It’s not as easy to retire as you might think. I’m coming up on six months since I retired. I am easing into being more and more my true self. I monitor myself for compulsions. Since I can basically do most of what I want to do, I notice closely when I feel that I “should” be something. Most of these compulsions are left over from my previous un-retired life. Most of them do not apply to who I am now.

I would probably listen more closely to the old compulsion to continue to improve my musical skills. But I know that my skills of executing music are ebbing a bit in the face of my hands shrinking. So I haven’t done much technique practice since retiring. Unless I can get my hands fixed (which is something Eileen keeps saying I should look into again), it seems weird to throw myself deeply into maintaining and improving my basic music skills.

The freedom that I was hoping for has been very gradual in coming. At the same time I think I am rapidly changing my understanding of myself. In a good way. I have been interested in growing and changing, but this change is very fundamental.

First of all, rabbit holes are available. By rabbit hole I mean the ability to follow distractions and curiosities in a way that is difficult when trying to do all the stuff I think I needed to do when I had a job.

And now I can follow multiple rabbit holes. In the back of mind a composition is rattling around. Probably more than one. But in the foreground is seeking a better understanding of the country where I live. When I was working it felt justified to read books about music and church stuff. Now I feel justified in basically reading whatever I want to. Right now this includes Fugitive Poses by Gerald Vizenor. But he’s only one of several books I am reading about native Americans.

This reading is contributing to my thinking about using traditions like native American and African American and Appalachian in my composition. I am rapidly coming to an understanding of what it means to appropriate traditions. Vizenor has taught me that my understanding of the “other” in my country has more to do with the dominant cultural understanding than any clear picture of people who are coming from these points of view.

This is helpful to me and has been so in many ways.

In addition I have been thinking a lot about my extended family of origin and how I fit in to it. Vizenor, Stein and others (especially poets) have helped me see myself a little more clearly and to take responsibility for my self in as many ways as possible.

I usually wonder how I fit in to the story of my family. I wonder this because so many times in my life I haven’t seem to do so. Since I’m not unhappy with who I am at this point, it’s helpful to consider that much if not of all of my disconnectedness has more to do with how others both within and without of my family system have attempted to define me, often as “other.” This kind of defining has come more from people around me than myself since I see myself so differently.

This is helpful.

Our internet was down for a bit yesterday. It’s discouraging how dependent one gets on the stupid thing. I called the Comcast robot in charge. She offered to text me when it came back which she did. I was reduced to taking out books to look up stuff instead of lazily googling. I was able to find my look ups in real books. Think of that.

Eileen and I watched Alex while Elizabeth taught her art class. I guess it’s sort of a painting class right now. Their model has religion. He was talking about God to the class causing a few eye rolls (according to Elspeth). He was born in England to Jamaican parents. Apparently not as obnoxious as some religious types.

Alex seemed to have remembered that she needs to ask me early in the visit (before martini time) to go to the upstairs music room. This is the room which now houses the harpsichord, the congas, and the marimba. There are other instruments laying around as well including several recorders, banjo, and guitars. Alex does not like to be up there by herself other wise she would have pretty much free rein. I don’t blame her for not wanting to be alone sometimes at this stage of her life. Her life has been quite an adventure so far and must be a bit disconcerting at times. She is a bright little thing.

So upstairs we went. I’m not sure quite what her attraction is other than the novelty of the musical instruments. She quickly tires of playing the marimba. Yesterday I put the congas on the stand which allows them a nice ring. I play too of course. I have been playing a movement of a Bach violin unaccompanied sonata on the marimba for her the last couple of times we were in the room together. Also Spanish Eyes keeps bubbling up from old memory. And we do some improvising. She seemed to get that the congas make a better sound on the rack than on the floor.

Before long we were back downstairs and I played some kids songs on the piano always checking in to see if she recognized stuff like “If I only had a brain.” She knew most of my repertoire and we all did some singing. Eileen and Alex did some dancing but dancing is hard to do when one is playing the piano.

Eileen and Alex began some elaborate pretend stuff. This may have been before the singing. But I was able to pass Alex on to Eileen and do some reading which is not always easy when Alex is in the house. It helps to put my ear phones on.

I do like it when Elizabeth and Alex spend the night and I can have some time with Elizabeth in the morning before they go home. There was a lot of processing Bob Daum’s funeral, some verbal (Elizabeth) and some nonverbal (Alex). It’s a complex family system with three families from Bob’s three widows. Only his current widow was at the funeral but Diane the first wife was around afterwards to help identify people in the pictures they shared with each other. Apparently they told each other all the stories about Bob some of which are not particularly flattering. I even witnessed some of these events when I met him at Jeremy’s graduation from Washington U with his J.D.

I have been spending quite a bit of time with Brahms late solo piano works. These are gems and my hands haven’t completely quite functioning so I can sort of play them. It’s ironic to lose facility at this stage of the game since my keyboard skills only really improved in the last couple of decades. I haven’t been working on technique at all. My playing is largely for my own satisfaction. I will have to confront if I have enough skill to play with people if I get that urge. It has occurred to me that my skills are quite diminished and may not exactly be up to some fun chamber music like stuff. I’ll have to write some easy stuff if I get the urge.

Here’s Bob’s obit.

Dr. Robert Daum, an infectious disease specialist, dies – Chicago Tribune

Bob’s last wife Susan had a daughter, Shannon Vavra, before she married Bob. Vavra is a professional journalist and did some hustling to get Bob’s obit in the Tribune. In fact, she wrote an obit but the Tribune insisted on rewriting it. Jeremy thought they probably made it a little worse which is believable when you read it.

Eileen and I watched the Zoom funeral. Shannon stood next to Susan as she gave her eulogy.

I have been finding my reading more and more absorbing. Gerald Vizenor and Gertrude Stein are charming me. I have added them to my other daily readings. This takes up quite a bit of time each day. Time spent in pleasure and learning. From Stein I am learning to rethink families. In The Making of Americans she slowly but surely documents how individuals are in families and how traits and behavior move through individuals. These traits and behavior are embedded in a never ending dance of emphasis or fading. It has helped me thinking about my family.

Vizenor has also helped me in this way. I am beginning to understand that the “other” is a creation of the dominant group of people. It is easy to see in natives. As the colonizers pushed people from their land and redefined them as “noble savages” at best and non humans to be exterminated at worst, it’s easy to see that this about the colonizers themselves. Part of the insights of Vizenor is that natives who remain connected to themselves as natives end up easier understood in terms of a post modern understanding of what has happened and is happening in America from the point of view of the “other.”

