I Have a mixed reaction to Christmas as I do to all things Christian.
It comes mostly from being raised in a preacher’s household. Also, from not turning away from my entrance point in the world (Church and Christianity), but embracing it in a weird sort of way. I have found knowledge of Christianity is very helpful in understanding the last 2000 years of Western Civilization. Camille Paglia recommends that college students study comparative religions. I believe she is an atheist. I can relate to the need to satisfy my curiosity about life through understanding as much as possible about human life on the planet.
Maybe that is a bit of a big chunk to contemplate, but it is Christmas morning and I am running on less sleep than usual.
Anyway, this morning I decided to make a Christmas playlist. After the Linus and Lucy theme (only related to Christmas in my pea brain), I was stumped. So, of course, before too long I found myself listening to the Christmas Oratorio of Bach.
Which leads me to the Burning Babe by Robert Southwell
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.
What can I say? Besides this poem I always have to listen to the following recording around this time of year. It seems to fit my mood.
On the one hand, I feel a tad sheepish that I have planned such an easy Christmas for myself at work. It’s in keeping with trying to balance my energy in the job so I can keep doing it and not retire. That was a theme for me after vacation this year. So my plan for Advent and Christmas was all pretty easy for me. Conducting the choir music is something I enjoy doing but the big part of the task is helping singers interpret music beautifully and effectively. This is not pressure for me. I think I’ve scheduled some good music this season but it is mostly unaccompanied.
On the other hand, we have had a year. In March, my Mom died. Then in late September Eileen’s Mom passed away. I develop a nasty rash (which is still with me in an abating manner). And I was diagnosed with melanoma. If I had done my usual pattern of continually challenging myself in my work, I would have been much more of a mess right about now. So easy is good. And I haven’t given up on challenging myself, just trying to be sensible at the age of 67.
Another Christmas is here and I continue to feel very lucky. When I mentioned to Eileen that I hadn’t been able to get her gifts for Christmas she pointed out that my diagnosis was gift enough for both of us. That’s true. Everybody dies, but it’s nice to have my future back open again instead of contemplating mortality with such clarity.
And of course my reading and contact with music continues to provide incredible satisfaction for me.
WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST IS ALL ABOUT ARTICLES IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
I finished reading through the library’s copy of the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I’m glad I looked through the hard copy of this magazine. I was seriously considering subscribing but found that most of the articles didn’t interest that much.
However, I read all of the articles about “Is Democracy Dying?”
For what it’s worth here are links to them with my own annotations.
1. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
2. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.
3.Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.
4. A facade of free choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the public exerts less and less actual control.
5. the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines.
6. within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information
“Democratic government, being government by discussion and majority vote, works best when there is nothing of profound importance to discuss,” the historian Carl Becker wrote in 1941. But in the polarized political environment of 2018, the stakes seem incomprehensibly high. For Democrats and Republicans alike, abiding by the old rules can seem a sucker’s game, an act of unilateral disarmament. Norms are difficult to enshrine but easy to discard. Every time Trump does something that just isn’t done, he all but guarantees it will be done again in the future.”
“As professors specializing in constitutional law and comparative politics, we’re often asked whether there’s another country that could serve as a model for the United States as it attempts to overcome its divisions. We always respond no—America is the best model.
For all its flaws, the United States is uniquely equipped to unite a diverse and divided society. Alone among the world powers, America has succeeded in forging a strong group-transcending national identity without requiring its citizens to shed or suppress their subgroup identities. In the United States, you can be Irish American, Syrian American, or Japanese American, and be intensely patriotic at the same time. We take this for granted, but consider how strange it would be to call someone “Irish French” or “Japanese Chinese.”
1. Madison referred to impetuous mobs as factions, which he defined in “Federalist No. 10” as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Factions arise, he believed, when public opinion forms and spreads quickly. But they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification.
2. Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
3. Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.
We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare.
There seems to be some very clear thinking in this article. Here are my annotations.
1. Sometimes I think of political leaders as boat passengers who climb onto the deck and, to avoid seasickness, pretend to steer the heaving vessel.
2. The examples I have discussed suggest three general conclusions.
2a. First, it is often helpful to look at globalization and localism not as warring values but simply as common phenomena
2b. The legal examples suggest that there are many different ways to deal with international challenges and circumstances. [SJ note: Interpendence]
2c. Third, and finally, my legal examples suggest the importance of looking to approaches and solutions that themselves embody a rule of law. To achieve and maintain a rule of law is more difficult than many people believe.
3. We do not have to convince judges or lawyers that maintaining the rule of law is necessary—they are already convinced. Instead we must convince ordinary citizens, those who are not lawyers or judges, that they sometimes must accept decisions that affect them adversely, and that may well be wrong. If they are willing to do so, the rule of law has a chance
For my generation, the need for law in its many forms was perhaps best described by Albert Camus in The Plague. He writes of a disease that strikes Oran, Algeria, which is his parable for the Nazis who occupied France and for the evil that inhabits some part of every man and woman. He writes of the behavior of those who lived there, some good, some bad. He writes of the doctors who help others without relying upon a moral theory—who simply act. At the end of the book, Camus writes that
the germ of the plague never dies nor does it ever disappear. It waits patiently in our bedrooms, our cellars, our suitcases, our handkerchiefs, our file cabinets. And one day, perhaps, to the misfortune or for the education of men, the plague germ will reemerge, reawaken the rats, and send them forth to die in a once-happy city.
