I finished The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. It’s the first book I have read by Thompson. Thompson has been mentioned to me by Jeremy before. Finally he ordered a couple titles and had them sent to me. It’s sort of a noir novella. Published in 1952, It is told in the first person by the killer, Lou Ford. Ford is a deputy sheriff in a small town in Texas. His personality gradually emerges into a full blown mad man. In the first chapter we watch over his shoulder as he spouts clichés to annoy people on purpose. “Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.”

It’s a tightly plotted period piece and was fun to read. I have that other title by him that Jeremy gave me and have interlibrary requested a third.

I haven’t heard from the Buildings and Grounds guy from Grace. I didn’t think about the fact that I was texting him on Thanksgiving weekend. But it’s possible I’m already on his persona non grata list along with most of Holland. I’ll give it a couple of days then contact Jen Adams and see if she has any ideas about who could move my harpsichord and marimba.

A friend of ours asked around at church yesterday about someone to repair our window. I haven’t done anything on this yet. But I’m sort of marking time until I have some good recommendations.

I have been meaning to get back to Thomas A. Sebeok’s I Think I Am A Verb: More contributions to the doctrine of signs. Wikipedia describes Sebeok as “a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician, and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field, he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication.” He died in 2001. I’m pretty sure I picked this up at a used book store or sale. I have always been fascinated by the title and have read in it before. But today I started at the beginning again. My reading technique is improving constantly and it’s worth starting over since I comprehend so much more the way I approach the written word these days.

Speaking of, here’s a great quote from Sebeok: “There appear to be two antipodal sorts of bookmen. There are those who derive endless delight from their solitary pleasure, which they pursue like self-stimulating laboratory rats, with electrodes implanted in their anterior hypothalamus, unceasingly bar-pressing in preference to any other activity. Then there are those of us whose bar-pressing habit is rewarded solely by a change in the level of illumination—in a word, novelty.”

I think I’m both of these.

New maps spark debate over major-minority districts

This is an AP article that mentions some Michigan stuff that was on the local paper’s web site (which is the only way I read it).

As I was reading a biography of C. P. E. Bach this morning, I realized that I have moved further away from academic musicians than academic scholars in general. I often think of my Eucharist professor, Neils Rasmussen, raising a finger and saying in the halls “Do not neglect to read the footnotes.” Then there was the liturgist Robert Taft from whom I took a Liturgical year course. And Paul Bradshaw. These men and their minds are so much more present to me than any of my music profs from grad school with the exception of Ethan Haimo from whom I took a Haydn course. Of course, Haimo was a bit of an outlier at Notre Dame du Lac anyway. I’m still slowly working my way through his book on Haydn. I thought of contacting him and letting him know that at least one student of his from that course is still thinking about Haydn. Then I saw he was teaching in Israel and thought maybe he might not be that interested to learn that. I still may reach out to him for the heck of it.

I think the fact that the liturgy department was so good and the music department full of unhappy and angry people might have something to do with my estrangement from music people. My music teachers at Wayne State were a different story. Ray Ferguson is often in my mind and others from WSU.

Maybe it has just been the luck of the draw but so many of the musical academic minds I have rubbed shoulders with seem to be disconnected from where my own understandings of music have ended up. I usually think it’s me, but it does occur to me that it could them who are out of step.

This morning I played through several little pieces by Hugo Distler from his Thirty Pieces for Small Organ or Other Keyboard Instruments. Then I played through several pages of Hindemith first piano sonata. I love this music. But I know both Distler and Hindemith are not terribly fashionable. Distler is probably limited pretty much to church music circles although he wrote a ton of beautiful music. And Hindemith was a huge presence when he was alive but seems to have fallen mostly out of favor. But I could be wrong since all of my input comes from reading and checking out stuff on YouTube and online.

I just searched Hindemith on YouTube and was very amused to see a two year old comment on the first piano sonata that said Hindemith was was “like the King Crimson group.” This is hilarious. I remember seeing King Crimson live. At one point they were a group I admired. I’ll have to look them up on Spotify and give them another listen.

I order a bunch of books by Ben Lerner from Readers World yesterday. I find him interesting. I’m not ready to commit to saying that I like his work a great deal. I did enjoy The Topeka School and am doing a reread of his long poem Mean Free Path but I’m not sure I understand the poem very well. I’m also reading a funny book by Lerner called The Hatred of Poetry. I don’t think I need to own this one. But I am interested in Lerner.

I finished Kunzru’s My Revolutions. Kunzru gives me a different perspective on the U.K. The book is a story of a leftist terrorist type who was living under a new identity whose life falls apart when he spots a woman from his past. In telling this story Kunzru revisits the main character’s past as a Marxist in the U.K. in the 70s. Fun stuff.

Kunzru and Lerner are on my mind as writers I want to read and learn more about.

Lerner sent me back to Marianne Moore since his little book The Hatred of Poetry begins with a poem of hers:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however with a perfect
contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

This reminds me of Randall Thompson’s definition of a novel: “A prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” If you google this you find that Neil Gaiman comes up as well as Jarrell. But I think it’s a Jarrell quote, possibly from an introduction he wrote.

I’m still reading Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, but since I finished Kunzru I’m thinking of also adding Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me to my daily reading. Jeremy Daum said to me at Thanksgiving that everyone should read this book, reminding me that he had sent me a copy. I only found my copy this morning so I’m tempted to add this one.