So much of the history of America is about refashioning the stories to fit the dominant discourse.

Vizenor quotes Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse). White “argues … that ‘in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in sciences.’

Verbal fictions. A good name for much historical thinking and writing.

As I begin to see indians as a creation of the people who conquered them, it’s easy to see African Americans in a similar way. After all the caricature of the Minstrel Show was invented by white people. The racialization of the people who were brought here and enslaved is something done to them, not by them.

This is a simple insight but it fits into my own attempt to understand my own connection to the “other.”

If I have been misunderstood in my life as a bit of a misfit or a one of kind weirdo this is something that was done to me not by me. Of course I exacerbate this little dance partly out of survival but admittedly out of mild narcissism.

Scapegoats are created by communities for a reason.

If I think about how white nationalism is returning to America it helps to think of people creating “others” to despise and revile and repress for the needs of themselves and a dominant culture.

My own position as misfit is a mild thing compared to the terrible things that are done to the “other.”

As Vizenor and Stein help me understand my life I continue to examine my ongoing role in my extended family.

Of course this also reinforces my sense of well being and gratefulness at how my life has proceeded and is proceeding now in retirement.

On a crankier note, I am having trouble getting through Nico Muhly’s BBC Inside the Music show. Muhly is a young composer I have paid some attention to as a church musician. His choices for his show have been putting me off as has his own comments about the music. Click above and listen for yourself if you’re curious. I found Julie Fowlis’s show (no longer available) representative of someone who obviously loved music. I learned stuff from her. Muhly show seems to be about his paltry ambitions to connect with stuff and disguises his own preferences. At least that’s what I got out of it.

Granted I’m not getting more tolerant of this sort of thing in my old age.

I have been playing piano a bit less. I hope it’s not as a result of the continually gradual worsening of my dupuytren’s contracture. It’s not getting better but I wasn’t expecting it to. Today I did play some Haydn. Yesterday I played from the Fitzwillian Virginal Book. Before that I played Brahms.

I have been spending a lot of time with Gerald Vizenor. I am being drawn into the maelstrom of his ideas and stories. The ideas are complex and connect a set of his own word coinage and usage to the semiotic and philosophical ideas of people like Foucault and Derrida—-to mention only a couple…. he also references Nabakov, Nietzsche, Che Guevara, Thomas Jefferson, and Jerzy Kosinksi. It’s going to be a while until I wrap my head around his thoughts. But until I do here’s another of his stories.

Before I type it here you need to know that Clement in this story is Clement William Vizenor, Vizernor’s father.

As far as the use of lowercase and italicized indian, here’s one of Vizenor’s comments: “The simulation of the indian, lowercase and italics, is an ironic name in Fugitive Poses. The Indian with an initial capital is a commemoration of an absence—evermore that double absence of simulations by names and stories. My first use of the italicized indian as a simulation was in The Everlasting Sky. The natives in that book were the oshski anishinaabe, or the new people

[here Vizenor footnotes his own book: The Everlasting Sky: New Voices of the People Named the Chippewa (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1972) he goes on with this explanation in the footnote: “Before you begin listening to the oshki anishinaabe speaking in this book, please write down a short definition of the word indian,” he wrote in the introduction, “Your brief organization of thoughts about the word indian will help you understand the problems of identity among tribal people who are burdened with names invented by the dominant society.”]

Then he finishes off his remarks about the word indian: “Since then, natives are the presences, and indians are simulations, a derivative noun that manes an absence, in my narratives.”

Whew!

Here’s the story.

“Clement, his brothers, and other natives in urban areas were indians by simulation, transethnic by separation, but native in the stories of their survivance. One contractor refusted to hire my father and uncles as house painters because they were indians; the contractor reasoned that indians never lived in houses, and therefore would not know how to paint one. Consequently, my father, uncles, and other natives had to present themselves to subsequent contractors as some other emigrant; at last my father and uncles were hired to paint houses as Italians.”

All quotes from Gerald Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses.

Vizenor quotes from such a wide range of authors that I thought should try to get copies of a couple of books to help me understand what Vizenor was getting at. The first was Homo poeticus : essays and interviews by Danilo Kiš.

This was in the MelCat catalog which means I could interlibrary loan it which I did.

The second book was Jean Baudrillard : selected writings edited and introduced by Mark Poster

This was in the MelCat Catalog but was not available for interlibrary loans. It was only 20 bucks on Amazon so I just ordered the damn thing. I made a note where he quoted from these and the page numbers he indicated. I hope this helps me understand this stuff better.

I said yesterday I was feeling overwhelmed with all the books I’m trying read. So of course I logged off and pulled out The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein and started reading it for the umpteenth time.

It wasn’t just because it was her birthday yesterday. I have been thinking of getting back to this book for a while. I continue to grapple with the insane history of America. I know that I have a fierce connection to being American that comes to me largely through my own life and the arts and learning about the terrible things that are part of our heritage. So Stein is a logical choice. She lived in Paris by like so many expats intensified her own relationship to her country. I have been curious where she takes this story. Maybe this time I’ll stick with the book longer.

Eileen had a Zoom breakfast with her group of women who all sang in the alto section of the Grace choir when I was the director. They have continued to seek each other out for conversation even though they are not all part of the choir now. For that matter, Eileen reports that the choir has not been rehearsing. I try not to pay attention to what is happening at Grace so I don’t really know what the deal is. But I think this kind of connection is excellent and I told Eileen today I am jealous of this kind of connection since I haven’t been able to establish much of this while living in Holland Michigan.

It’s not all me. I have reached out many times trying to establish friendships or connections and have been rebuffed or fizzled out time and time again. This does not include Rhonda, Jordan, or my piano trio people. But I am amused to mull over attempts that I have made that have come to naught. I do wonder if this is connected to my own strong demands on people I have relationships with. Or is it another case of not quite looking and acting the part and once again being under estimated or even misunderstood? I am lucky to have someone as strong as Eileen to be a companion. I know it’s not always easy for her.

I exercised while Eileen was on the Zoom call. We had breakfast before the call. Today is also when we try to connect with Sarah in England so we did that as well. It was a lot of time for Eileen to be in front screens talking with people but I think she enjoys it all.

I am trying to finish Timon of Athens by Shakespeare so I can move on to Coriolanus. I noticed recently that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem entitled Coriolan (his spelling) and wanted to read the play before checking out his poem which I have already read at least once but don’t recall. Also his essay, “Hamlet and his problems” beckons. Apparently he declares Coriolanus superior to Hamlet. Who knows.