The struggle against that germ continues. And the rule of law is one weapon that civilization has used to fight it. The rule of law is the keystone of the effort to build a civilized, humane, and just society. At a time when facing facts, understanding the local and global challenges that they offer, and working to meet those challenges cooperatively is particularly urgent, we must continue to construct such a society—a society of laws—together.
The Breyer article had the following Wilson quote as a sidebar from the article linked above. Wilson is not my favorite leader. He did damage with his racism. But I like this quote anyway.
“we have looked upon nothing but our own ways of living, and have been formed in isolation. This has made us—not provincial, exactly: upon so big and various a continent there could not be the single pattern of thought and manners and purpose to be found cloistered in a secluded province. But if provincial be not the proper word, it suggests the actual fact. We have, like provincials, too habitually confined our view to the range of our own experiences. We have acquired a false self-confidence, a false self-sufficiency, because we have heeded no successes or failures but our own.”
Eleen has not been getting up much before 10 the last two days. So this morning while I was waiting for her to get up I went a little nuts and made two different recipes of bread. Lustig recommends making your own bread, so I tried his recipe. When I added the final amount of flour I knew I had done something wrong. The dough wasn’t dough at all. It was more like a mush. So I added flour until it was a bit more manageable. I must have put in the wrong amount of water.
I set this aside to rise, but didn’t have much hope that it would work. I was so frustrated at that point that I went on and started a recipe from 100 Days of Real Food by Lisa Leake.
This is one of the cookbooks I checked out of the library recently. She also has a website. Neither of these recipes recommends much kneading which I found odd. I tried to do it their way to see how these recipes would work. After I finished the first step of the Lisa Leaks recipe, I noticed that the first recipe was rising nicely. Eventually I cooked up all of the bread recipes and ended up with four fresh loaves. The kitchen smells pretty good right now.
After making bread, Eileen and I went to the Post Office to finally mail off a package to the California Jenkins household. The cancer thing threw us off our usual prep for Christmas.. Now we are scrambling to get stuff done in time. Oddly the Post Office was not that crowded. We stopped by Cranes to buy some frozen pies for next week. Then we hit Reader’s World, picked up some books I had ordered and came home.
My feet hurt because I didn’t wear shoes this morning for cooking. I usually do.
Yesterday I discovered the music of Roy Hargrove.
I am not usually drawn in to many Jazz musicians that are not in my own little canon (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and so on). But this recording blew me away.
And If you’re at all in the mood for Jazz I recommend this recording as well.
Hargrove died last month. Bummer. But I do like his music.
Eileen and I were pretty stunned yesterday when we learned that my surgery had removed all of my cancer. We were both braced for bad news and determined to meet it head on with resolve. When we didn’t need our resolve and were confronted with good news, we both were a bit disoriented.
My own disorientation has not really dissipated as of today.
I was very spacey at last night’s choir rehearsal. The choir was very supportive and happy for Eileen and me about the cancer news. It was also my first rehearsal with my new glasses. They seem to be working well so far. I am probably going to get in the habit of having either my tv/driving glasses on or my glasses for reading and choir directing on most of the time.
The drummers arrived and did a good job on the two pieces I have asked them to play on.
One of the choir member’s wife dropped by with a congratulatory cake for us to snack on after rehearsal.
I am experiencing the usual Thursday exhaustion today but I am still getting used to the idea that I don’t have a cloud hanging over me like I thought I would.
Here’s a fun face from LikeWars: in the last month and a half before the 2016 election, the people at the following link “Twitter concluded that Russian-generated propaganda had been delivered to users 454.7 million times.” They go on to say that these numbers are probably too low since they were only looking at one part of the market.
This is the article cited backing this claim. The whole website looks interesting as does this one I found looking up some of the citations in LikeWars:
I have been trying to let everyone interested know by email or Facebook, but I thought I would put this here as well.
Apparently they were able to remove all the cancer with the operation last week. Did not see that coming. I think both Eileen and I were braced for bad news today and when we received good news instead it left us both a bit dazed.
My new reading glasses came in today. They are “progressive” or “computer” glasses. Essentially they are blended trifocals with the center part of the lens focused around fourteen inches or so. I got them with the idea of reading music and directing the choir. We’ll see how they work out.
One of the disadvantages so far is that rectangles (like a computer or tablet screen) appears to be trapezoid.
Notice in my pic above, no bandage. Tomorrow I go to get stitches out. I received a copy of the report the gamma camera tech person submitted on my online access today. She cited some trace evidence in my test:
“Findings: Activity is seen at the left head/scalp injection sites.
Activity is also noted within a sentinel lymph node within the
left-sided cervical neck region. There is an additional linear
extension of radiotracer uptake extending inferiorly from the
injection site, possibly preauricular in location. There is a
suggestion of very faint radiotracer uptake within the left
supraclavicular region.”
You can see preauricular area in this pic:
and the supraclavicular region in this pic:
I am expecting that they didn’t quite get all the cancer. I’m braced for more treatment. I would like to beat this if I can.
I have been spending a lot of time with the Fitzwilliam Virginal book. I am finding this music very satisfying to play right now. William Byrd and John Bull and others exercise their compositional ingenuity that is so evident in the choral work of Byrd on the keyboard. Lots of very clever imitation between voices and beautiful melodies and chord progressions. I have been playing it on my cheapo synth and think it sounds fine.
