Yesterday was my fourth Sunday not having to do church. Last night I dreamed about attending a concert. The players were all string players. I knew some of them. They were not happy with their performance. I remember giving the bass player a big hug of encouragement after the performance and listening to the cellist’s processing of the experience. Somehow I was involved in the playing but I’m unclear just how.

It’s a relief not to have a church dream to mark the fourth Sunday since quitting. I spent most of the day arranging my books. I have a new shelf in the study. Unfortunately I have been allowing my books to be in disarray in the living room. I have several bookshelves in that room and have started organizations more than once.

I have a shelf of T. S. Eliot stuff except for the wonderful Christopher Ricks edition which sits on my desk along with Emily Dickinson, Dante, and John Donne. I have a shelf of James Joyce stuff in the living room except for the stuff that is scattered throughout. I am a bit overwhelmed in trying to organize books on this floor. Upstairs my consistent goal is to shelf books by author. On the main floor I have found it convenient to have my music books in one place shelved mostly by author but sometimes by subject and my poetry books the same. I have also started little sections like African American history and music books and a folk music section.

My goal is to find a book when I want it. I need to organize the books on this floor somehow. I don’t think I have enough shelf space in the study to bring all of them into this room.

I like having a study and I like having important books on shelves in this room. But I haven’t figured out exactly how to do that.

And then there’s the planned upstairs music room.

I need to start working on that. I have put it off because it has had all kinds of stuff stored in it, but now most of that has been removed. Eileen and I are planning a trip to drop off games, clothes, and blankets to the Bibles for Mexico shop today. A lot of this stuff came from what will be the music room upstairs.

As soon as I can make some room in the music room we will arrange for someone to move the harpsichord from the church to the music room. I look forward to that. I’m also planning to put the marimba in that room. We may do them at the same time but that’s not necessary. The marimba disassembles and Eileen and I could probably do it ourselves, but we’ll see.

I am just beginning to see what it s to be “retired.” I put it in quotation marks because I’ve never emotionally understood church work as a job per se. I have always felt a bit like someone who does things he enjoys and gets a bit of pay for it. It’s still like that even without the responsibility of helping a community pray through its music. But the pay is coming from social security. Soon we will add a pension to it. And Eileen has her incomes from similar sources.

We are planning to hire a financial advisor after my eye surgery. They should help us sort all this out.

When Black History Is Unearthed,Who Gets to Speak for the Dead? by Jill Lepore

The October 4th issue of the New Yorker is the Fall book issue. I didn’t know they did one. The articles from it I am linking today are both dated September 27th but I have been reading them in the actual copy which is dated October 4th.

Jill Lepore always seems to grab me with her prose and ideas. This article about historic African American cemeteries is no exception. Lepore has a historians eye for complexity and coherence.

A Straight Line in the Darkness excerpts from Patricia Highsmith’s diaries

I have found three titles for this same article. It’s not unusual for a magazine or newspaper article to have a couple different headlines or titles, one in print and another online. But the title I have used is sort of the one in the actual magazine I have. A different title came up when I googled it. I’m about halfway through it. Highsmith is a writer I admire. The diary is bit gossipy but has interesting parts.

It’s a rainy morning in Holland, Michigan. I listened to We The People’s latest podcast during my morning routine. The participants outlined the upcoming Supreme Court docket and it doesn’t look good.

As I watch a fair amount of social media go by I suspect I am living in a age of propaganda in the U.S. Otherwise how can so many people support such many unsubstantiated and basically untrue notions. Of course truth might not have that much to do with it. It’s more about entertainment. But even the the entertaining is getting monstrous to me.

Case in point, the novel, The Vorrh by Brian Catling. I finished this on Friday. Whereas Kunzru put together a puzzle of characters and story and ultimately succeeds, in Gods Without Men for my money Catling doesn’t succeed with his array of characters and situations.

He pulls the story together at the end, but by that time I had lost patience with almost every character. I googled reviews and I seem to be in the minority. Michael Moorcock liked it in his 2015 Guardian Review.

I just took a moment and read this review. I learned from it that Catling was doing some satiric things on actual people of whom I have never heard. According to Moorcock not only does Catling come up with a character based on the French surrealist Raymond Russell, but Russell has written a book (mentioned in the novel) which also has a mysterious forest named The Vorrh. So maybe it’s just my ignorance showing. I note that nowhere does Moorcock say he likes the book. Only blurb worthy quotes and comparisons. I respect Moorcock as a writer, but I find the infighting about genre and so on uninteresting if not boring.

This reader did not like the book. It seems full of missed opportunities to wade into the nasty post colonial discussion of Europe and Africa. I know. I know. That’s not the point of telling a story. The story is the point. In this case as I followed the story I was repelled. Repelled by characters and situations. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing in a book. But I found myself questioning weird plot twists. Catling and his readers must have a taste for gratuitous bloody violence. More and more, I do not.

So maybe the judgment is upon me as a reader. Ignorant and seeking a character to admire or a plot with some daylight of redemption or decent humor. So be it. At this point, I’m not planning on reading the next two volumes of this trilogy that Moorcock was panting for in 2015.

Instead of reading yet another Kunzru novel I turned back to J. G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy. I have read two of the volumes, Troubles and The Singapore Grip which I remember enjoying. Farrell has a bitterly ironic eye for the fading empire. And he mercilessly concentrates on the perpetrators not the victims. He continues this in the last volume of the trilogy that I am now reading, The Siege of Krishnapur. It won the Booker Prize. It takes place in 1857, the year of what the Brits call “the great mutiny.” The introduction by Pankaj Mishra is very helpful in pointing out that “mutiny novels” were a Victorian thing for a while. Farrell’s story satirizes them and goes a step further in comedic ridicule. The intent reminds me a bit of Robin Diangelo’s insights about progressive white people in her Nice Racism.

The blurb on my copy of The Siege of Krishnapu describes the other two volumes of the trilogy. Troubles was “about the Easter 1916 Rebellion in Ireland. The Singapore Grip “takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set on the British Empire.” I have to quote the next part: “Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.”

I have all three in New York Review of Books reprint editions. These editions I find unfailingly well written and worth reading.