Eileen has left to spend the day with our friend, Barb Phillips, in Kalamazoo. She is sure to enjoy that. I love living with her but a day alone is usually a good thing for me if they don’t come too often.

I’m still processing Edison’s death. I find myself listening for his meow. The routine for me to is to get up and feed him first thing. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to keep an ear out for his meow since he has been living in a confined area in the basement. There is some relief mixed with grief. In this case, the relief is not having to factor in his care if we leave town.

I chatted with Stephen Rumler yesterday when I went to pick up my congas. Then last night I had church dreams about people who have not been in my dreams for a while. Sheesh.

I loaned Elizabeth my nylon string guitar and a bunch of songbooks yesterday. It was good to see her and Alex. I think my stock with Alex rose a bit after we spent time playing with the marimba and the harpsichord. She also favored us with a dance as she sang her song of nonsense syllables. This was quite charming to me. When they were leaving she hugged and kissed me twice. This is new behavior.

I admit I am blogging to get it out of the way so I can leisurely read and practice for the rest of the day. I have been having some thoughts about composing again but so far haven’t succumbed. This morning I listened to some of the albums recommended on the All Songs Considered podcast.

l liked these people. I stopped listening to the podcast to put on music of 2021 they were recommending. I was surprised to enjoy it. Cool.

Just as we expected, Edison did not live through the night. Eileen thought he had stopped breathing last night but I thought I could detect a shallow breath the last time I visited him before going to bed. Eileen and I toasted him last night. He was an amazing cat and a great companion. I will miss him sorely.

I contacted Elizabeth and asked how to proceed today since Alex and she were coming over. She told me to go ahead and take Edison’s body to the vet (our normal procedures for our animals when they die).

So this morning after breakfast Eileen and I took him to the vet. I put him on a clean blanket in a box. I explained to him that we did the best we could taking care of him. Hey, I know he was dead but I talk to dead beings all the time. I think he had a good life.

Alex was sad according to Elizabeth. She did ask me what we did with Edison. I explained and it seemed to be satisfactory for her.

Alex was pumped to see all my new music toys.

I took over thank you cards to the staff members of Grace who moved my harpsichord for me. While I was there I chatted up Stephen Rumler, the new music guy. I was able to use a Bob Goldthwaite joke on him (“I didn’t lose my job. I know where it is. You’re just doing it now.”)

I loaded my congas into the Subaru and brought them home. Even better, I located scores that I thought I had brought home. Stuff by Frescobaldi and the Gabriellis. I was so very happy to find these scores. I have playing Frescobaldi off IMSLP which is a bit more frustrating than you might think.

After lunch, Elizabeth went off to her meeting and Alex and I went up to the music room. She probably told twenty times that she was really enjoying herself messing with the instruments. I do like to show people stuff like this.

My harpsichord is largely out of adjustment and many notes don’t work yet. But Alex got the demo and played.

She also liked my congas. But the real hit was the marimba. I love having a kid tell me how much she likes something to which I can sincerely and wholeheartedly respond, me too!

The marimba is old and clunky but actually works a bit better than the harpsichord does right now. And of course it sounds like a marimba which is great!

Another day of highs and lows.

Alex and Elizabeth return home to Jeremy this evening.

Eileen has spent a lot of time reading to Alex today. I think having to watch her for Elizabeth was therapeutic for both of us.

First the good news. The harpsichord is now upstairs at my house.

Several members of Grace’s staff brought it and carried up the stairs for us.

Eileen is already working on reassembling it with better screws.

We threw the keys on the marimba loosely to make the whole process easier this morning. I am a happy camper about this.

On the other hand, my beloved cat, Edison, seems to be slowly giving up the ghost. Yesterday he refused all food and seemed more wobbly than usual. Remember he is both deaf and blind. He has been crying more and more which is a bit heartbreaking. This morning I found him in a pool of his own urine. I try to comfort him. The only way to do this is to touch him so he knows someone is there. He can probably differentiate between the humans who are caring for him by smell and gestalt.

I am thinking about how we will handle this. I had thought I would take him to the vet to be put to sleep. However, on reconsideration, that trip to the vet was one of the traumatic parts of Edison’s life. It seems dumb to put him to sleep for humane reasons and make part of the process one of the things that disturbs him most. He may go unconscious (or even die) and that would make this decision moot. I will be contacting the vet soon to discuss strategy with them. I am willing to administer a sedative or a lethal injection myself. It will have to be an injection since Edison is not exactly eating right now.

I have called Elizabeth and apprised her of what’s going on. Edison was originally her and Jeremy’s cat so they are very attached. In the mean time Alex will probably take Edison’s death hard since she is so attached to him herself. Elizabeth and Alex are coming tomorrow so Elizabeth can consult with some drawing students she is going to teach here in Holland. We will watch Alex for her. I wanted her to know what she and Alex were walking into. Usually Elizabeth and Jeremy are pretty straight forward with Alex. So I’m expecting it to work out fine but be sad.

