My used copy of Collected Poems: 1953-1993 by Updike arrived in the mail yesterday. He has completely re-ordered his poems chronologically. Also he divides them into “poems” and “light verse.”
“Poems” come from the “real world” and “light verse” from “the man-made world.” It’s a bit confusing. He also omits a few poems from his collection. I have traced the first twenty or so poems of The Carpentered Hen and find that they fall in all three categories (poems, light verse, omitted).
He has notes in the back to some of the poems. So I found out that “March: A Birthday Poem for Elizabeth” which I mentioned and linked in my March 30th post, was actually wrong. The Elizabeth in question though expected in March was born on April 1. Updike vindicates himself a bit, because she was born in the U.K. and it was still March in the U.S.A.
Hah.
Another busy day yesterday. Unusually a choir member apologized to me for her behavior the previous day. I find forgiveness pretty easily, but her behavior had added to the weight of my own crazy interior anxiety which caused me to toss and turn on Sunday night. I slept much better last night.
I handed in all the information for the upcoming four services in Holy Week. This means I decided on the organ music and sent the secretary the titles and words to the choral anthems.
On Good Friday I will play a triptych of interesting pieces by Ernst Pepping on “O Sacred Head” for the prelude. The Vigil postlude and Easter Sunday postlude will both be the tried and true “Toccata” from Symphony 5 by Widor. I ran through this Sunday after choir rehearsal and convinced myself I still remember it. I have performed this piece many times including an undergraduate jury.
Musicians have to play in a test situation. Usually several faculty sit and listen and then grade you. That’s what a jury is.
I can remember that a visiting organ professor said that I played Widor in a very impressionistic manner. This was a typical veiled slam. My teacher had advised me to ignore the staccato markings over the incessant sixteenth notes. He said that Widor put them there to off set the rolling acoustics of his church. I bought it then, but now I’m not so sure. I am rehearsing it in a staccato manner, but will probably play it legato.
For the prelude on Sunday morning I have scheduled “A Prelude for Easter Morning” by the living Episcopalian composer, Gerald Near. It draws on Gregorian chant (Haec dies) and the Easter hymn, “O Sons and Daughters.”
I also managed to schedule a rehearsal for my string trio. The children’s choir director who is a phenomenal pianist consented to play a hymn at Maundy Thursday and the accompaniment to the choral anthem on Sunday.
This all looks pretty doable.
Today I have a class in a half hour and I have to prepare scores for the strings after that. And practice.
Once again I am harvesting and storing the junk of my parents. In order to clear my Mom’s old room, Eileen and I sorted out what she needs now in her new smaller room and discarded some stuff she will probably never need. The remaining stuff is sitting in my house (and temporarily in my car).
This is the third time I have brought my parents extra stuff to my house. I think this will inoculate me so that if I don’t die a sudden death or become an invalid I will probably divest myself of a lot of my own junk before death.
It could happen.
warning… remainder of post boring church stuff, no pics, no fam stuff
Anxiety at church is rising. Since we have the Vigil on Saturday, I have asked the choir to come out for all three days of the Triduum (Maundy Thurs, Good Fri, Sat Vigil) plus Sun Morning. Most of them are okay. One is skipping services. One is angry and thinks this is not a privilege but too much to ask of the choir. I have been repeatedly turned down when I have asked for help for Holy Week from the many instrumentalists at my church. I do think I will probably have enough people for a string trio on Maundy Thurs and a solo violist on Good Fri and an obbligato Violin at the Vigil. I plan to invite an excellent pianist to slip in and play the piano on the anthem for Easter Sunday. Also I have a bass player who is up for anything.
Service went pretty well yesterday as will all the upcoming ones. I especially enjoyed working with the kids. The children’s choir director has given notice that this will be her last year as director. I have told my boss that I am willing to take on this duty with a slight increase pay. I am getting sucking in more than I originally intended I know, but I would like to see what would happen to this struggling group if I was the director.
The three kids from the children’s choir who showed up yesterday responded very well to my leadership and seem to have a good time. Basically all I did was teach them handbell technique and then have them do a very simple ring on the Hosanna.