Enough for today. Off to read and have a martini.

It was six degrees when I got up this morning. But no snow accumulation. When I went out to put up the flag and get the newspaper the air was so cold it hurt a little bit to inhale. I recognize that feeling. Living in Michigan most of my life I have been exposed to some extreme weather. When I was courting Eileen I did quite a bit of fishing including ice fishing. You can stay pretty warm outside despite extreme cold. You have to wear layers including long underwear and you must at all costs stay dry. If you do that it’s surprising how well one can stay relatively warm outdoors.

Of course I haven’t been ice fishing in a long time. But I am finding myself very appreciate of the little bit of outdoors around my house. I have been following how our milk weed plants refuse to die in the winter and manage to stay beautiful in snow with wispy seeds dangling but not detaching. I watch birds at our bird feeder and notice their sounds when I am outside. The air was clear and the sky deeply blue this morning when I was out.

One of the first things Eileen said this morning was how lucky we are to have a warm house. Soon after that she pointed out that since Alex’s Grandpa Bob died on Tuesday I am now the last living grandpa in our extended family. Nice.

Today was my biweekly appointment with Dr. Birky. I came out of the appointment feeling good. Birky usually leaves me in that space. Poor guy. Today when he asked me what was going on in my life he got an earful of Gerald Vizenor and Susan Howe. I finished two books by Howe yesterday: Concordance and The Birth-Mark. The next book by Howe I want to read is My Emily Dickinson.

But I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed right now with all the books I have going. It’s not the time to even interlibrary loan My Emily Dickinson. But it’s definitely in my future.

This afternoon Eileen and I watched Bob Daum’s funeral via Zoom. Wow. Zoom takes an already awful experience like a funeral and makes it ten times worse. The sound was terrible. The “prelude” seemed to be some kind of a device stuck in front of a terribly microphone. It was distorted beyond any semblance of coherence. Apparently Daum was fond of classical music. I didn’t know that but I didn’t have much contact with him. At the end of the ceremony they played a recording of a Beethoven piano sonata. Again awful sound.

It reminded me that I am pleased to be estranged from all things church. The service was at a funeral home. It was decorated in a sort of sixties miniature church architecture. Eileen’s goal was to see Elizabeth and Alex if they were there. She missed them when they were briefly on camera. She went back and replayed the video of the occasion to see Elizabeth.

At first I wasn’t going to watch but it seemed sort of disrespectful to not do so. Jeremy seemed the most collected of all the family members talking. I know he is used to speaking under duress (and often in another language). He handled himself very well in my opinion. That is, what I could understand of what he is saying despite the bad audio.

I have been reading my way through Joy Harjo’s collection, When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. This morning when I grabbed it to read a poem I noticed in the bio, the poet, Kimberly M. Blaisser, had written a book on Vizenor entitled Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition.

I felt a little satisfactory chills and appreciation of another incident of serendipity in my life and made a note of the title for future checking out.

Here are a couple of quotes by Vizenor for today:

“[A] sense of self is a creation, an aesthetic presence; the self is not an essence, or an immanence, but the mien of stories.”

I really like that. He added this quote himself: “The self is a narrative construed ‘not as a prelinguistic given that merely employs language, much as we might employ a tool, but rather as a product of language.’ “

The quote is credited to Anthony Paul Kerby in his 1991 book Narrative and Subjectivety.

Elizabeth and Alex left this morning. They are driving back to Delton to grab some stuff and coming to Grand Rapids and catching a plane around 4 PM. They will land at the Reagan Airport in D.C. where Elizabeth has already booked a room and a car. Jeremy will join them there. Jeremy’s Dad died Tuesday after a long debilitating illness. Jeremy’s brother Michael was there when he died. The rest of the family has quickly gathered there. Jeremy flew over on Wednesday. This has been long expected but it doesn’t make it any easier for everyone.

Eileen and I went to the hearing aid people on Wednesday. We have very good insurance and if we go through the right people (TruHearing) we can both get a set of hearing aids for about $1400 each. They list at about $5k. They should arrive in about a week and then we will go get fitted. Ah, old age!

I had a nice chat with Elizabeth over coffee before she left this morning. She was up last night booking all the stuff for today. I admire her energy and fortitude. I do enjoy those little moments when I can sit and listen to her. It’s not as easy as it sounds since Alex like most seven year olds takes up most of the oxygen in the house when she is here.

I am enjoying getting into Gerald Vizenor’s work. I am carefully rereading the introduction to Fugitive Poses. As I was telling Elizabeth this morning that since Vizenor is in his eighties, I am processing a lifetime of astute and astounding Native American perspective and a parallel and related path of journalism and scholarship.

I was tickled to see that I already had a book by him in my library.

The Heirs of Columbus looks to be a fun read. Wikipedia tells me it’s one of fourteen novels he has published. I hope I continue to feel so enthusiastic about this man and his work. That’s a lot of novels plus his other works that will provide me a lot of enjoyment.

While thumbing through The Heirs of Columbus I recognized a story he told at the lecture. Here’s how he told it in his novel.

“The Anishinaabe … remember that Naanabozho, the compassionate tribal trickster who created the earth, had a brother was a stone: a bear stone, a human stone, a shaman stone, a stone, a stone, a stone.

“Naanabozho was the first human born in the world, and the second born, his brother, was a stone. The trickster[Naanabozho] created the new earth with wet sand. He stood on his toes as high as he could imagine, but the water rose closer to his nose and mouth. He would dream without a mouth or a nose, but he would never leave the world to the evil gambler and his dark water. The demons in the water caused him to defecate, and with pleasure, but his shit would not leave; several turds floated near his mouth and nose.

“Naanabozho was at the highest point on the earth and could not move, so he invented meditation with trickster stories and liberated his mind over his own excrement. The trickster created this New World with the sand a muskrat held in her paws.” from The Heirs of Columbus by Gerald Vizenor

Again I’m in the position of wanting to write quickly so that I can spend time reading. It looks like Gerald Vizenor is my flavor of the month. He is amazing. I find it difficult to say exactly why since his ideas are so wide ranging. In the introduction to Fugitive Poses he draws on time as a visiting professor at Tianjin University. While there he taught The Red Pony and Being There. He ran into some censorship problems since the only way for him to get his students access to books was to have a few pages photocopied to be read each day in class. This allowed the censors to monitor every word he was having them read. The photocopier “broke down” around page 90 in Being There due to some explicit sexual description.