Plus I have been listening to James Harding’s recording of the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book on Spotify. I like how he plays and the music is working for me. I was listening to it this morning when “The Carman’s Whistle” by William Byrd came up and Harding switched to 4 foot stops on an organ. That’s exactly how I have performed this piece. Cool.
Here he is playing a different piece on organ. I think it’s quite nice.
Here’s the Byrd piece played by Ernst Stoltz.
Eileen and I are talking about eating less processed food. Today I went to the library and grabbed a bunch of cookbooks with this in mind. We are increasing the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables we are eating. The theory is that the closer you get to real food the better your diet and you probably should lose weight. Of course my downfall is my nightly martini. But as I said to Eileen today when she pointed this out, I like to think of it as pleasure not a downfall. My weight is creeping down despite the alcohol.
Eileen is making chili and decided to skip the sugar and ketchup she usually puts in it and instead put in some real maple syrup which is less processed than the ketchup and probably better calories than refined sugar.
I see that Fox news was featuring some skepticism from Nate Silver about the influence of Russian bots on the 2016 election.
Reading LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media I disagree with the esteemed Mr. Silver (who was probably misrepresented on Fox News).
Here’s a paragraph I marked from my reading this morning.
Writing about Russian bots, the authors point out that “If a few thousand or even hundred of these digital [robot] voices shift to discussing the same topic or using the same hashtag all at the same time, that action can fool even the most advanced social media algorithm, which will mark it as a trend. This ‘trend’ will then draw in real users, who have nothing to do with the botnet, but who may be interested in the news, which itself is now defined by what is trending online. These users then share the conversation with their own networks. The manufactured idea takes hold and spreads, courting ever more attention and unleashing a cascade of related conversations, and usually arguments. Most who become part of this cycle have no clue that they’re actually the playthings of machines.” p. 140
It appears to me from my reading that there is much careful scholarly understanding of what is happening to us online, but the knowledge is not widely disseminated (makes sense, since so much of it is in books…. ahem).
Yesterday did not wear me out. Of course, I didn’t do much of anything after church. I have been playing a lot of Beethoven. Eileen and I are hoping for some clarity around my cancer this week. At the least, we will be in their offices on Wednesday (to get my stitches out). It seems like that would be good time to update us.
I emailed this weekend’s plan for our annual Advent IV Lessons and Carols to the office today. That was quite a bit of work but at least now it’s done. Christmas Eve and the Sunday after Christmas will be easy to pass on. We are doing some fun music this year. What a blessing to have the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols at our disposal. Nevertheless, next year I’m planning on mixing it up with some other stuff. It was just too tempting this year to use it exclusively for Advent IV and Christmas Eve and again on the Sunday after Christmas.
Eileen is bugging me to take off my bandage and take a shower so that she can rebandage my head. I will do this later.
I have been reading a ton of Emily Dickinson out loud recently. She is fun. Also I keep reading in back issues of Poetry Magazine. I’m only just now finishing October’s issue.
This is in the October issue of Poetry. it’s an essay by a teenager. Inspiring. I like how Kara Jackson mentions poets that inspire her. I didn’t know Eve L. Ewing, but here’s a link to some poems by her including “Arrival Day” which Jackson mentions. Good stuff.
I have been catching this Barcelona group on YouTube made up mostly of young people 7 years old to 20 somethings. I find this group amazing.
I think I’m pacing myself pretty well today. Dawn played the Frescobaldi piece very, very well for today’s prelude. It’s such a lovely delicate piece. We did the interp we had worked on.
I got up early and looked up all the hymnody that we had scheduled today just for the bloody heckuvit. The choir sang the little Buxtehude adaptation well. I decided yesterday not to try to play the entire Buxtehude piece I had scheduled for the postlude. We drove back and forth to church.
I am pleasantly tired this afternoon.
This week I am hoping to learn about how much cancer is left in my body. I’m not sure when I will get this report. I’m scheduled to go in Wednesday morning to get my stitches taken out.
I wonder if i will hear then or before.
Eileen and I have been thinking about Robert Lustig’s notion of “real food.”
Even though I haven’t been skipping my evening martini, my weight has been going down. This morning I weighed 224. This is nice. I hope the weight keeps going down. I am planning to have a Sunday afternoon martini.
I keep playing and thinking about Beethoven.
Also this morning when I was looking up the hymns, I learned that Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a piece called “Household Music.” It’s in four movements and according to the Hymnal Companion was specified by Vaughan Williams to be played by strings or whatever instruments were in the household.
In this recording you can clearly hear the melody of our closing hymn today, “Watchman tell us of the night.”
I overdid it a bit yesterday. I got up gung ho and had a good chat with Curtis Birky my therapist. We agreed to skip our next appointment due to the holidays with the reservation that if I get to feeling like I need to talk to him I will contact him for an appointment. Then I drove back from Glenn where he lives and practiced organ for an hour or so.
In the afternoon I began to notice some weird fatigue. My energy pie has changed due to the surgery I’m sure. I didn’t have much energy for the rest of the day. And in the wee hours of this morning I felt an unusual weakness and didn’t get up until after 7 AM. It was a good rest and I took my first shower since the surgery this morning (Too much information?).
