life. But that wasn’t the point of this dream. It was more about sheer onstage confusion. Plus the actors and I improvised as we stalled on stage for someone to make an entrance.

I am doing a lot of nothing on this vacation. Spending time with family. Reading and splashing about in my son’s pool.

I made Lebanese flat bread on David’s grill yesterday afternoon for the heck of it. It just so happened that there was a recipe for this in last weekend’s New York Times. (link to recipe)

I am beginning to miss daily practice. I didn’t at first. And I am still disentangling my head from my silly day to day stuff back at home.

Luckily I have been distracting myself well in the in between times of dreaming and worrying about stuff.

Followed the release of Tony Blair’s memoir, “A Journey,” on this Wednesday.

Looked at  a copy of it yesterday in the bookstore. I might read it at some point. Here’s some interesting links about it: link to New York Times review, link to The Guardian interview with Blair on Brit newspaper web site & link to The Guardian editorial about it .

Then there’s David Corn’s bitter little article about a meeting with Bush Blair omits: link to “Tony Blair’s Big Lie of Omission” by David Corn on the Mother Jones web site. Plus the old New York Times article (3/27/2006) that broke the story on the memo in which the leaders discuss last minute ideas on provoking the Iraq war. (link)

Very disturbing.

This morning’s reading included “Of Two Minds About Books” by Matt Richtel and Claire Cain Miller (link to article NYT 9/1/2010). It’s about e-reading and e-readers. Discussion of this rarely mentions reading on netbooks. It’s usually about the stereotypical idea of whether electronic reading devices are better or are going to replace books.

This always strikes me as missing the point. I haven’t read any discussion of what makes up a book: words? ideas? stories? paper and glue? Spending time with words seems to be below the radar or beside the point in many of these discussions.

Again yesterday at the bookstore I looked at Barnes and Nobles’s e-reader. The young woman came up to me and asked me if I wanted help. When I said no she proceeded to show me what a page of prose looked like on the reader (something I had already done before she approached me).  I thanked her and moved away from the reader.

I find myself much less interested in buying hard copies of books from bookstores and much less interested in browsing in them. This is definitely because of the increase in access I have to them via the Internet. Besides ebooks, I routinely use the Web to interlibrary loan books from my library or purchase them used (usually from a bookseller on Amazon) not to mention accessing and reading tons of articles.

Plus the Web allows me to follow my ideas and interest much more quickly and thoroughly than I used to. So that being a room full of books is much less of a singular opportunity to run down books and concepts I have been thinking about.

I console myself with the idea that the used books I purchase online are purchased directly from used book dealers. If I was still dealing in used books I would insist on having an online presence hopefully through Amazon.

Mr. Rosenthal (my daughter-in-law’s Dad) made fried eggplant for everyone last night. Mmmmm. good

The vacation is going well.

Didn't take pics. But they looked something like this.

Used this recipe for the dough: link to dough recipe It was fun to cook in my son’s fancy kitchen. Plus his grill is also pretty fancy. I was able to use different temps to initially grill the dough and then by shifting it to another area on the grill allow the cheese to melt and dough continue to cook over a milder temp. Very cool. link to suggestions I used to grill pizza Made 6 little pesto pizzas and 2 little tomato sauce ones.

Listened to President Obama’s speech this morning on an NPR site as I lay in bed. link to page with stream of the speech Then got up and accompanied my daughter-in-law to the gym and did some treadmilling. She has a membership and my son printed up a free pass. They gave me another free pass so I can return while I’m visiting.

On page 90 of this the second volume.

Nicholas my grand-son furnished me with volume 2,3, & 4 of the Fablehaven series. I don’t think I will finish all of these but I will read in them while visiting.

Managed to sun burn my belly in the pool yesterday. I guess I’m really on vacation.