Two pages later he describes provoking a censorious reaction in Elaine Kim, chair of The Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader was featured in a locked glass cabinet where faculty and their recent publications were displayed.

Kim ordered the removal of the book cover because, “I feel an obligation to the women of this department who are always subjected to sexual harassment in the media. I to am sick of naked ladies—and men too, for that matter–in the media.”

Here is Vizenor’s description of the above cover: “The cover of Shadow Distance is a color reproduction of an original painting by German artist Dirk  Görtler. The expressionistic montage of totemic and trickster scenes from Bearheart [a novel by Vizeno], on the right, a portrait of the author an a Conoco truck stop sign in front of a bear. An androgynous nude trickster figure faces the bear, the omega letter is painted on the back of the trickster. The word muralts, a neologism, mounted on the truck stop sign over the head of the trickster, and omega, the end, are ironic, not erotic.”

There’s more by Vizenor but he did not include a picture of the book as I have.

Two pages later Vizenor sent me scrambling to get my Modern Library Thomas Jefferson as he delves in some detail in Jefferson’s odd contradictory writings both about Native Americans and Blacks.

I’m only on page twenty of this book and my head is reeling.

Vizenor combines an amazing erudition with the perspective of the trickster and he calls them: “storiers.”

Just for fun I have linked the lecture I listened to this morning to begin with a couple stories he tells during the Q and A.

It’s a rainy afternoon in Holland, Michigan. They say snow is on its way but we’ll have to wait and see. I am almost to Act V of Timon of Athens by Shakespeare. I don’t think I’ve read it before. Timon has crashed and burned, being a rich citizen who gave too much of his money to friends and ends up digging in the dirt, destitute and scorned by all who exploited him and took his largess. At least that’s where he is at the end of Act IV.

If I understand correctly, this play was never performed in Shakespeare’s time. And many critics I consult seem to think it’s one of his weaker plays. But I am liking it. I guess I identify a little bit with Timon. Mostly he’s wonderfully bitter. I like that.

I just checked and his name is pronounced TAI-mon. I have been wondering exactly how to say it. I did TAI-mon some of the time, but not confidently.

I did get in the car and drive to the library to return some books and pick up Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence by Vizenor. Vizenor is an Anishinabe critic and novelist. “The Anishinaabeg are a group of culturally related indigenous peoples present in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States” according to Wikipedia. Anishinaabeg is the plural form. The authors of The Art of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance & Myth of Michigan’s Anishinaabe, 1946-1955 have used this term as an umbrella for the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi people living in the Michigan lower peninsula. But Wikipedia says it covers more than these three.

The inscriptions for the Vizenor book are interesting. The first one is a quote from Kafka’s “The Wish to Be a Red Indian.”

“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.” Kafka

I think that might be the entire piece. Kafka has done a lot of little pieces like this.

There are several of these at the beginning of the book. Besides Kafka they are drawn from The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion by Edmond Jabès, In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner, The Work of Fire by Maurice Blanchot, The Agony of Flies by Elias Canetti, and The Names by N. Scott Momaday. It’s quite a list.

I’m wanting to go read about Timon of Athens and read some of Vizenor before my evening martini. In the meantime here’s one more of the lovely quotes at the beginning of Vizenor’s book.

“In general, the writer seems to be subjected to a state of inactivity because he is the master of the imaginary, and those who follow him into the realm of the imaginary lose sight of the problems of their true lives. But the danger he represents is much more serious. The truth is that he ruins action, not because he deals with what is unreal but because he makes all of reality available to us. Unreality begins with the whole.” The Work of Fire by Maurice Blanchot.

I signed up for a free three month trial today for Amazon Music. I have not been very happy with Spotify. I have many complaints not the least of which is the amount information they routinely do not provide for recordings. When Neil Young and Joni Mitchell took a stand against Josh Rogan and withdrew their entire collection it gave me pause. They are actually two that I do listen to quite a bit on Spotify. Usually Amazon Music only offers a month free trial but they have upped and it’s hard not to guess that it’s because of the Spotify controversy.

What I would love is a good classical music service. This morning after I signed on for the three month trial I was in the mood to listen to Brahms. Poof. Easy peasy. Then I checked Young and Mitchell recordings. Sooprise. Sooprise. There they were.

Yesterday I skipped blogging. I got up late and went right to work making bread. I did a Shipt order and spent the rest of the day goofing off.

I noticed recently that I have been letting my unread copies of the Sunday New York Times Book Review accumulate. I decided to fix that by going through them and clipping reviews that interest me and that recommend books I might want to look at. This takes time which is probably part of why I have gotten behind.

I find the differences between printed papers I look at and online access significant. We get the Holland Sentinel daily and the New York Times on Sundays. I tend to read both of them online instead of in person. Eileen reads the Sentinel over breakfast. I read the online version then as well. We compare notes and find many differences. Mostly in terms of what the paper presents on its front page and the order and coherence of presentation of the online app.

Yesterday Jamel Bouie had an article in the Opinion Section. I wanted to read it since he is someone I follow and pay attention to what they have to say. However the headline in the paper didn’t draw me in. Is Slavery An Evil Beyond Measure? it proclaimed on the front page of the section. Well sure it is. The subtitle clarified a bit but I didn’t look closely at it: “Data science is unlocking new insights about the U.S. system, but there is a danger in trying to quantify suffering.” This does a better job describing the contents of the article but it didn’t register in my pea brain.

I turned to the article and read the first paragraph which quoted a grisly description of what it was like to travel in a ship bring people to the Americas to be sold as slaves. Nope, I thought and turned Viet Thanh Nguyen’s article, “A Disturbing Book Changed My Life.” Nguyen is someone whose fiction I have read and admired so I was already sold when I saw his name on an essay as the author.

Nguyen’s essay did not disappoint. He has a great mind and I like his prose.

But again there was a discrepancy between Nguyen’s headline in the printed paper and what’s online.

Also when I bookmarked the page there was a third variation.

Nguyen’s headlines “A Disturbing Book Changed My Life.” printed version
“My Young Mind Was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.” the title online
Opinion | What the Battle Over Banning Books Is Really About – The New York Times this is what my bookmarking service, Diigo.com, automatically saw as the title for the article.

Weird.

But in Bouie’s case, the title that came up in my NYT app interested me more than the print and I decided to read the article which ended up being quite good.