Today we will get a Christmas tree and I will do the usual prepping for tomorrow’s Eucharist. But I need to take it easy.
Beethoven’s doing the trick
For some reason I have been playing a lot of Beethoven post surgery. My cellist and I read through some of the first movement of his cello sonata. Then the trio played some of his Op. 1, no. 1. Yesterday after gaining a slight second wind, I sat at the piano and played his entire Sonata in G major, op. 31, no. 1 and the first movement of the Tempest piano sonata which follows it..
This morning I showered, cleaned the kitchen, and made coffee listening to the first three movements of the Eroica symphony. Great stuff and exactly what I want to hear right now.
I generally associate Beethoven with a nobility of human spirit (the way I associate Mozart with a joie de vivre, joy of living). But mostly I like the melodies, the turns of phrases, the chord progressions.
I think that listening for form in symphonies might not be the ticket for me. I like listening more viscerally, for sheer enjoyment. I think that my training pushed me away from this kind of listening. Thank goodness i still manage to play and listen to music for fun and the sheer wonderfulness of it.
But I don’t think it’s Beethoven’s nobility that is attracting me right now. i think it’s the beauty in the music, the melodies and the sheer logic, that does it for me.
And of course facing cancer I’m very glad to be alive at this moment.
I may have over done it a bit today. This morning my incision was hurting a little. Eileen suggested some acetaminophen before I went to trio rehearsal. This worked very well. After trio, I stayed and practiced organ. I am hoping to perform the entire Buxtehude piece I have scheduled for this Sunday. Then Eileen and I went out for lunch at the local sushi place, stopped at the library, took the cat to vet, and then grocery shopped. Whew.
Eileen just changed the dressing on my wound from surgery. It is quite a long ugly incision. But it doesn’t look infected and doesn’t hurt too much.
I wanted to grocery shop to begin to apply some of Robert H. Lustig’s ideas about nutrition. So we bought a bunch of fresh fruits and vegetables.
I am learning from this dude. As I have mentioned here before I took a nutrition class at WSU which has influenced my eating and feeding my family since then.
Lustig’s ideas are not only more up-to-date and integrate better brain science than was available to my nutrition teacher. He also approaches diet from the point of view of a pediatric endocrinologist.
He has taught me one important fact that I did not know.
All calories are not equal
Of course they aren’t. But it has been my long standing approach that basically calories are what you keep track of ever since taking that nutrition class and then losing about 40 pounds in the 80s. (I have (only gained back about 25 of those pounds at this point beating the usual odds of dieting. I think this is probably largely due to the good information I received in my class which boils down to the lest processed the food, the better.)
Plus I like to cook from scratch.
I have ordered a copy of Lustig’s The Fat Chance Cookbook. And one of the reasons for today’s library visit was to pick up a copy at the library.
I also checked out the library’s copy of the October Atlantic monthly. This issue is all online, and has some of my favorite authors in it. I’ll probably pass along insights here from articles as I read and think about them.
Jupe’s reading converges
It’s strange how a lot of my reading is converging lately. This morning in LikeWars I read how fake news is like bad nutrition.
“Like junk food, which lacks nutritional value, [fake new stories] lacked news value. And also like junk food, they were made of artificial ingredients and infused with sweeteners that made them hard to resist.”
“Our bodies are programmed to consume fats and sugars because they’re rare in nature…. In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that [sic] gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. if we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity.”[emphasis added]
Higher on this page in Likewars is this startling fact: “in the final three months of the 2016 election, more … fake political headlines were shared on Facebook than real ones.”
Regarding the effectiveness of intentionally faked news: “When polled after the election, nearly half of Trump voters affirmed their belief that the Clinton campaign had participated in pedophilia, human trafficking, and satanic ritual abuse.”
Then when listening to Lustig’s lengthy lecture on YouTube (recommended! The best parts are at the end!) I was surprised to learn that the day of this lecture Lustig had lunch with Tristan Harris, the former Design Ethicist at Google., and Roger McNamee, Facebook’s first invester. Harris developed the idea of deliberately delaying Gmail’s page load a second or two to emphasize the dopamine charge the user gets when the email finally loads.
But now he, Mcnamee, and Lustig have formed the Center for Humane Technology which attempts to offset the bad tech (Google, Facebook) in order to slow down technology’s hijacking of our minds.
Anyway, I am getting tired and am going to stop here. More later.
So the surgery went well. Unlike the logistic phones calls preceding it, the care was excellent. We went over early enough for a repeat of the nuclear injection test, but it did not happen. Another bit of logistic confusion about timing. One was enough. I enjoyed chatting with a RN named Jocoabie who was raised in Holland Michigan, attended Holland Christian High School and then Calvin college. Later I learned that my anesthesiologist, Dr. Phillip Hage, took 5 years of Latin as a high schooler and tested out of AP Latin translating 100 lines of the Aeneid. I told him I found it encouraging that my anesthesiologist had heard of the Aeneid, adding inwardly, much less translated some of it. He spoke about making sure he read Mythology stories to his young child. Wow.