I enjoyed playing the little Bach postlude. Once again I’m pretty sure this stuff falls on deaf ears. I understand the design of the Palm Sunday service to be one of moving from triumph to the solemn. So I accompanied the last two hymns pretty quietly. Then played a medium loud but solemn postlude. The music was there to frame the prayer if the congregation chose to use it.
I asked my choir to rehearse in the basement after church since that is where we have most of the Maundy Thursday service and where we will perform our anthem. I think it might have helped their blending possibilities for the Thursday anthem. Like most church basements our basement is pretty forbidding to music: carpet, low ceilings, long room. I will have them perform in a circle and try to get some kind of choral blend. Silly me.
Blacks are the target of the highest number of hate crimes in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — higher by a wide margin than any another group of Americans by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability. While blacks make up 12.6 percent of the country’s population, they were 70 percent of the victims of racial hate crimes in 2010.
Many American professors of politics and history (most notably Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, an expert on Shiite Islam) could disabuse your readers of their constant diet of misinformation relating to Iran having hostile intentions (it has not started an aggressive war in two centuries) and threatening to “wipe Israel off the face of the map” (the original Persian of that oft-cited phrase related to time not place — “the Zionist regime would pass” — and was expressed in the passive voice, implying no agency on the part of Iran in bringing that about).
Occasionally consulting a Persian-speaking source like Professor Cole could help you a lot.
So I’m staring at Holy Week and wondering how things will go. The response to my call for musicians to come and celebrate this week has been very small. Many people are out of town. One young man is playing in a different church in town. Others simply don’t respond. I’m trying not to care. The music will go well, I’m sure.
I once attended a lecture about some esoteric performance practices in the Baroque period. As I was walking away with my teacher, Ray Ferguson, he was commenting how ironic it was that these kinds of controversy just don’t matter. In my heart, I knew he was right. One can play music in many ways. Ray taught me that the important thing was that you gave a convincing performance not it’s correctness. A valuable lesson.
Likewise, music at church, I think. So many ways to get from A to Z in church music. When I look at the New York Times sampling of music being played around at churches in New York, I am both encouraged and discouraged. Encouraged that I see pieces that I myself am doing and will do this week. Discouraged because I’m pretty sure that (in the words of the Bill Murray character in Stripes) “It just doesn’t matter” what I do, most of it probably makes little difference to the people in the room.
I’m pretty sure I will have a string trio for Maundy Thursday. I plan to keep trying to entice a non-choir instrumentalist for Good Friday. If I can’t get one, I have a choir member who has been bugging me to play the obbligato on the anthem. It’s hard to spare any singer with such a small group, but right now this musician is my back-up plan for Good Friday.
At the Vigil, I want to add a violin part to the Mozart Alleluia we are singing. It will sparkle. That should all fall together.
And in the end, I can pretty much do all of this stuff myself providing the choir shows up, which it will.
My blood pressure is up. Sooprise. Sooprise.
Being a musician in the 21st century in America is an odd thing for me. Celebrity has pretty much drowned out reality. My wife once told a sixth grade class she was teaching that her husband was a musician. They were impressed. They were sure I was rich.
Even in academia I find that perception trumps reality. If one has the right degree, schmoozes the right way, and conducts oneself with a certain circumspect yet unmistakable air, one is often assumed to be competent. Never mind if that is the case or not.
Oh well, excuse the early morning Sunday bitching. I still am very happy to be in close contact with great music. This morning I will close the service with a lovely Bach chorale prelude from the orgelbuchlein on Jesu, Meine Freude. We are closing with a hymn based on this tune (“Would You Share Christ’s Passion?”).
I’ll close with another bitter little but lovely quote from the late Adrienne Rich which seems a bit appropriate.
“For a mass audience in the United States is not an audience for a collectively generated idea, welded together by the power of that idea and by common debates about it. Mass audiences are created by promotion, by the marketing of excitements that take the place of ideas, of real collective debate, vision, or catharsis; serve only to isolate us in the littleness of our own lives—we become incoherent to each other.”
from “The Space for Poetry” in What is Found There by Adrienne Rich
xanthochroid, n. & a. fair-haired and pale-skinned (person). xanthochroism, n. condition in which all skin pigments except yellow and orange disappear. xanthoma, n. skin disease causing yellow patches. xanthopsia, n. optical defect causing everything to seem yellow. xanthous, a. yellow- or red-haired; yellow-skinned.
