I’m enjoying my last week of vacation. Yesterday I went to Hope College and accompanied a very talented eighth-grade sax player at his lesson with my bud, Jordan VanHemert. Today I had tea with Rhonda Edgington and Kola Owolabi.
It’s flattering and fun that my bud, Rhonda, keeps reaching out to me and connecting me to other people. Kola was a delight. He teaches organ at U of M and was interested in maybe returning with his Baroque Italian Organ Music class to play the Pasi which he seems to have fallen in love with.
This morning I exercised to a BBC documentary about T. S. Eliot (YouTube Link). I have been thinking about his work on and off this summer. This documentary was interesting in that I realized that I have read his biography and remember a lot of it. I wondered what they were going to put in the documentary.There are many voice overs of T. S. Eliot and others reading his poetry. I recommend the documentary if you’re into Eliot. It’s over an hour and twenty minutes long.
The following video of a song I like a lot uses many shots from the documentary and it’s much, much shorter.
I looked at The Wasteland and noticed that the epigraph comes from Dante’s Inferno. I knew that Dante was important to Eliot. The documentary reinforced some of my understandings about him that I have been getting from reading Patricia Sloane’s T. S. Eliot’s Bleistein Poems.
That Eliot had a pronounced sense of humor and enjoyed confusing his readers with both real and made up erudition.
I seem to be easing back into life in Holland. I have been practicing Sunday’s psalm at the piano. I am enjoying studying Song of Solomon by Morrison and now I am being drawn back into thinking about T. S. Eliot.
Life is good. Eileen just came in and said it’s beautiful outside and she is going to sit in the back yard.
BBC News: Zuleika Hassan: Kenyan MP with baby ordered to leave Parliament
There’s sin everywhere.
Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism’ – The New York Times
NYTimes: Can Britain’s No. 1 Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble?
I pushed my tablet over to Eileen this morning with this article on the screen. There was a picture of the very cool book store we went to in London recently. I believe that the man in this article, Mr. Daunt, was sitting at the front desk when we walked in.