There was a possibility I would need a skin graft to cover the where the incision was made on my head. This was not the case. That means less pain I would imagine. The pain level has been very minimal so far. I took some acetaminophen last night but that was mostly for a ghost of a headache. This morning I feel fine. However, I don’t trust my energy levels at the ripe old age of 67 and I do want to do some kind of a choir rehearsal this evening. It has occurred to me to cancel my piano lesson and instead use what energy I would have for it to rehearse the Buxtehude Praeludium I have scheduled for Sunday. My back up plan on this piece is to stop about half way through it where the more counterpuntal section begins since this means more difficult pedal entries. If I do so, I will be following some of the other versions of this piece I have seen in Concordia wedding organ music collections edited by Paul Bunjes. That’s good enough for me. But with a little rehearsal I should be able to pull it all off.
Last night, Eileen and I watched this delightful performance by Sir Ian McKellen. He is a favorite of ours whom we saw in Waiting for Godot in West London. I recommend the entire video which is lengthy, however I have started it at the little known Shakespeare monologue from an early collaboration (Sir McKellen talks about it before he gives a predictably moving performance of it). It’s from the play Sir Thomas More Act II scene 4.
“Wretched strangers” is another name for immigrants, eh? As Sir McKellen informs us, this passage exists in Shakespeare’s handwriting. How cool is that?
I have to say that in addition to McKellen’s huge talent, I think to watch him talk to these young people reveals his fundamental decency and kindness as a human being.
P.S. It is slightly less mortifying to weep at Shakespeare and McKellen.
Here’s another embed. I am a fan of this podcast and organization. This is long. Here’s a link to the mp3. The panelists are uneven in their coherence. I think Michelle is less clear than the other “Goldbergs” on the panel. I have only listened to the mp3 so I’m not sure exactly what’s in the video but I think it’s the same.
I did get the call from my preop people. I was logged onto Metro Health’s MyChart site and had discovered that I was scheduled to be there today at 2:15 PM for an inoculation of something to trace my lymph distribution below the surgery area. I was just writing a letter of complaint on the MyChart site when my nurse called. She was very helpful and I’m all set now to drive over this afternoon for my injection plus another blood draw for a final lab test for tomorrow. I decided not to complain at this point. Maybe later I’ll ask why I didn’t calls I was expecting. You don’t want to piss off the people who are part of cutting you up. At least that’s my opinion.
I’m planning to do prep for Wednesday’s rehearsal today. Eileen has volunteered to help. Stuff from this past weekend needs to be filed. It’s not that much, but I need to have the opening and closing hymn redone in Large Print versions for my crew, then put them in their slots. Also the upcoming psalm for the following Sunday (Advent IV). Rev Jen and I are not meeting tomorrow. So all I have for Wednesday will be to give a piano lesson and do a rehearsal, both contingent on my ability to do so in post op recovery.
I believe if you go to this page you can listen to the program I was talking about yesterday, an interview with Robert Lustig
He discusses marketing which he defines as using truth to espouse your opinion versus propaganda which he defines as using misinformation to espouse your opinion. Then he combines this notion with the concept that when we hear something we agree with (true or not) we give ourselves a shot of pleasure inducing dopamine. I think he is saying we can then become addicted (physically) to this shot of dopamine so that we seek out stuff we agree with, consciously or not (confirmation bias).
Eileen and listened to some of a lecture of his on YouTube last night. Warning, it’s over an hour and half long and a bit technical in places, but excellent and informative so far.
Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson
Again, I learned something from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Today is Emily Dickinson’s birthday. Keillor mentions that Dickinson’s entire family fell into public confessions of faith after a revival. Dickinson tried to do so as well but ended up failing. This colors some of her poetry a bit differently for me. I find in Dickinson a Shakespearean approach to language and thought that is very gratifying. Keillor reads a poem by her today, “This World is not Conclusion.” I love the way this poem begins:
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Incidentally my Complete Poems changes the next line this way.
From “Philosophy, don’t know – ” to “Philosophy-don’t know”
I think the change from a comma to a dash (an Emily Dickinson dash!) changes the meaning. Maybe the subjects of the verb phrase “don’t know” are an implied “they” (Music, Sound) or even an implied “I.”
I did hear from Metro Health yesterday. After calling and leaving messages at various numbers I had basically given up hope. However, someone called to tell me that I was on their list to call and that I would get a call today with prep info and the time for my procedure.
Now I’m waiting around for this call. I was going to blog after it came in but it’s already 3:30 PM and I’m beginning to wonder when they will get around to it. Might as well blog a bit.
Church went well today. I felt a little silly because Johannes Müller-Stosch, the conductor of the Holland Symphony Orchestra was visiting.
He is a gracious informed presence and also an organist church musician type guy in Long Beach. The reason I felt silly was this was an improvisation week end. I would have liked for him to hear repertoire on our lovely Pasi, but that’s the way it goes.
The choir nailed “Every Valley” by John Ness Beck. This is a piece that is popular with many choirs. it’s kind of poppy. My relationship to it has changed (as has my understanding of much music). I used to think it was too hokey. Now I just think of it is in the style of popular music. No biggie. I played piano. Playing piano and conducting is not something that I find easy to do. Better to play and conduct from the organ (something I have been trained to do). On the other hand I have been trying to get the choir to listen and sing with its own autonomy. I like ensembles that can do that. So I try to do the body language part of conducting but not too many cues. There’s no way that you can keep up a conducting pattern when you need both hands so much of the time to play the accompaniment adequately.
