One way to think about how crazy I find the world is to realize that I live in a different reality from other people. In my reality it’s people and beauty and ideas that are real not money. In my reality I want to take responsibility for my own actions and understand history and listen to great music and great ideas. This means my reality is peopled with the writers I read and composers I play and listen to. After all my world seems as real to me as other people’s worlds seem unreal to me.

It looks my buddy Dave Strong probably died of Covid. I was looking at past messages on his Facebook feed and it looks like he was struggling with it before he died. What a shame. I have a terrible feeling that he might not have been vaccinated or wore masks. I hope that’s not the case because I’m sure this would have made his brother, Dave, who is a MD crazy. But I’m just shooting in the dark here.

The pandemic is worsening. Eileen and I are taking precautions. We went to the grocery store together today. We wore masks, but many people at Meijer were not wearing masks. Like I say, they live in a different reality from me.

I continue to play through Bartok. Recently I began playing through his Bagatelles. I admit I didn’t know exactly what a bagatelle was. I am familiar with Beethoven’s Bagatelles. I played through a few of these. Finally I broke down and looked it up in my Harvard Dictionary. The word means “trifle” and was coined by, lo and behold, my beloved Francois Couperin. Bartok’s Bagatelles are very different from Beethoven’s. And Couperin’s music is totally different than both Bartok and Beethoven, of course.

Willie Apel, the author of the Harvard Dictionary, says these are “character pieces.” He mentions Schumann’s character pieces so I played through a bit of Schumann earlier today as well.

When I was at Readers World recently, I was using up my gift certificates that the church and Rhonda gave me. The owner asked if I had retired recently and how was it? I said I had and it was great. I read, play music, and think of more books to order from her store.

I am in pig heaven with many good books to read. I’m reading Kunzru’s My Revolutions and Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness and enjoying the shit out of both of them. I am rereading Lerner’s book length poem, Mean Free Path, since I had no idea what the title meant when I waded in for the first read.

“Mean” in sense of “average.” According to a Google, the actual distance a particle such as a molecule in a gas will move before collision is called the “free path.” The distance cannot be generally be given because its calculation would require knowledge of the path of every particle in the region.

Whew! I suppose Lerner expects his ignorant readers like me to google it, but I like to forage ahead into poetry and sometimes prose without always stopping to look up everything. I definitely didn’t have a clue about this connotation of the phrase when I read the little book the first time. Now I’m rereading because one of the techniques he uses is to write lines that only make good sense if you skip a line to finish the thought.

I have interlibrary loaned his book, The Hatred of Poetry. I wonder if it will shed any light on Mean Free Path.

I had to stop at this point and listen to Rhonda and Brian Reichenbach play the piece I wrote for them. They were performing at Calvin College which streamed the concert.

They played the heck out of my piece. Thank you Rhonda and Brian! I will link up the video if I can.

I played my way all the way through volume 4 of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos yesterday. The Mikrokosmos are a series of pieces Bartok wrote for his son to learn piano. They are in order of ascending difficulty. They have been my companions for years and I have played and performed from them.

Volume 4 is pretty sight readable for me. Most of Bartok’s piano works are not this easy including some of the later volumes. I was tickled to see that I had performed the Intermezzo (no. 111) as a prelude on 3/10/02. This means it was probably for the Lutherans when I had a short period of serving a local Lutheran church as organist/choir director. Also, Bulgarian Rhythm (no. 113) indicates a registration on my electric piano with a split keyboard, Jazz Organ/Bass down an Octave. This means I probably performed it on the street.

I have played quite a bit of Bartok in local coffee shops and on the street when I was still doing that. I have arranged Bartok and other cool music for whatever instruments and instrumentalists I had handy. I was listening to the radio today and a dancer was saying that she and her troupe had quit dancing in public spaces because they didn’t feel welcome. I think that describes my ultimate decision to quit playing on the streets of Holland, Michigan.

But it’s not that big a deal for me to not have this outlet. My therapist asked me if I was planning any more public performances in retirement. I told him no, but I don’t rule it out.

I finished The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith last night before going to sleep. It is a fun romp. Apparently it is her second novel. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but the writing is virtuosic and the plot hilarious. Here’s a passage I particularly enjoyed:

“Alex, like everybody, held hospitals in the highest, purest dread and loathing. To come in with a bump and leave with the baby–this is the only grace available in a hospital. Other than that, there is only pain. The concentration of pain. Hospitals are unique in this concentration. There are no areas of the world dedicated to the concentration of pleasure (theme parks and their like are a concentration of the symbols of pleasure, not pleasure itself), there are no buildings dedicated to laughter, friendship or love. They’d probably be pretty gruesome if they existed, but would they smell of decay’s argument with disinfectant? Would people walk through the hallways, weeping? Would the shops sell only flowers and slippers and mints? Would the beds (so ominous, this!) have wheels?”

This morning I finished reading Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and Ben Lerner’s book of poetry, Mean Free Path. After breakfast with beautiful Eileen, I jumped in the car and picked up some books I had ordered from the local bookshop: three novels by Hari Kunzru I haven’t read and a book of essays entitled Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound edted by Paul Theberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett. The latter I think of in the same category as Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction by Keith Negus. I have ordered my own copy of this book but haven’t been able to resist reading the library’s copy while I wait for it.

Eileen and I are planning to skip another Great Performance Series performance scheduled for this evening. This time we have the will and I am feeling better, but the Pandemic rages and it seems silly to go into a public gathering at this point. Ottawa County were we live is surging more than any other in our state. No one was wearing masks at the bookshop just now. Lack of precautions are taking a toll not only in little old Western Michigan but world wide. I would not be surprised if we don’t have another lockdown before Christmas.