Bouie’s headlines: “Is Slavery An Evil Beyond Measure? Data science is unlocking new insights about the U.S. system, but there is a danger in trying to quantify suffering.” print version
“We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was” title online
Opinion | We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was – The New York Times bookmarked title.

There’s Nothing Quite as Distressing as This Piece The pianist Paul Lewis picks his favorite page of Brahms’s late solos, a work of “abject anguish.”

This is the article that made me think I wanted to listen to some Brahms this morning. I haven’t finished it yet but I just checked the Amazon music app and the recordings in this article are available on it. By the way, the Amazon Music app is expanded beyond what comes automatically with Amazon Prime. It usually costs 7.99 a month. This is cheaper than what I pay for Spotify Premium (9.99)

Since a genius like Fanny Hensel spent her entire musical life in the shadows, it inspires me that living in the shadows musically, like I guess I do, is just fine and a worthy way to aspire to be a composer and musician.

I might as well mention my unhappiness with the music episode of the 1619 podcast here. When I first began listening to the presenter, Wesley Morris, narrate his ideas, I was discouraged that it was so anecdotal and a bit vapid. He describes spending some time a friend putting together a meal. They listened to a Pandora playlist the name of which I can’t make out. It consisted of Doobie Brothers, Seals and Croft. Morris was born in 1975 and seemed to relate to the music (as did I). Then he begins thinking about Black influence on the music he was listening to. This somehow leads him to a truncated discussion of the white invention of Minstrel Music but eventually sees Motown as a crowning achievement of Black music.

First I fact checked Morris a bit in my copy of Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans (Third edition), and satisfying myself that he had indeed simplified the story tremendously (How else could you do so in a silly podcast?). Then I decided it would be only fair if I checked out his chapter in 1619 Project (the book). I learned that he can write good sentences which is no mean feat in my book. The music chapter begins much better then the podcast episode with him seeing a temporal connection between Birmingham Sunday (the senseless 1963 bombing of Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed young Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair) and the Motown music on the charts at the time.

This was more coherent.

Later I learned that Morris is a staff writer for the NYT magazine and critic at large for the NYT. He is the only person to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. And he has done so twice. It is confusing that he was asked to do the music section of this book and part of my frustration is the exclusive understanding of music as primarily popular culture and not art. I’m still reading his essay. I am expecting it to be better than the silly podcast he did.

And more importantly Adam Hochschild in his November 2021 review of the book version of the 1619 project helped me put the music comments in the larger perspective of what the book and the project accomplish. Which is quite a lot.

I am 100 per cent supportive and interested in learning the retelling and correcting of the history America’s slavery and subsequent white racism. And I have to grant that the 1619 Project had bigger fish to fry than my own love of music. Hochshild makes a very friendly, supportive, and clear-eyed critique and argues convincingly that the book and project ended up flawed but still very important. But he didn’t mention music.

So there’s that.

But I promised to mention how Virginia Woolf is helping me thinking about composing as well many other things. In my Thursday blog, I described how R. Larry Todd, the author of Fanny Hensel: the Other Mendelssohn, mentioned an essay by Woolf. His mention sent me up my stairs to see if the essay was in any of the books by Woolf I own. It wasn’t, but I did find a 1929 essay she published in Life and Letters a literary review of which I own a tattered copy.

The title of her essay is “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.” I read it and was reminded how often Dr. Burney is cited in the biography of C. P. E. Bach I am reading. Burney was a fan of C.P.E and spent time with him. Woolf’s essay is not about C.P.E. but still it continued to expose me to how I can very modestly identify with people (women specifically) who are shunted to the side in our histories and stories. In this case, young Fanny Burney daughter of the doctor and a prolific diaries and essayist as was Burney himself. The difference is that he got all the limelight and recognition.

But this is not near as important as the inspiration I receive from the continual music of Woolf’s sentences. Here are the ones in this essay I quite like.

“But there was, one vaguely feels, something a little obtuse about Dr. Burney. The eager, kind, busy man, with his head full of music and his desk stuffed with notes, lacked discrimination.”

“To his [Burney’s] innocent mind, music was the universal specific. If there was going to be any difficulty music would solve it.

There were others but these are the only two I marked.

Susan Howe continues to inspire. Here’s a quote of her remarks in an interview regarding how she makes poetry. It rang true in my mind and reminded me of what it’s like to compose music.

“You open yourself up and let language enter, let it lead you somewhere. I never start with an intention for the subject of a poem. I sit quietly at my desk and let various things—memories, fragments, bits, pieces, scraps, sounds—let them all work into something.” Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark

I keep thinking about a composition. At this point I am thinking of a three movement suite of sorts. Probably for Marimba/Congas, Violin, Cello, and possible Keyboard. More importantly in my mind I would like to have each of these three movements connect to a particular American expression: I. Native Americans II. African Americans (Spirituals?), and III. Appalachian Americans. At this point I am not thinking of using actual pieces from these traditions. I’m more interested in honoring these traditions that I admire and see as constituent aspects of American music.

It has occurred to me that the three movements should be medium fast, slow, and quick. I am dithering about how to approach this. This kept me awake early this morning. Each movement could feature an instrument such as Marimba/Congas on the first movement, Cello on the second, and Violin on the last. I am thinking of using the Violin in a bit of a fiddle manner.

One idea I am kicking around is to write a good melody and use it thematically in each movement. I haven’t decided to never use pre-existing melodies in my compositions. But it seems that this time I want to see if I could do this without directly using material in each tradition.

My relationship to making up music has been an odd lifetime obsession. The first time I went to college I majored in Music Composition. This was at Ohio Weslyan U in Delaware. By that time I had already written tons of music. But I knew I wanted more skills to help me. But I also remember doubting how helpful college would be to me for what I had in mind. Life intervened. I ended up quitting college and playing in a friend’s bar band for money.

I was still interested in making up music (composing). I continued to do so. In retrospect I can see that I detached myself from ways of learning that might have set me more clearly in one direction or another. I never studied composition formally again. I brushed up against more formal study when I was attending Wayne State where I finally got my bachelor’s degree. But the composition guy was definitely not interested in having me for a student even though I continued to compose and perform music at Wayne State while I was there.

Back when I was in the bar band, a friend told me of an opening for a keyboard player in a fancy Detroit hotel. He said that if I was at all interested in a Jazz career I should take this rare opportunity and go for it. I understood from his explanation that when big name Jazz musicians came to Detroit this was where they would often stay and sometimes came to the venue so that any musician playing there might have a chance to go forward in that career.