I wasn’t too broken up until Elizabeth thanked me over the phone today. Then I lost a bit of control. Ironically I think we lost our phone connection right at that moment.

Eileen thought I should send them a picture of Edison which is something we have done a lot of to keep them connected. But I demurred and Elizabeth agreed that she preferred hearing stuff on the phone.

Back to some good news. It looks like we are going get even more shelves. When the Grace people were here, Jim the buildings and grounds guy, asked if we needed more shelves since there are some that Grace is getting rid of. Cool.

So we continue to be very busy especially for retired old folks. But we are definitely getting shit done. As I write this Anthony the handyman is fixing our upstairs door. The Sharp Corporation said our project not only wasn’t covered under warranty, but didn’t make their minimum of a $1200 project. Anthony discovered that the door and shingles were not even nailed in properly. Surely the guy from Sharp Corporation noticed this. Anthony only came by to check it out and could clearly see how to repair it so he’s nailing back together.

Yesterday, we filled the new bookshelf in the living room. Today we moved the empty shelves into my study. This is a lot of work for a bum, but fortunately Eileen has the Energizer Bunny gene from her Mom.

Elizabeth and Jeremy lost power due to the winds last night. We offered to let them come here. They thought about it but I don’t think that’s going to happen now.

I am so pleased to get more shelves. Anthony has finished fixing the storm door. He doesn’t live far from here so we have made a discovery in him!

Eileen and I have busy little bees today. Before Eileen got up I moved the lighter electric keyboard to my study.

Then after breakfast, we decided to go get my marimba from the church.

While we were there I met Stephen Rumler the new music guy for Grace. I also chatted briefly with the rest of the staff. Jen and Jim are planning to move the harpsichord home early next week. Woo hoo!

Then we came home and put stuff in the upstairs music room.

We rested for a little bit then decided to unpack the new book shelf and bring in the parts.

Eileen seems to be beginning to assemble this thing. I’m a bit pooped myself but we’ll see how far she gets.

The guy from the glass place came and took out my window to take to the shop and fix. I’m expecting him back today sometime. This afternoon I’m expecting a man from the Sharp Construction company to come and give us an estimate on replacing the storm door and some siding off our upstairs. I called and started a claim with my insurance company about this.

I also called Grace church and talked to Mary about getting some help moving the harpsichord. Rhonda was willing to help but it didn’t work out for her due in some part to my not wanting to do it after her husband gets off work. I’m hopeful that Mary who really runs thing over there will rattle some cages for me and find someone for me to hire to move it. If not, I will find someone to hire to move it for me. I’m getting too old to move it by myself.

I finished reading three translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I found it very helpful to read three at at time since they were so very different. Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders are surfers who know each and other and collaborated on a contemporary language version. Very helpful but no notes. John D. Sinclair’s version is one that has the Italian on one page and his prose translation on the facing page plus a little essay for each canto. Finally the Dorothy L. Sayers is a rhyming translation. She also did the notes for the Inferno and the Purgatorio but died before she was able to do notes for Paradiso. Her colleague, Barbara Reynolds, ably completed the notes for the last volume.

By reading these three at the same time I think I got more out of it than doing them individually. I definitely got a lot more out of it than I did when I read classic J. M. Dent version. It is good and I relished following in the footsteps of Juan Louis Borges and T. S. Eliot who both used it. But I got so much more out of doing it consulting three different versions.

It has taken me quite a while to finish this little project.

Before driving down to the beach yesterday, we stopped and picked up the library’s copy of The Hidden Musicians: Music Making in an English Town by Ruth Finnegan which I had interlibrary requested. This is a fascinating little book whose title I picked up from the bibliography in Keith Negus’s Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Finnegan is intent on examining all music making in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, U.K. This little city is not far from where Sarah lives so that’s part of the attraction, but also I like Finnegan’s approach to taking each musical activity on its own terms and keeping her range so wide. She researched it in the 80s. I read the first chapter yesterday and am enjoying it immensely.

Finally, Eileen and I have been enjoying this beautifully performed YouTube video. Recommended.

Well kiddies, it’s another dreary day in December in Western Michigan. I got up late, cleaned the kitchen, and made coffee and chocolate drink for Eileen. Then I switched the order and did my exercises before my stretches. It was probably a mistake to listen to the new Talking Feds podcast. Doom and gloom about the abortion ruling coming up and the general direction of the Supreme Court.

Later I decided it was a one-two punch to the old morale to listen to that podcast and then pretend to be a grown up and call people after breakfast about house stuff. I have taken over trying to contact Ryan of Sharp Construction about the storm door hanging off our house. I have called his cell twice today and left messages. I did manage to get a line on someone who will fix our broken window. I’m waiting for a call back on that. That will probably be tomorrow.

I made several calls before I connected with someone to fix the window.

It looks like Rhonda’s husband, Mark, and son, Isaac, are going to help me move my harpsichord. I don’t think Rhonda’s going to use it as she was considering. It will certain boost the old sagging morale if I can get my harpsichord and marimba home.