We almost had a train wreck this morning. I was glancing at the psalm in the bulletin during the first reading and noticed that the Gloria Patri had been included. This made sense because the psalm slot was filled by Canticle 16. But I hadn’t put the Gloria Patri in the choir’s version. So I hurriedly whispered to the choir to sing the canticle from the bulletin. They went with it and all was well. If I hadn’t noticed we would have led strongly until the Gloria Patri in which case the congregation most likely wouldn’t carry it without us. That would have been interesting.
I had many supportive comments this morning about my impending surgery. It is helpful to have so much support. It reminds me of a radio show I heard this morning which I will link here tomorrow since it won’t be available online until then.
The program is The People’s Pharmacy and the guest for this weekend’s show was Robert Lustig. I’ve never heard of him but I liked what he had to say.
Lustig is a professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California. Basically he is a brain science guy who offers practical application of living in our crazy time. I will probably talk more about his work as I learn about it. But for now here’s the 4 Cs he presented on the radio show. As best as i can remember they are ways to resist the strong manipulations of our brains be consumers and addicts.
Here they are:
Connect (empathy)
Contribute (to something bigger than yourself and other people)
Cope (Sufficient sleep, mindfulness, and exercise)
Cook (the less processed foods in your diet the better)
I have put three books by him on hold at the local library.
I’m especially interested in that last book, the cookbook.
He’s also all over YouTube and I’m planning to watch a few of his presentations. What I like about this guy is that he presents simple concepts clearly.
I thought of him just now because he is clear that “Connecting” is something you do in person to other people looking them in the eye and listening and responding. Weirdly it’s sort of the opposite of the “Connectivity” of social media.
He also said that his four Cs are things you Mom told you. I liked that.
Today is John Milton’s birthday. I learned that (like I do many things) by listening to Garrison Keillor’s Writes Almanac for the day. I was very surprised to learn that Milton coined a lot of words.
“According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.” link to source
The prep nurse for my surgery failed to call me yesterday. I expected her to review pre-op procedure and tell me when I was to arrive on Monday for my pre-surgery injection of radioactive dye for them to trace on Tuesday. I called several numbers today but apparently they are closed for the weekend. No harm done. I have a pamphlet that the surgeon’s nurse took us through with basically all the info and the nurse I talked to at my surgeon’s office indicated that the Monday procedure would probably be later in the day.
I didn’t feel like getting up early this morning but I had to in order to arrive at church an hour before the 10 AM funeral. The family requested “light jazz” on the piano for the prelude and postlude so that’s what they got. And I played “Bye bye Blackbird” for the postlude as people exited. If it was good enough for Keith Jarrett to record in honor of his colleague Miles Davis I figure it’s good enough for an Episcopalian funeral where they requested “light jazz” on the piano.
Beginning today I’m supposed to shower with some sort of anti bacterial soap. I was expecting the nurse to tell me to shave my left cheek prior to surgery. But since she didn’t call I’m not planning to do so until I have to.
I’m fairly tired this afternoon but am seriously considering going over to the church and practicing. Who knows how much I will feel like doing so after surgery? I did find a Buxtehude piece that wasn’t one of my top ten pieces that I don’t really want to do since I feel like I play them to death (dating back to the 70s fer chrissake).
Tonight is my last martini until the surgery. Eileen and I stayed up last night waiting for a call from the nurse from the surgery people.We finally went to bed around 8 or so. The preregister nurse said they would contact me before 7:30 PM. When I got up this morning, there was no indication that anyone had called on my cell. Whippy skippy. I do hope they do surgery better than pre-op.
Rehearsal went splendidly last night. I worked over the SNOB (Shorter New Oxford Book) of Carols in the afternoon. I found some interesting recordings which I emailed to the choir. I also looked harder at the pronunciation especially in “Hayl, Mary ful of grace.”
I especially liked this recording of it:
And we are doing Riu, rui this year.
I like this performance though it has some weak moments. But, hey, they are an Australian youth choir. What do you want? I like the energy.
I assigned verses to people who wanted to sing solos. And we managed to end by 8:30 PM.
Today I spent an hour with my cellist rehearsing Frescobaldi and a composer named Bibl. Here’s a recording of the Bibl. I especially like the first Adagio.
After my cellist left I continued reading through Buxtehude on the Pasi. Then took Eileen to the eye doctor for a check up this afternoon. Even though I am exhausted today, it was a day well spent.
It seems that part of an allergist job resembles that of a detective. Yesterday I learned that one of the reasons to use as many hypo allergenic products as possible is to minimize the spread of harsh soaps to rashes via scratching them. I hadn’t thought too much about this. In addition, direct contact between the rash and the soap is also unwanted.
When the allergist asked me where the remaining rash was on my body, I told her on the back of my legs and on my elbows. Eileen piped up with the theory that sitting on my Mom’s leather chair in shorts and short sleeves meant that my flesh was touching the leather. The allergist pointed out that there were substances in treated leather (tannens?) that would exacerbate the itching.
Last night Eileen covered areas of my chair with a cotton sheet. I also put on longer [pajama pants. Combined with the recommendation of my allergist to take two antihistamine pills a day instead of one, my itching is subsiding more and more even within twenty four hours of these changes.
Who knew?
Fun Facts from my morning reading
1. I have been reading Natasha Tretheway’s new book of poetry, Monument. Tretheway is (in the words of her bio in the back” “a two term US poet laureate and a winner of the Pulitzer prize.”