This amuses me to no end in retrospect since I know that I barely had the chops to do straight Jazz at that point even if I had been interested which I was not. After I left Delaware, and was playing in bar bands and running a used book store I continued to develop as a keyboard player but not under a teacher. This development has continued my entire life. After quitting bar bands and closing the bookstore, Ray Ferguson at Wayne State helped me the most, but I still see myself as mostly self taught.

To this day I understand myself as a peculiar kind of musician. Music has been my first love and I continue to need a daily dose to this day. In addition music via church music helped me and Eileen earn enough money to raise our family and now be happily retired.

Making up music and poetry and prose are very natural acts for me even if they don’t quite fit into easily understood descriptions. The action of making music, “musicking” if you will, ends up being the important part of my life long understanding of music.

This omits self-promotion and specialized understandings of just what music is.

Susan Howe in her book Birth-Mark, describes a larger understanding of poetic and archived texts that corresponds in my mind to Christopher Small’s enlarged understanding of music. She writes: “… presenting … texts as events rather than objects, as processes rather than products, [convert] the reader from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem while at the same time calling attention to the fundamentally historical character of both the reader’s and writer’s activity.”

Howe is working toward an active action of reading in which the reader is part of the evolving process. This reminds of how it feels to sit at my piano and play. The result is a “process rather than” a product.

Next time: how Virginia Woolf and Fanny Hensel are helping me process this.

Elizabeth and Alex spent the night last evening. Elizabeth had her first art class and it sounds like it went well to me. One of the things I like about when Elizabeth visits like that is that I tend to get up and have coffee with her. This means good conversation first thing in the morning if she is amenable. Also I don’t have to face exercising and stretching right away upon arising.

I picked up a couple books on hold at the library today. Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn (2010) by R. Larry Todd is probably a book I am going to want to own. Hensel (as Todd refers to her to distinguish her from her brother whom he calls Mendelsohn) has continued to intrigue me. I only own the Dover edition of her piano music which is all Lieds for the piano. I want to get more music by her but Eileen and I have decided I should hold back on purchases for awhile so I’m not very quick to buy things as I was.

A quick glance at her page on IMSLP reveals quite a few titles that are available there so I’m not that limited.

In Todd’s introduction to his book, he mentions an essay by Virginia Woolf that interests me. It’s called Three Guineas (link to the 132 page pdf of it). It was written after Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. He observes that Hensel is an example of what Woolf called “women who were denied their own creative space—of how in effect, history erased their voices, their identities.” Todd also says that Hensel is now “widely regarded as the most significant female composer of the nineteen century.” Cool. She definitely has chops, both as a composer and virtuosic pianist.

The Supreme Court Loses Its Chief Pragmatist – The Atlantic

Jeffery Rosen, the author of the above article, continues to provoke my amazement and admiration. His organization, National Constitution Center, which is funded by Congress, continues to be a platform for excellent conversations from scholars and others. Rosen’s moderation of conflicting understandings of his guests is a wonder to behold.

Another snowy day in western Michigan. It is beautiful. My beloved milkweed plants continue to persist despite all the snow we have been having. They are in bad shape to be sure but they are still poking out of the snow. The birds and the squirrels have been fluttering around the bird feeder that we replenish from time to time. I actually did a little snow shoveling today to prepare for Elizabeth and Alex to arrive as well as the Shipt person.

Elizabeth is teaching her first art class today. She seems pretty into it. Alex is okay with hanging around at our house while she does so. They haven’t decided if they are spending the night or driving back to Delton this evening. I know both Elizabeth and Alex would probably prefer to be at their own home this evening but we’ll see what happens. I have cleared the bed in my study where I am sitting so that they can sleep in here tonight if they wish.

I continue to play and study Schubert’s Bb Piano sonata. I added some Bartok today. I have been pondering what music I am going to write. So far, still looking out the window.

Sarah now has Covid as well as Lucy. Still no dire symptoms. It seems to be sweeping the little area in England where they are living. Many kids have it. Eileen was pointing out that if Sarah and company lived here in the U.S. they would probably not be diagnosed since they don’t have many symptoms and tests are more rare. Eileen has ordered tests for us but they don’t arrive until the end of January.

I begged off digging out and going down to the beach today. We are pretty snowed in. The paper either wasn’t delivered or was swept away by the little plow that plows the sidewalks.

With Eileen’s help I enrolled in an extended dental service with my insurance today. This is timely since I am up for some pretty major dental work in March. My dentist thinks I should have a tooth removed because the area around it is mildly infected. Hard to argue with that but what a pain. Not literally a pain, since I have had this infection for a few years and no pain to speaking of. I also haven’t had the filling that fell out replaced yet and they found another cavity besides that at my last visit. I am scheduled for both of these to be fixed in March at my dentist.

I don’t see why it’s taking so long. Eileen decided she should have her teeth cleaned. She called yesterday and they scheduled her for yesterday afternoon. She walked over in the snow. It was beautiful yesterday. We put out more bird seed recently and we are being deluged with birds (and squirrels).

Today seems to be a Schubert day for me. I was listening to another BBC Inside Music program this morning. The musician who was moderating this time was the violinist, Tessa Lark.

I have never heard of her. Her choices were interesting. She hails from Kentucky and plays a bit of fiddle as well as has pretty spectacular classical credentials. She like so many including myself seems interested in integrated all kinds of music into her styles. She played a recording she made with of the movements from David Chase’s Appalachian Suite. These were written with her in mind. They are composed for solo violin and choir. I wasn’t too impressed with it. A pretty typical choral piece but with violin accompaniment.

First of all Chase titled it “This Old Hammer.” It’s really the African American song, “John Henry.” I understand that they were going for an Appalachian kind of deal but why not acknowledge the real background of this tune? I don’t mean to sound too negative about this composition. The best part was an improv that Lark introduced the movement with. She said the Chase “let her” improvise a beginning for each of his movements.

I think this is the recording she played on her Inside Music show complete with her improvised beginning.

I still prefer this version.

She played a recording of Schnabel playing the first movement to Schubert’s Piano Sonata in Bb. I have been listening to recordings of this movement over and over today. I do love it. I also began playing through it before Eileen got up this morning. I don’t usually play piano before she gets up but she has told me more than once that it’s not a bad way to start her day. She reaffirmed that this morning.