I have about decided that I don’t like Ben Lerner’s poetry. This figures since I ordered several books by him. Only two of them were poetry but still. It may be that he is a bit too John Ashbery for me. I’ve never appreciated Ashberry very much. Lerner admits in a poem that he likes early Ashbery, whatever that means. I’m just finding his long book length poems obtuse to this old fucker. He does a lot of clever things. I’m not sure he loves words the way say, Hayden Carruth does. Both poets send me to the dictionary regularly. I don’t mind that so much, especially since most words pop up with a phone search. Plus I love words almost as much as I love footnotes.

I will finish reading Lerner with as open a mind as I can muster, but this morning I realized he was turning into a bit of a chore for me. He just goes on the lengthy list of my ongoing projects.

Yesterday was Frescobaldi and Hindemith at the piano. Today was William Byrd on the piano and some Dave Bromberg on Spotify.

Ending Roe v Wade is part of a long campaign to roll back democracy itself | Jill Filipovic | The Guardian

I haven’t read this yet but the general idea is why I was upset this morning listening to Talking Feds. The right are only doing what they intend which is to win the culture wars by hook or crook. Clarence Thomas has made no secret of the many advances he would like to take away from our country. Now it looks he can. I’ll have to keep reading Thomas Mann and Hannah Arendt in order to survive being informed as my country’s democracy is systematically disassembled.

I continue to love being retired. It’s Sunday morning and I am so glad to not have to go do church today. I never really dreaded the work, but I always had other things I wanted to do. Now I can do them. I finished reading a book of poetry this morning (The Norfolk Poems of Hayden Carruth [1 June to 1 September 1961]. I read some in I Think I am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs by Thomas A. Sebeok. Then had a bit of yearning to read some Thomas Mann. I recently read a short story of his for fun because of this odd longing to read some beautiful English translation of Mann. This morning I pulled out the multi-volume edition of his Joseph tetralogy. There was an introduction by him about the whole process of writing these books.

Mann wrote the Joseph sequence from 1926 to 1942. This means that he began it right after WW I and worked on it throughout WW II. In his introduction he writes that this was a period “when every day hurled the wildest demands at the heart and the brain.” This could easily describe what it’s like to be alive now.

I know that Robert Reich is partisan, but he is my own echo chamber. I hardly ever disagree with what he writes. His article, There is no doubt any more: the US Supreme Court is run by partisan Hacks, published online on Friday is short but spot on. It is just another instance of how my country is tumbling toward its own destruction. If not destruction, at least recreation as a despotic nightmare.

I think about Thomas Mann and his own witness of the slide of his country and the world toward madness. He has left behind many essays and speeches that he gave in opposition to what was happening in Germany. It is instructive to think that the world has tottered on the edge of madness before. Unfortunately, we are also looking at the extinction of much life on our planet including humans. This is different, but probably only in degree not in kind. I say this because there is so much more to the universe than humans.

Thomas Sebeok starts his second chapter, “Communication, Language, and Speech: Evolutionary Considerations,” which I read in some this morning talking about the idea that communication was “carried forward by the primordial molecular code of beads on strings, subject to qualitative and quantitative shuffling of genetic segments.” In other words, he alludes to the beginning of the evolution of life on Earth.

He published his book the same year that Lewis Thomas the biologist upon pondering the pictures of Earth taken from the moon observed that the Earth is one organism. In this context as we contemplate the extinction of so much it helps me to think of humans and some other species as not some crowning achievement of one sort or another, but as an expressions that upon ceasing to exist do not exhaust the beauty and range of life itself.

It’s a bleak consolation of course. But the perspective of history, science, and biology does help me to cope with the madness of the collapse of my country.

In the meantime, it is more consoling to spend time daily with the beauty in music and poetry and stories like Mann’s immense re-imagining of Joseph and his Brothers.

The Truman Show

Rick Perlstein shared this link as an example of excellence in writing. He says, “I’ve been meaning to boost this masterful article for months–a marquee example of what easy marks consensus-besotted media gatekeepers can be when it comes to sentimental narratives about the decency of our rulers.” I have it bookmarked to read.

When American Jazz Pros Meet Spanish Jazz Kids | by Garry Berman | Nov, 2021 | Medium

I have been following Joan Chamorro’s work with Jazz and kids on YouTube ever since stumbling on it a few years back. This is the first article I have found about in English. Again bookmarked to read.

Eileen and had a nice chat with Sarah today. Saturday is our usual day to zoom with her. Eileen’s morale is slightly improved. She is making some good headway with her new loom. I think that helps. The house stuff has really gotten her down. I will think of more ways to shoulder some of this responsibility. We discussed me contacting the builders who installed our upstairs screen door and the siding. I suggested we should badger them and threaten to go public on Facebook with our complaints. We’ll see. They may not be at fault or at least not legally responsible.