I did know that. I picked up her book because it was on the new shelf at the library.
Recently I noticed Tyhimbe Jess, a poet I admire greatly, mentioned her on Facebook.
All good. But this morning she dismayed me a bit when she changed a bit of a quote from Nina Simone. Poets seem to love sectionalizing their poetry books. Trethaway had a section of poems set in Mississippi.
She used the partial quote from Simone as a epigraph for it: “Everybody knows about Mississippi.” When I read the quote I can hear Simone singing it bitterly and beautifully but there’s no way I don’t here the entire phrase: “Everybody knows about Mississippi GODDAM!’ which also the title of the song. I wonder why Trethaway presents the epigraph in such a sterile way as to omit the word. It disgusted me so much I quit reading her for the morning. I will, no doubt, return to finish the book but not today.
2. In their book, Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media, Singer and Brooking unsurprisingly talk about Russian disinformation.
I was surprised to learn how extensive this is. The government in Russia has for decades invested huge amounts of money creating an entire system of the weaponization of disinformation. It is staggering and not just about the 2016 election in America.
The main branch of the propaganda machine, RT (Russia Today), has more subscriptions on YouTube than any other news outlet in the world. We hear about the cyber wars, but it seems to me that the USA has been left entirely in the dust here. The Russians understand that disseminating misinformation is best done in plain sight. Citing the fictional amateur detective C. August Dupin from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Singer and Booking write “The very best way to hide something, Dupin explains, is to do so in plain sight. So it is with modern censorship. Instead of trying to hide information from prying eyes, it remains in the open buried under a hoard of half-truths and imitations.”
And when they write “hoard,” they mean it. The Russian govern has sunk billions of dollars into this effort and it is seen as military “defense.” In fact, several oligarchs who help with this funding are under indictment from Mueller.
The term, disinformation, was coined first in Russian with a fake etymology from France.
3. Historically “England’s America was disproportionately African.”
“One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night. Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants they out-numbered Europeans two and a half to one.” p.. 45-6 These Truths by Jill Lepore
Church went very well yesterday. I was happy with my playing. It was a little challenging to perform the Handel organ concerto in its entirety. I had it in my fingers a couple weeks ago to perform for the AGO chapter meeting. I didn’t put the same intensive preparation in for yesterday’s performance. However, it went well.
The choir sounded very well on our anthem.
I’m writing in the late afternoon. I went to the eye doctor in the morning and the allergist in the afternoon. My eyes are getting worse. The optometrist told me I was a candidate for cataract surgery whenever it got to the point I judged my eyesight bad enough to do so. It’s not too bad yet. He also drastically changed my prescription for lenses. I ordered two glasses this time. One strictly for driving the other for reading, and conducting.
The allergist had a few more tips about avoiding stuff that might make my rash worse.
Fascinating, eh?
Eileen and i watched half of this video yesterday.
I have read McChesney’s Rich Media Poor Democracy some years back. I learned a great deal from it. .
And we watched all of this one recently
We used Kanopy to watch these. I am finding Netflix and Amazon Prime cater to tastes very different from mine. I think that they have things I would l enjoy viewing. I’m just not in the targeted audience so browsing on them is not all that fruitful. I keep telling myself I’m going to use my laptop to find better stuff to watch on these two but I keep not messing with it. Laziness no doubt.
I haven’t been blogging much. I don’t have anything to report on the health front. Eileen and I walked over to Evergreen Commons yesterday and exercised for the first time in about six months. This hiatus dates back to the beginning of my reaction to a new blood pressure medicine. I did 45 minutes on the treadmill but slowly. Tomorrow I have an eye doctor appointment and an allergist appointment. I don’t think I’ll have time or energy to exercise but maybe on Tuesday.
On last Friday my visit to my therapist went well. Dr. Birky is a good listener and it was helpful to talk with him. Later that day I received a disturbing picture of an old friend who is also battling cancer. It was disturbing because he looked so ravaged in it. I dreamed about him that night.
This morning my strings and I will perform all of a Handel organ concerto: two movements for the prelude, a slow movement for the beginning of communion and the concluding gavotte for the postlude. That should be fun. The choir has nice anthem ready with added string parts. We will begin our Advent service music and hymns today.
Yesterday afternoon I noticed that the usual suspended huge Advent wreath had not been hung. I called around and finally connected with Rev Jen. She was surprised and sounded like she would try to get someone to do it. I’m curious to see if they get it hung by this morning’s Eucharist.
I have been playing through pages and pages of Buxtehude on the organ this week. I am going through the scores that I owned in undergraduate school. Once again I am surprised by how much of this music I have learned and performed, some of it in college and some of it in churches.
Buxtehude sits very nicely on the Pasi. Plus I am tapping in to his joie de vivre that pervades his music. It’s fun stuff. We have a little Buxtehude choral adaptation for an upcoming anthem in Advent. I have invited my cello player to play along. She and I will do a Frescobaldi piece for the prelude that day, but I think some Buxtehude on organ is order for the postlude. This is one of the reasons I began looking at Buxtehude this week.
I’m also casting about for a Christmas eve postlude. I think it’s nice to do something a bit more sedate after the late service. I would like to find a killer arrangement of a familiar Christmas Carol. I have been reading through these as well and have a stack of possibilities. It is such a pleasure to have a organ at my disposal that has such beautiful sounds.