I decided to look a bit more closely at this movement. The first thing I do is number the measures. I also pulled out Charles Rosen book on Sonata Form. He refers to this movement twice in the book. I love the music and have played it over and over. My left hand continues to lose the ability to stretch well. But I so far I can still play through music I love. I have found myself leaving out superfluous notes occasionally and doing a lot of quick little rolls to play all the notes with the left hand that are written.

What I like about this movement is how beautifully Schubert seamlessly moves his ingenious melodies from key to key. As I play through the piece I usually just enjoy it, but today I started wondering about its form. Rosen says that it is a tour de force of handling a three key area exposition in a sonata allegro form. This part of the piece moves from Bb to Gb major back to Bb and then to F# minor.

It sounds so clinical to describe it like that since it really is beautiful. Notice that the two secondary key areas have an enharmonic relationship. That means that Gb is really F# on the keyboard. But once again one barely notices that when you are drawn into the beauty of the piece. Lark describes listening to this piece when she was in college. She said the wisdom of it belies the youth of the composer. Schubert only lived to be 31 years old. Google says that Lark herself is only 23 years old. She must have started studying at schools young she has a bachelors and a masters from the New England Conservatory of music plus holds an Artist Diploma (whatever that is) from Julliard.

Here she is tearing up a little bit of bluegrass. Yikes, she can certainly play.

I think she is playing Leadbelly’s Cotton Fields. Again, why not give a little credit?

My mood of doom and gloom was gone this morning for no discernible reason. I did have frustrating dreams about church and choir. Again there was no obvious reason for this. I was distressed to see that Lucy my grand daughter in England has come down with Covid. We chatted with the English group today and they all seemed in pretty high spirits and Lucy was suffering from no ill effects due to Covid. But this, of course, means they will have to alter their behavior for a while. It is likely they will all get before they’re done. Sarah and Matthew are both vaccinated. They are monitoring Alice for any signs of Covid which is complicated by the fact that she has a terrible cold.

I was reading the letters of C. P. E. Bach this morning. He referred to himself as “soft-hearted” when discussing his choice not to set a poem about the death of his adult son to music. This struck me as a better way for me to talk about my own over sensitive nature. I’m just “soft-hearted.” “Soft-headed” is more like it.

It snowed last night. This morning seemed like a good morning to snuggle and read. I read some more of Arvilla Smith’s diary. She and her husband eventually end up in the Holland area and work with local Indians.

Both of them kept diaries. I’m up to Arvilla’s 1838 entries. At this point, I think they are living in a place called Gull Creek not far from Kalamazoo. Arvilla’s husband, George (or Mr. S as she refers to him throughout her diaries) does not begin his diary until the year of 1838 and then very sparsely. I am planning to cross refer more now that I have reached that point in Arvilla’s dairy.

Reading diaries and letters of people is very like spending time with them. It is a comforting thing to do on such a cold and snowy day for sure.

When I was a teenager, I’m not exactly sure how old, I attended a National Youth Convention of the Church of God in Chicago. At this convention I learned the shocking fact that the denomination of my Mother and Father and Grand Parents was in fact half Black. If I had a been a Black teenager this probably would not have come as a surprise. But it certainly was to me. I don’t remember much except shock and anger at not being told this before. It may have been after this when I began sporadically showing up at Black Church of God communities in Flint where my Dad was a minister.

My main memory of this was doing so with a young woman who was mortified when I accepted an invitation to sing in the choir that Sunday. At least this is the memory I have. I’m pretty sure I didn’t invent it.

This memory occurred to me today as I was reading The 1619 Project. The past several years I have learned a lot about American history. Specifically the history of American racism. It has been a slow burn of anger and frustration as I filled in some of the holes in my understanding of America.

I remind myself that I don’t have to continue to identify with Christianity now that I’m not making my money doing music for its worship. Having said that, I notice that I continue to connect with the stories very actively, reading both Thomas Mann’s Joseph series and Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Thurston. I like the stories and I like Mann and Thurston.

My battle fatigue with the turmoil in my country continues. I haven’t given up hope and I try to pay attention to how things are unfolding. Nevertheless, when I combine paying attention with learning how time and time again, white Americans have done terrible things to African Americans, Native Americans, and other groups it can be painful. However, I do want to have the information both current and historic.

But for some reason it has left me a bit shaken. Maybe this partly because I am so over sensitive temperamentally. But I do think that a lot of it is a logical reaction to the madness of now.

Music continues to help me. As well as reading both fiction and nonfiction daily.

I have discovered Sibelius’s third symphony thanks to Keval Shah’s Inside Music episode. So far, I am finding it rewarding to listen to a musician’s choice of music he or she likes and why. Shah played the second movement of Sibelius’s third symphony and I liked it and started listening to the whole symphony.

I left a bunch of Sibelius organ music at Grace because I never managed to like it. This may be one case where approaching a composer through music I can play on the piano or organ might not be quite the ticket. Most composers I love left me music to play on the keyboard. This kind of one on one with music is very much how Bach approached much of his keyboard music. Much Bach was written specifically to be played for the edification of the keyboard player as well as listeners but primarily for that wonderful moment of contact with the player and the music and the composer in a intimate beautiful connection of enjoyment.

So music does help. Today I have played some Beethoven and Haydn. My hands continue to worsen but not so much that I can’t eke out the music. I am sometimes reminded of a scene from Hesse’s Magister Ludi. It’s toward the end of the story. The music master who has taught and guided Joseph Knecht sits by himself at the piano and plunks out a Bach two part invention with only two fingers.

So this kind of hope keeps me going. That, and continually being grateful for being so lucky.

Despite it being a Birky day (he’s my shrink), I am struggling with a bit of a low morale today. I attribute it largely to watching and thinking about what’s happening in my country. That the voting rights bills that went down this week bummed out me terribly. I like everyone else didn’t expect them to pass. But still depressing

McConnell’s inadvertent exposure of his own racism was also depressing to watch: Mitch McConnell’s viral Black voter comments cause widespread furor | US Senate | The Guardian

Then when Clarence Thomas held out against the SCOTUS ruling allowing access to archival stuff about the Jan 6 went down. Dang. This exposes the underlying corruption of Ginnie Thomas’s actions and positions. See Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court by Jane Mayer, New Yorker January 21, 2022. Sheesh.

I talked to Birky about all this. The upshot was he copied the names of two books I recommended: The Cruelty is the Point by Adam Serwer and the 1619 Project. You know you’re in trouble when your therapist is looking to you for updates and readings about the morass of idiocy happening in our country.