My friend Rhonda texted me a question about my harpsichord (Is it an 8′?). I’m not sure if she is going to end up using it. I will contact her next week and find out. Since if she is planning on using it she has already told me they could return it to my home instead of the church. This would save me figuring out how to get it from the church to the house.

Eileen and I could easily move the marimba by ourselves since it disassembles into manageable sections. I would dearly love to get every little thing out of the church since it’s been a while since I retired.

If I have to move it myself, my next step is to call Mary the administrator and find out if Jen or Jim received my texts from before Thanksgiving and if they have thoughts about who could help me move the harpsichord.

Either way I will probably check with Mary about recommendations for someone to repair our broken window.

I have been learning about the history of public hangings in the U.S. I’m reading The Death Penalty by Stuart Banner. I had no idea that public executions were the kind of event they were. I was surprised to learn that public sermons were usually an important part of this event. In the American South, these sermons persisted at public hangings into the 20th century.

Banner points out that unlike executions in England which were carried out by a public executioner (who was often despised), executions in the U.S. were usually the responsibility of local sheriffs who did not relish this part of their duties. Often sheriffs did whatever they could to get someone else to take charge of it and build the scaffolding, run the execution, and then dispense with the corpse. Sometimes people who had been sentenced to die were able to commute their sentence by serving as an executioner. This is more understandable when you factor in the many trivial crimes which resulted in death by hanging.

Banner meticulously documents hanging after hanging. After a while I realized that the period of these deaths is also the period of many of the folk songs in my Child Ballad collection. I read through some today and found at least one reference to a hanging.

I am still very interested in the melodies of these ballads. I continue to entertain composing some settings maybe along the lines of what Bartok did with folk melodies or even some modest attempts to emulate Copland.

I had a busy day yesterday. I took my Subaru in to replace the tail light we broke while moving mattresses. Then I went and had my new lenses installed in my frames. Eileen waited in the car because she wasn’t very impressed with the lens store people. Previously they had been haphazard about their approach to masking. But yesterday everyone was masked up. Unlike the auto place where I was the only one wearing a mask. Then Eileen and I went to the bank and talked to a banker about our finances. This was a hundred per cent better than the visit with the person at Edward Jones.

At some point Eileen was very unhappy to discover that the door on our upper landing had come away from the siding.

She reported it to the people who installed the door and siding about three years ago. We haven’t heard back from them yet but Eileen had trouble sleeping last night because of worrying about this. This morning I called State Farm about it. They told me what my deductible would be $1,135 and that I should wait until I have heard from the builders before putting in a claim.

This morning I made bread while listening to the Brandenburg Concertos of Bach. Eileen and I had fresh bread for breakfast. After breakfast I went grocery shopping. When I came home I could still smell the bread.

I am continuing to enjoy The Book of Form and Emptiness by Oseki.

“We books would say … that story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.” Ruth Oseki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

I also am continuing to enjoy retirement and beginning to understand what it means for me. In many ways I am returning to my self. In my dream last night I was riding with my parents to go to a restaurant. In the dream I was exulting on not having a job now and realizing that I could do whatever I wanted to do including going with my parents to a restaurant.

Eileen and I had a conversation about our differing styles. Yesterday when we got home from getting stuff done all Eileen could think about was the door upstairs. I told her that I was feeling like we had accomplished quite a bit. I told her that I’m like the character in the Ozeki novel, Benny. I am overly sensitive and acting like a grown up takes a lot of emotional energy from me. So we agreed to work on stuff next week. We also agreed that we would touch base on our finances on Wednesdays. This is mostly for Eileen’s benefit. I continue to have trouble believing in the idea of money. But I don’t want Eileen to feel overwhelmed with thinking about money.

It’s kind of like church, just because I don’t believe in money doesn’t mean I can’t function in regards to it. The only difference is that now with church I don’t have function any more.

Ruth Oseki observed that “when we read a book, we all are hearing voices.” Books are inanimate objects. She was speaking about her new book on The Road Home Podcast (link to YouTube). I hadn’t stumbled across this podcast before.

The dude who is interviewing her has written a book by the same name as his podcast.

The theme to the podcast is Zen Buddhism. I have always had a soft spot for Zen.

I keep thinking about Oseki’s talking Book and her character Benny who can hear inanimate objects. This morning as I read in the biography of C. P. E. Bach by Ottenberg and the letters of C. P. E. it colored how I was thinking about what I was doing. I have enjoyed reading C.P.E.’s letters. I think of it as listening in on him like a book. This listening is very similar to how I experience playing music. I feel like I am in the presence of another mind. This is part of what I like about playing music of other composers. This is definitely along the line Oseki is thinking.

Speaking of podcasts, Oseki and Nichtern mention one I had never heard of. It’s called “Everything is Alive” and in each episode an actor takes on the persona of an object like a bicycle or a phone booth. Oseki said that she thought it was great and wished that she had known about it when she was writing The Book of Form and Emptiness.

In the episode of The Road Home podcast in which Nichtern interviews Oseki, he mentions Ben Lerner as an example of another author who appears as a character in his own fiction. Oseki does this in A Take for the Time Being.