I have been sleeping in till 7 AM. This morning I got up early so that I would have time to do some reading before the day begins. I’m working on Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare and Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Singer and Brooking. I ordered copies of these books yesterday. I have found that I do appreciate having hard copies of books I am reading and I read so slowly that I rarely can finish them in the time the library allows.
The relief in our house this morning was palpable after weeks of not knowing very much about my melanoma. We are, of course, not out of the woods yet. But we do see how things are going to proceed for a couple of weeks. This is helpful.
I posted about my oncologist visit on Facebook yesterday. Between this and friends and family the support has been overwhelming. I spoke briefly to the Chinese branch of the family this morning. Alex was taking her evening bath (It was around 8 PM there). She looked at me and immediately asked for Eileen. It was cute. Unfortunately Eileen was still sleeping but did get a kick out of this when I mentioned it to her.
After three tries, I finally have a new winter overcoat. Many thanks to Eileen for persisting and helping with this. My coat is the third one to arrive in the mail but the first one to fit well. After poking around online we were resigned to returning coats that did not fit until one did. We couldn’t find one long mens winter coat locally. It’s possible we could have found one in Grand Rapids but it was more convenient to do the mail thing.
Choir rehearsal went very well last night. I believe the group was happy to see that I had relatively good news from the oncologist visit. I have been keeping as many people informed about this stuff as possible. We settled down to working hard on upcoming music. Tuesday afternoon, despite a fatiguing day, I did a string arrangement of Sunday’s anthem. The piece, “Hark! A Thrilling Voice,” is a stuffy Anglican type arrangement by Ian Higginson. It was the last thing I did Tuesday before my evening martini and I was bushed. I was disappointed that it was so difficult for me to come up with string parts. After working on it for a while I discovered that Higginson has made some odd alterations to the third section of the piece. Like so many of these Anglican type anthems, he had written a bit of a melody which he used several times in different ways. But he had changed it in subtle ways the third time. When I figured this out, I gave up being creative and just had the strings play the melody in octaves with the choir singing it in unison. This is a lot of melody but oddly enough it and the other sections I came up with worked very well last night. I had warned the string players that I was unhappy with the arrangement and might make changes before Sunday. Now that doesn’t seem necessary to me.
For my morning poetry readings this morning I read the three poems in this week’s Archive issue. The other two were by Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. All three were excellent but Roethke’s especially struck me.
It can’t be a coincidence that the New Yorker editors chose a poem whose title seems apropos to the terrible time we are living through in the USA under the brutal leadership of our executive. This is a tough time for people who think we should live compassionately and unselfishly as possible.
Eileen and I drove over to Grand Rapids for my consultation with my oncologist this morning.
The appointment left me feeling more optimistic at least more than I have been feeling. I told my brother in a phone call later that I was feeling a tad less “mortal.” Dr. McCachill the surgeon was very informative and encouraging. Although my spot on my head is serious enough to warrant surgery, it is not necessarily certain that we are catching the melanoma late. From what Dr. McCahill said the melanoma could possibly be something that has only just begun to show itself. He said often the cause of this kind of melanoma comes from exposure to sunlight in one’s childhood.
He also said that he did not think my 6 month long rash was related to the cancer. This relieves some of my more imaginative daydreams of having cancer all over my body that shows itself in itchy red little rash (thankfully, this is not the case).
The surgery is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec 11 at 7:30 AM. We chose an early time. Later times are more likely to get delayed if another surgery takes more time than scheduled. I go in the day before so that they can put some kind of radioactive solution into the area of my spot. This is an outpatient procedure as is the surgery itself. Then the next day they will be able to see how the lymph disperses in this part of my body. At this point, they are planning to check the two lymph nodes under the chin bone on either side for cancer.
Even though I don’t have a lot more information, I am feeling very much better about facing this. It helps to meet Dr. McCahill and see that the clinic seems very efficient and friendly. We met him in a building near where the operation will take place. We went into that building today so that I could have blood drawn and get an EKG.
The tech that did the EKG recommended a restaurant nearby when I asked if there were any good ones. It was Little Bangkok, a Thai restaurant. I was already thinking of it since it showed up on my phone. We went there after the appointment, blood draw, and EKG for lunch. The food was very good.
I met with Rev Jen for our weekly meeting and brought her up to speed on the surgery. The nurse told me that I should be able to do a Wednesday evening rehearsal after this surgery on Tuesday. That is good! Rev Jen has been very clear that I need not worry about whether I will function during this period, that she and I will make sure someone subs for me. But, of course, I do worry about this. Loss of functioning is something us old people worry about (heh!).
My piano student canceled his lesson for this afternoon. So after setting up for this evening’s rehearsal I have come home to rest (and blog).
On Wednesday afternoons, as I rest up for the evening rehearsal, I usually read the latest New Yorker if it’s come in the mail yet. I have been doing this today. The issue is titled: “New York Stories: An Archival Issue.” I didn’t notice this until I read the Frank McCourt piece and then turned to another article that was obviously from the past as well.
This is not archival. They are working on making Armstrong’s home a museum. How cool is that! I have read about Armstrong’s life and can picture this house.
I have recently been searching out archived interviews with Anthony Burgess. It had not occurred to me to do so before this. I am enjoying watching these. There seem to be a ton of them available. Buckley and Burgess, what’s not to like?
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