But I did listen to a good podcast from the American Constitution Center this morning. MLK, the Declaration, and the Constitution | The National Constitution Center The inimitable Jeffrey Rosen joins William Allen, emeritus dean and professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on the civil rights and Black Power movements.

The three of them picked out six or seven of Martin Luther King’s speeches to discuss. At the end of the podcast Rosen suggests that listeners read all the speeches they discussed. Although he promised to link them in in the description section of their podcast, some of the links are to purchases and not to the speeches themselves. I made a list.

Martin Luther King speeches and articles

An Experiment in Love, 1958
Pilgrimage to NonViolence 1960
Letter from the Birmingham Jail 1963
I have a dream 1963
Our God is marching on 1965
Beyond Vietnam (1967)
Where do we go from here? (1967)

I linked in “Beyond Vietnam” because I fond it online. It’s also titled “A Time to break silence.” As far as I can tell all of these speeches and articles are in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches: King, Martin Luther, Washington, James M.: 9780060646912: Amazon.com: Books. I’m not planning to purchase this right away since I’m curtailing my book purchases and much of this stuff is on line, but I will eventually own this collection, I’m sure.

Adriano in Siria – Wikipedia

I was listening to the Inside Music BBC show from Jan 8. The presenter Keval Shah played an aria from the opera, Adriano in Siria by Vincenzo Legrenzio Ciampi. I was interested in learning more and could only recall the title. I looked it up on Wikipedia to discover there are over 60 operas based with this title. Who knew? Never heard of it.

President Biden’s first year with the press – Columbia Journalism Review

CJR is excellent.

‘Nocebo effect’: two-thirds of Covid jab reactions not caused by vaccine, study suggests | Medical research | The Guardian

Remember placebo and nocebo (the opposite) effects are real. If you take a placebo and get well, you get well, eh? Conversely by drawing attention to the fact that many reactions attributed to the vaccine are not caused by the vaccine does not mean people are not actually having them, just that they are not caused by the vaccine.

Covering the Republican assault on American Democracy – Columbia Journalism Review

like I said above, this source is excellent

NYTimes: The Persistent Gender Gap at the Supreme Court Lectern

At the lectern. This refers to whose arguing before the court.

I skipped blogging yesterday. We have been trying not spend money but Eileen said it would be okay if I went to Readers World and spent a bit. I thought I had ordered How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino but apparently I had only asked to see it.

It’s a 1937 Young Adult novel from Japan that has only recently been translated. I bought it and also The 1619 Project

Gah-Baed-Jhagwah-Buk: The Way it Happened, A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa by James M. McClurken was waiting for pick up at the library.

I sat down and looked at all the pictures in it when I got home. I’m glad that I have read a bit in The Art of Tradition by Getrude Karath and Jane and Fred Ettawageshik. Eileen noticed that in the McClurken book the white people are called Americans. The book suffers from lack of awareness of the dilemmas in connecting to this part of our heritage. The perspective in The Art of Tradition is necessarily limited but not as bad as the picture book. There are pictures of Fred in McClurken and his son, Frank, and grandfather, Jo. And many of the pictures are credited as provided by Fred Ettawageshik.

I have been pondering getting back to composing for a while. I’m still in the “look out the window” stage of this sort of thing. But reading about Michigan tribal history is helping me think about how to connect to the spirit of American Native Indians, Sorrow Songs, and Appalachian folk songs.

I have put in a request for an interlibrary loan of Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian. Michael D. McNally footnoted this book in his introduction as editor of The Art of Tradition. McNally was describing how the writers of the 1955 book became actively engaged in the course of learning and documenting Anishinaabe lore. “They [Kurath and the Ettewageshiks] were at work when the ‘Naming Ceremony at Harbor Springs, hitherto sponsored by an all-Indian organization, came under the support and direction of the Michigan Indian Foundation, a group of non-Native doctors, lawyers, and men of affairs from Detroit who summered in the region and took a hobbyist interest in Indian culture and artifacts. In 1953, under the foundation’s direction, and much of the program was undertaken by white performers, the dancing even ‘taken over by a group of Detroit white boy scouts, the Heyoka Wacipi.’ ”

The last quote was footnoted to Deloria’s book above. I am hoping it will have some philosophy and observations about appropriation of someone else’s tradition.

So I am enjoying learning more about the stories, dances, and music of Native Americans and the Anishinaabe specifically, but I am increasing uncomfortable with directly using material in my own composing. I am thinking that I will probably look hard at using specific material of Sorrow Songs and Appalachian folk songs as well. It would seem that it would be easy to be inspired by this stuff without actually stealing it. Although, I did use Sorrow Songs in the my composition, BLM. Something to think about.

Lastly, we had a visit from Eric Payne today. Eileen was hoping he would help us fix our leaking flat roof and rail and then repair the water damage that it has caused in our kitchen. Unfortunately he recommended the Sharpe Construction company which has done work for us in the past. Eileen was not happy with the disconnect between what the salesman told us we were buying and what ended up being done. But Sharpe seems to be the only company for the job so I am taking over communications with them to allow Eileen not to go stark raving mad. Their rep is coming tomorrow.

I have books that I have ordered waiting for me both at the library and the Readers World. I am delaying going out into the cold since I am madly trying to read in books I already have from the library. I am continuing to enjoy The Art of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance & Myth of Michigan’s Anishinaabe, 1946-1955. As I learn more and more about this tradition I have increasing reservations about using melodies from it. It feels like appropriation if not very carefully. I am more likely to simply write some music but not use melodies lifted from this book. It has many melodies, dances, and songs. I love the attitude this book exposes: the humor in the tradition and the genius of people who adapt their ideas and traditions into a changing context. Humans are amazing animals that is for certain.

I love the idea that Anishinaabe do not have a clearly distinct idea of sacred and profane.

I am also continuing to read Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Gordon. As proceed into the story of what happened after Emily Dickinson’s death I can see that the main character of this book is her scattered poems and manuscripts which were divided up as a direct result of feuds in subsequent generations. It is the manuscripts that hold my attention especially since the editing of them is still underway.

The Culture War Has Warped the Supreme Court’s Judgment

Another good article in the Atlantic by Adam Serwer.

“If you read the legal language in the Occupational Safety and Health Act… you might think that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate stood a good chance of surviving the Supreme Court’s review.

But if you watched Fox News at all over the past year, you would have guessed that it was doomed.”

Ms. Lauryn Hill Is Executive Producing A Doc On The Baraka Family

As in Amiri Baraka the late poet.

Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized

Anthropologist, Anand Pandian writes about America for The Guardian.