I haven’t read the book in which Lerner does this. It’s probably one of the ones I ordered by him. But I have read A Tale for the Time Being.

It was cool listening to Ozeki talk about the “Ruth” in this novel. At first she said that she and character were distinguished by the fact she (the breathing author) was alive. But she quickly got tripped up in thinking about the life of the character “Ruth.” The character “Ruth” also had a kind of life both on the page in the minds of readers.

I like thinking about spending time with minds like Ruth the author and Ruth the character and also characters in books I read as well voices of authors and composers.

The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade by Gary Goodman came across my Facebook feed today. It’s not being published until Dec 7th. I am intrigued. Maybe not enough to purchase without reading some of it. But I will try and remember and see if the local library gets it. It doesn’t come up when I search the library’s online catalogue. Often books that are in process or ordered do come up in that kind of search.

Here’s the blurb from Facebook:

“Highly recommended, partly for Gary Goodman’s portrait of a lost world, but also for its colorful dramatis personae.”—The Washington Post. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

The Flip Side

This is something else that showed up in Facebook feed today. I have been trying to subscribe to it. Supposedly it’s free. Each email takes one issue and links in how the left is thinking about it and also how the right is doing so. This is just up my alley but some reason I haven’t been seeing it in my inbox. When I search, emails come up and they are marked in my inbox but I don’t see them otherwise. Who knows? This is just up my alley.

I have been identifying with Benny the young main character of Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. Benny hears voices. Not just any voices but the voices of any inanimate thing nearby. It has struck me that this is slightly similar to being an introvert. Or at least it reminds me of my own introverted reactions to life.

I am overly sensitive and struggle with too much input in the silliest situations. I let my mind race over the many possibilities of what is happening around me. It’s not that different from hearing voices from objects.

As Benny says “People don’t come naturally to me, and I’ve had to study and practice, like when you’re first learning to read and have to sound out the syllables. I have to learn people phonetically and then memorize them by rote.”

In Benny’s life objects like the toy animals in the kid shrink’s office talk to him. They actually shriek and talk about the many sad children who have played with them. Benny gets busted after arguing with a pair of scissors (Benny silently, the scissors in a snarling voice that only Benny can hear). The scissors are telling Benny to stab his teacher. He struggles and ends up stabbing himself. After that he is in a Pediatric Psych ward for a while.

Later in the story, Benny finds comfort in spending time at the library. The books in the library are quiet as are all the objects in the library. There is a hush over everything because of the nature of the place. Benny begins to read books and finds them comforting and interesting. Do you see where I’m going with this?

I think I have mentioned here that one of the characters in the story is the actual book you are reading. The Book has a voice and explains stuff from time to time. Early on, the Book explains what matters:

“That’s what books are for, after all, to tell you your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we are able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We are care about your feelings and believe in you completely. But here’s another question: Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too?”

So the Library and the Book and books that Benny turns to are all a source of solace and coherence to him.

This is extremely satisfying to me.

During our recent chat about books, Jeremy Daum (my son-in-law) recommended The Death Penalty by Stuart Banner. I immediately requested it on interlibrary loan. Jeremy whose profession means needing to know about things like American Death penalty said that this book had shaped his thinking. I notice that Banner teaches at Washing U where Jeremy earned his J.D. Next time I see him, I’m going to ask if he knew this guy. I read in it today.

Hugh Trevor Roper’s Men and Events: Historical Essays was also waiting on my library hold shelf. Trevor Roper is a writer I have read and enjoyed over the years. I recently read an review of this book by Jacques Barzun and wanted to take a look at it. It looks like fun.

Then for some reason I decided to start another Zora Neale Hurston novel.

I have these gorgeous Library of America volumes of her work. Moses, Man of the Mountain was the next novel in this collection so I started reading in it. It reminds me a bit of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. I plan to read them as well. But probably not soon. Hurston rocks.

I keep hearkening back to what the financial advisor said to me about hoarding books. Jeremy Daum suggested it would have been a good time to invoke an elegant Miss Manners reaction and pretend not to understand what she was talking about. I wish I had thought of that. Instead I nodded my head sheepishly thinking Benny thoughts about not connecting with people.

Sometimes I feel like Eileen and I living in hiding here in Holland.

I texted Rev Jen about trying to hire someone to move my harpsichord and marimba. Nothing from her yet and nothing from the Buildings and Grounds guy I texted last Saturday. However, I’m pretty sure I can get someone to move these for me.

Lately it’s been Bach on the piano. I love the English suites especially. It’s not a bad thing to be living and hiding in Holland.

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.

We had a nice Thanksgiving. My daughter Elizabeth, son-in-law Jeremy, and granddaughter Alex came to our house for a Thanksgiving meal. I had a chance to spend some time with each of them. I read to Alex, chatted with Elizabeth, and talked books with Jeremy.

