Eileen has cleverly prepared a place for our deaf and blind cat, Edison, in our basement. The porch where he has been living will be too cold for the winter. We have to sequester him at this point in his life to minimize the mess (poop and such). Eileen bought a rug and set up a comfortable room in the basement for him. She placed a remote thermometer sensor down there so we know exactly how warm or cold he is. The room is where our furnace is housed so I don’t think Edison will be cold.

My left eye is healing well. I have been only using glasses for TV. Eileen continues to help me with my daily regimen of eye drops. It’s down to two a day in the right eye and three a day in the left. Bless her!

Last night I tried something different. I had my fake martini as usual followed by a light meal. Then instead of my usual dish of diet ice cream, I had a whisky. This worked. There was probably a similar amount of calories in my whisky as in my ice cream. And then no snacks and to bed still lucid enough to do some reading.

This morning I got up and listened to John Dowland lute pieces and Charlie Parker and made bread. It’s in the oven now and will likely be ready before Eileen gets up. This is the first bread I have made since my eye operations.

I have also been playing Dowland’s lute pieces on the piano. This music is very charming and a life long love of mine. I always think of Philip K. Dick since I believe he also loved this music. I have a very cool edition that is in lute notation as well as in treble and bass clefs.

I have been playing piano variations of Beethoven.

You don’t hear much about these pieces but they are surprisingly wonderful. I own the two volumes published by Kalmus. I see that the picture I found on the web and put above of one of the volumes has a faint stamp of the University Music House in Ann Arbor. That used to be a favorite haunt of mine.

Yesterday’s foray into Beethoven and Burgess inspired me to pick up his This Man & Music. For some reason I had the impression this was all about Burgess’s own compositions and had put this book very low on my to-be-read list. I haven’t found any pieces by him that I like. I wish this wasn’t so since I admire him so much as a writer and thinker. But this book is more about Burgess’s ideas about music and has an entire short chapter explaining his very cool novel based on the Eroica symphony: Napoleon Symphony.

It is a treat for me to find anything by Burgess that I haven’t read. In fact, I enjoyed reading in this book so much that I picked up my Complete Enderby last night and continue a reread.

The pleasure of reading Burgess is intensified these days because when he uses a word I don’t recognize and quick check on the phone usually gets me quickly up to speed. But in This Man & Music, in one instance yesterday this didn’t work.

Burgess uses the word, “porable.”

Here’s the sentence: “The play and the poem and the novel have come to be regarded as primarily visual realities because of the supreme physical advantages of a printed text — portability, porability, privacy.”

Nothing in the OED and nothing in my beloved American Heritage Dictionary. After realizing it was probably one Burgess’s many word coinages, I looked closely at the word. It would make sense if he was using “pore” as in ponder (one of the definitions in my American Heritage). So in essence he meant “ponderable.” I can see why he did so, since the three words trip off the tongue with not only alliteration but a nice first and third syllable vowel in common between portability and porable.

I’ll close with some cool quotes from this book.

“Most art is a failure, but art that does not risk failure is not worth attempting.”

“No one can judge a piece of music by merely hearing it; no one can judge a novel just by reading it.”

And my favorite so far:

“There is something childish about institutional or collective music, with bullying and corky choirmaster quips, o public humiliations over wrong notes, shouting and hockey-mistress cajolery, facetiousness about chippy-choppy rhythms, ‘Don’t you eat ice cream?’ if you fail to spot a Neapolitan sixth. I was, I began to see from consultations with bona fide students of the subject, better out of it, a free autodidact.”

With any luck you can see an embed of the 2021 Anthony Burgess lecture by Laura Tunbridge above. As with so many things I write about here, I’m not sure how many readers will be interested in this. No one probably is as interested as I am with the exception of my brother. But this is a fun lecture. Tunbridge plays excerpts of Beethoven and does talk about Burgess quite a bit.

Tunbridge was asked presumably because of her book on Beethoven: Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces. I suppose any lecture that includes Burgess, Beethoven, Enderby, and a recording of Burgess playing a terrible electronic keyboard is one I don’t want to miss. The recording by the way is at the very end of the lecture if you want to skip to that. I found it instructive to listen to Burgess ramble at the keyboard since he describes his piano playing abilities in various ways most of which confuse me.

On a personal note, the terrible sound of the keyboard reminds me of a dream I had night before last.

I dreamt that a church had hired me as their musician. They seemed very pleased to have me and thought I was a bit of a whiz. I was in the church before service. A colleague of mine who shall remain nameless but not unrecognizable was playing at the organ. In real life this colleague cannot stand the sight of me and keeps me at an arm’s distance despite the fact that we have known each other for decades. In the dream he is playing a terrible electric organ whose sounds rival the insipidity of Burgess’s. There is a family of Hispanics in front of him. He is apparently playing something they have either requested or are sure to love. Their pleasure is evident.

I am standing nearby preparing to play for service. As I listen I muse that the first thing I will do is turn off the bloody vibrato and try to get a straight tone. I wonder (in the dream) just how this will affect the good opinion of the community that has hired me and is obviously used to the terrible sound. In the dream it does not matter to me. I speculate that they will just have to be disappointed.

The eye operation went well yesterday. I am scheduled to return this morning for the post op exam. As I write I can see out of my new lens in my left eye. The print on my screen is legible with it but not as clear as the right eye.

The appointment is for 8:00 or 8:15. We have received conflicting notices. I need to call Eileen at 7 which is in ten minutes. She has been extremely helpful with all this. Not only driving me back and forth to appointments, but also she has helped me with my daily regimen of eye drops which is considerable. I have two weeks left of drops in the my right eye and three in the left. These drops are anti-inflammatories.

While we were sitting in the car by the beach on Tuesday, Eileen read the NYT Times article about some of the participants in the January 6 insurrection at the capital that I linked here on Monday. She shared some but not all of my reaction to it.

Paul McCartney on Writing “Eleanor Rigby” | The New Yorker

It looks like David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, admires the Beatles enough to not only include the lame article by McCartney in a recent issue linked above, but also to write a different one himself. I’m interested in the Beatles but I’m not sure there’s that much that hasn’t already been said about them. I don’t listen to their recordings that much because I know them too well and don’t often have the urge to hear them again.