I think everyone enjoyed our time together. We did have a couple of mishaps. We had Jeremy so close to the window in the guest bedroom that when he thrashed around he accidentally broke the outside window. No harm done to his foot, but we will have to have the window pane replaced. Also, when Eileen and Jeremy were moving the mattress and box springs from upstairs to the basement by throwing them off the upstairs balcony, they accidentally hit the Subaru and smashed the left rear lights. This will have to be taken care of soon.

Another mishap that occurred was that Eileen’s credit card got hacked and used. The credit card shut itself down due to suspicious activity. Eileen had to make a trip to the bank yesterday to get the replacement card started in process.

Jeremy moved Eileen’s new loom all by himself, taking it from the downstairs dining room up to her loom room. That’s where she is right now. She’s very happy to get going on her new loom.

Jeremy, Elizabeth, and Eileen cleared out the upstairs music room entirely. Now it is ready for the harpsichord and marimba. I texted the Buildings and Ground manager at church that I wanted to move them soon and asked if he knew of anyone I could hire to do so. I’ll get moving on some of these tasks next week.

We chatted with Sarah on Zoom today. Their lives are pretty crazy right now. Lucy my granddaughter has been to the doctor four time in the last week. She, Alice, and Sarah are all suffering from congestion and coughs. They have tested themselves for Covid so it’s probably not that. Lucy also has had some hearing loss in one ear. Sarah seems to feel the worst of the three. Matthew doesn’t have any symptoms but he is sleeping with Lucy and she is keeping him awake at night so he’s not up to snuff either.

While we chatted I cooked.

I heated up the oven and roasted several veggies. I used sesame seeds and sesame oil on the aspargus. I dumped cheese on them before it was done. Mmmm. I had some for lunch in a salad.

I halved the Brussels sprouts and tossed them in olive oil before roasting.

I also roasted the oyster mushrooms that came from the Market Wagon on Tuesday.

I have been falling in love with these Harpsichord concertos by C. P. E. Bach. This is the recording of one I have been listening to on Spotify. Great stuff!

And I found a new rock and roll band.

Low Cut Connie was recently read the explainer of a current topic on the Talking Feds podcast. I had never head of him or his band but checked it out and like the energy.

How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer | The New Yorker

I think this is a fascinating article. Ce Ce Moore is a genealogist who uses genetics to solve mysteries. Wow.

The War Inside H. G. Wells | The New Yorker

In the same issue (Nov 22, 2021) Adam Gopnik has this interesting take on Wells.

How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives | The New Yorker

And Jill Lepore has another great article, also in the Nov 22 issue.

The Historic Russian Recipe That Turns Apples Into Marshmallows – Gastro Obscura

They’re called pastila and take a whole lot of work and time to prepare. But the ingredients are simple: apples, sugar, egg whites, and powdered sugar. They look cool. I bet they taste good as well. No plans to make soon but maybe someday.

Happy Is an Elephant. Is She Also a Person? – The Atlantic

And Jill Lepore also has this article I took off of the Atlantic website. Woo hoo! I haven’t read it yet, but I do like her writing.

Working with the Whitney’s Replication Committee | The New Yorker

In 2016, Lerner wrote this article. Here’s a link to him talking with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro (2018?) who is mentioned in the article about the same subject. I haven’t read the article but I have listened to the talk. I think it’s very interesting to consider the need for upkeep and restoration of contemporary art. Very cool.

It’s Wednesday afternoon and the pumpkin pie is in the oven. Eileen and I went to the dermatologist today for my two week check. He seemed please with my progress so far. I was relieved that he didn’t tell me to quit using the salve he prescribed. My rash is immensely better but not exactly back to where it was at its lowest ebb. So I’m to monitor my own progress and cut back from 2 applications a day to one and eventually to use as needed.

We stopped at Meijer on the way home and picked up a few last minute things for Thanksgiving. I’m a bit beat but Eileen is madly cleaning. I made the pie crust for the pie which was my original agreement. But Eileen asked me if I could go ahead and mix up the filling. This is very easy so I did.

I’m out of practice on pie crusts. I got pretty good at it at one time but haven’t made one in a while. Eileen hates store-bought crust so I learned to make a decent homemade one. We’ll see if I still have the knack.

I’m over half way through Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty is the Point: The past, present, and future of Trump’s America. It is excellent. Serwer is as clear and eloquent as anyone I have read about Trump and the current racist state of our country. Each short introduction to each chapter has the word “cruelty” in the its title. So the first introduction is entitled “The cruelty of backlash,” and the chapter is entitled “Is This the Second Redemption?” Redemption here refers to the undoing of the Reconstruction after the Civil War.

In the ninth chapter (Introduction: “The cruelty of exclusion,” Chapter title: “What We Do Now Will Define Us Forever,” Serwer makes an excellent critique of the Democrat’s inability to step up to the plate in this time of need. Writing in July of 2019 he observes that Democrats have “slow-walked investigations, retreated from court battles, and unilaterally surrendered the sword of impeachment… This foot-dragging will leave them with little time to actually look into presidential abuses before campaign season begins, effectively forfeiting a massive political advantage, to say nothing of abdicating their constitutional duties.”

He goes on “Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered the gibberish analysis that the president (Trump) was ‘self-impeaching,’ so no actual impeachment was necessary. When confronted with yet another woman accusing the president (Trump) of sexual assault, Pelosi said, ‘I haven’t paid much attention to it.’ When the politically connected financier Jeffrey Epstein was indicted again on charges of sex-trafficking minors, and Pelosi was asked what she would do about now-ousted labor secretary Alex Acosta, who negotiated a previous sweetheart deal with Epstein, she said, ‘It’s up to the president. It’s his Cabinet,’ a position indistinguishable from that of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.”

A few pages later he asks “What, exactly, would be enough to rouse Democrats to action? … If congressional Democrats cannot or will not defend the principle that America belongs to all of its citizens, regardless of race, creed, color, or religion, their oaths to defend the Constitution are meaningless.”

And these are the good guys these days. Whew.

I don’t have to much on my mind today but I want to keep to my resolve to do some regular writing here as daily as possible.

Today would have been my Mother’s 95th birthday.

I think about her and my Dad often.

They are often in my dreams. Literally. Plus they seem to stare back at me from the mirror.

I continue my daily reading and piano playing. I’ve added reading Chaucer aloud recently. This is fun and it’s surprising what reading aloud does for my comprehension of the Old English.

Today I spent some time with C. P. E. Bach, reading in his biography by Ottenberg, reading his letters, and playing through a few of his Prussian Sonatas.

I also did some clearing of my study in preparation to turn it over to Elizabeth, Jeremy, and Alex for their Thanksgiving visit. I worked on it today so that I would be sure to have tomorrow free for Eileen’s and my weekly foray to the shore. Eileen has also done some clearing of the music room upstairs as well which has a bit more room if they opt for that. At least there’s room for a harpsichord up there now.

Wednesday I am due at the dermatologist. My rash continues to abate, but it is nowhere near completely gone. I am interested to see what the doctor decides on Wednesday. The med I have been using is not recommend for use beyond 14 days. Tuesday will be my 14th day of application I think.

I did end up subscribing to the Atlantic magazine, but digital only. It would have cost me only ten more dollars but I don’t really want more magazines to dispose of after use.

Eileen and I have been watching old Alfred Hitchcock movies. So far we have watched North by Northwest, Marnie, and Vertigo. I find the old movies so much more satisfying than most things made for screens these days. I especially appreciate Bernard Hermann scores for all of these. Movie and TV music usually makes me a little crazy and at the least distracts and/or annoys me.

I have a new hero, Adam Serwer. I’ve had his book, The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America sitting on my to-read shelf for a while. I started it yesterday. It’s a collection of essays he has written beginning with “Is this the Second Redemption?” published in The Atlantic on November 10, 2016. Serwer brings together an astute understanding of the past and the present in this article. Each article is preceded by an introductory essay that has been written for this 2021 collection and updates anything needed.

But not much is needed so far. I admit I ordered this book because I liked the title. The cruelty is indeed the point of white racism. But I had no idea that this guy existed. I am enjoying it so much that I am thinking of subscribing to the Atlantic where he is still writing.

I have read the first four of thirteen chapters. Already I am marking up passages and connecting ideas. For example, Serwer does an elegant and telling comparison of “The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated” as a “most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.” Wow.

Pages later he ties in James Baldwin who, he writes, “wrote about this peculiar American delusion in 1964, arguing that the founders of the United States had a ‘fatal flaw’: that ‘they could recognize a man when they saw one.’ Because ‘they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. It is an extremely complex lie.”

Good stuff. Serwer’s back notes indicate he is quoting from Baldwin’s essay, “the White Problem” in the collection The Cross of Redemption.

Like so many of Serwer’s references, this 2010 publication will go on my to-read list.

I can only link yesterday’s video. The link should begin at about where my piece starts. They did a good job on it. Here’s a link to the program.

The Pioneering Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler

This is an article from the Smithsonian Magazine. A lot of is rehash of lionizing the excellent Butler. But there this picture of her typewrite.

Charles Conwell Killed in the Ring

I can’t remember who recommended this, but they said that thought they weren’t that interested in boxing the writing was elegant. It happens to be in the Atlantic.

One way to think about how crazy I find the world is to realize that I live in a different reality from other people. In my reality it’s people and beauty and ideas that are real not money. In my reality I want to take responsibility for my own actions and understand history and listen to great music and great ideas. This means my reality is peopled with the writers I read and composers I play and listen to. After all my world seems as real to me as other people’s worlds seem unreal to me.

It looks my buddy Dave Strong probably died of Covid. I was looking at past messages on his Facebook feed and it looks like he was struggling with it before he died. What a shame. I have a terrible feeling that he might not have been vaccinated or wore masks. I hope that’s not the case because I’m sure this would have made his brother, Dave, who is a MD crazy. But I’m just shooting in the dark here.

The pandemic is worsening. Eileen and I are taking precautions. We went to the grocery store together today. We wore masks, but many people at Meijer were not wearing masks. Like I say, they live in a different reality from me.

I continue to play through Bartok. Recently I began playing through his Bagatelles. I admit I didn’t know exactly what a bagatelle was. I am familiar with Beethoven’s Bagatelles. I played through a few of these. Finally I broke down and looked it up in my Harvard Dictionary. The word means “trifle” and was coined by, lo and behold, my beloved Francois Couperin. Bartok’s Bagatelles are very different from Beethoven’s. And Couperin’s music is totally different than both Bartok and Beethoven, of course.

Willie Apel, the author of the Harvard Dictionary, says these are “character pieces.” He mentions Schumann’s character pieces so I played through a bit of Schumann earlier today as well.

When I was at Readers World recently, I was using up my gift certificates that the church and Rhonda gave me. The owner asked if I had retired recently and how was it? I said I had and it was great. I read, play music, and think of more books to order from her store.

I am in pig heaven with many good books to read. I’m reading Kunzru’s My Revolutions and Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness and enjoying the shit out of both of them. I am rereading Lerner’s book length poem, Mean Free Path, since I had no idea what the title meant when I waded in for the first read.

“Mean” in sense of “average.” According to a Google, the actual distance a particle such as a molecule in a gas will move before collision is called the “free path.” The distance cannot be generally be given because its calculation would require knowledge of the path of every particle in the region.

Whew! I suppose Lerner expects his ignorant readers like me to google it, but I like to forage ahead into poetry and sometimes prose without always stopping to look up everything. I definitely didn’t have a clue about this connotation of the phrase when I read the little book the first time. Now I’m rereading because one of the techniques he uses is to write lines that only make good sense if you skip a line to finish the thought.

I have interlibrary loaned his book, The Hatred of Poetry. I wonder if it will shed any light on Mean Free Path.

I had to stop at this point and listen to Rhonda and Brian Reichenbach play the piece I wrote for them. They were performing at Calvin College which streamed the concert.

They played the heck out of my piece. Thank you Rhonda and Brian! I will link up the video if I can.

I played my way all the way through volume 4 of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos yesterday. The Mikrokosmos are a series of pieces Bartok wrote for his son to learn piano. They are in order of ascending difficulty. They have been my companions for years and I have played and performed from them.

Volume 4 is pretty sight readable for me. Most of Bartok’s piano works are not this easy including some of the later volumes. I was tickled to see that I had performed the Intermezzo (no. 111) as a prelude on 3/10/02. This means it was probably for the Lutherans when I had a short period of serving a local Lutheran church as organist/choir director. Also, Bulgarian Rhythm (no. 113) indicates a registration on my electric piano with a split keyboard, Jazz Organ/Bass down an Octave. This means I probably performed it on the street.

I have played quite a bit of Bartok in local coffee shops and on the street when I was still doing that. I have arranged Bartok and other cool music for whatever instruments and instrumentalists I had handy. I was listening to the radio today and a dancer was saying that she and her troupe had quit dancing in public spaces because they didn’t feel welcome. I think that describes my ultimate decision to quit playing on the streets of Holland, Michigan.

But it’s not that big a deal for me to not have this outlet. My therapist asked me if I was planning any more public performances in retirement. I told him no, but I don’t rule it out.

I finished The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith last night before going to sleep. It is a fun romp. Apparently it is her second novel. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but the writing is virtuosic and the plot hilarious. Here’s a passage I particularly enjoyed:

“Alex, like everybody, held hospitals in the highest, purest dread and loathing. To come in with a bump and leave with the baby–this is the only grace available in a hospital. Other than that, there is only pain. The concentration of pain. Hospitals are unique in this concentration. There are no areas of the world dedicated to the concentration of pleasure (theme parks and their like are a concentration of the symbols of pleasure, not pleasure itself), there are no buildings dedicated to laughter, friendship or love. They’d probably be pretty gruesome if they existed, but would they smell of decay’s argument with disinfectant? Would people walk through the hallways, weeping? Would the shops sell only flowers and slippers and mints? Would the beds (so ominous, this!) have wheels?”

This morning I finished reading Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and Ben Lerner’s book of poetry, Mean Free Path. After breakfast with beautiful Eileen, I jumped in the car and picked up some books I had ordered from the local bookshop: three novels by Hari Kunzru I haven’t read and a book of essays entitled Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound edted by Paul Theberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett. The latter I think of in the same category as Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction by Keith Negus. I have ordered my own copy of this book but haven’t been able to resist reading the library’s copy while I wait for it.

Eileen and I are planning to skip another Great Performance Series performance scheduled for this evening. This time we have the will and I am feeling better, but the Pandemic rages and it seems silly to go into a public gathering at this point. Ottawa County were we live is surging more than any other in our state. No one was wearing masks at the bookshop just now. Lack of precautions are taking a toll not only in little old Western Michigan but world wide. I would not be surprised if we don’t have another lockdown before Christmas.