Cool. And about that “zebuesque.” Couldn’t raise anything online so I was reduced to pulling out one of my collection of dictionaries. It was there that I figured out that the word is zebu-esque. And refers to a Zebu.
My dictionary mentioned the hump on the back and described its ears as “pendulous.” So the passenger Updike is describing must have a hunchback and funny ears.
It looks like the Supreme Court is gearing up for another bad ruling (like Bush V. Gore). What bothers me about this is not the partisanship but the obvious confusion on the part of people (supreme court justices!) who are critical of the Affordable Health Care Act.
When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain.
Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”
Article by a guy who is writing a book on Gated Communities.
Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders
Mr. Martin’s “suspicious” profile amounted to more than his black skin. He was profiled as young, loitering, non-property-owning and poor. Based on their actions, police officers clearly assumed Mr. Zimmerman was the private property owner and Mr. Martin the dangerous interloper. After all, why did the police treat Mr. Martin like a criminal, instead of Mr. Zimmerman, his assailant? Why was the black corpse tested for drugs and alcohol, but the living perpetrator wasn’t?
Adrienne Rich died this week. I’ve admired her poetry and essays over the years, as well as her clear-eyed political understanding of this poor country.
So last night I checked and was annoyed that my collection of her work was not filed correctly in my poetry books. Damn. This morning I got up and poked around until I found it in a stack of books waiting to be filed.
My collection has three books of hers bound as one. What is found there (1993) is a collection of essays. An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and The Fact of a Doorframe (1974) are poetry collections.
I began my morning reading with Rich. I found this lovely sentence in an essay in the first volume:
“To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and, simultaneously to allow what you’re reading to pierce the routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled.”
from the essay, “As if your life depended on it” by Adrienne Rich
Perusing her poetry this morning sent me to the dictionary numerous times. Actually to the internet which is my dictionary of convenience.
Did you know a “corm” is the swollen, underground stem base of flowers like crocuses and gladioli? Rich used this word in a striking image: “This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms…” (from her poem, “Here is a map of our country”).
Girasol is another word for sunflowers which as also called Jerusalem Artichokes
and Sunchokes:
“the girasol, orange, gold-petalled/ with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to California…”
When I turned to read Updike this morning, I ran across another poem with a reference to sunflowers, an entire poem, in fact.
Sunflower
by John Updike
Sunflower, of flowers
the most lonely,
yardstick of hours,
long-term stander
in empty spaces,
shunner of bowers,
indolent bender
seldom, in only
the sharpest of showers:
tell us, why
is it your face is
a snarl of jet swirls
and gold arrows, a burning
old lion face high
in a cornflower sky,
yet by turning
your head we find
you wear a girl’s
bonnet behind?
from The Carpentered Hen and other tame creatures by John Updike
I need to quit blogging and go clean up my Mom’s old room at the nursing home. But one more poetry reference.
I was tickled to run across a poem entitled “March: a birthday poem for Elizabeth” which Updike wrote to his daughter. I have a daughter named Elizabeth who was born in March as well. I emailed her a link to the poem.
The information in this article is pretty familiar to me, but as the author points out it doesn’t inform the scandalous rhetoric of the music/movie moguls.
My 60 year old body is a bit sore this morning. I managed to get my Mom set up in her new room, but there is a horrendous mess waiting for me in her old room. I have tons of stuff to sort through, saving what she needs and getting rid of the rest. That’s tomorrow.
Today I have pretty full schedule. Class at 9:30, meet with boss at 11, then back to my Mom’s nursing home. This time to play a little mini concert. I could probably pull of the Debussy piece I have been practicing, but I think I’m going to play music that I know a bit more thoroughly and can do in this exhausted state. So they will get Bach and Mozart for their classic portions. Maybe a Scarlatti piece. All stuff I play regularly at weddings and funerals. Good stuff. In addition. I will play pop music from the forties and of course we will sing hymns.
Contemplating not playing Debussy’s “Danse” at tomorrow’s mini-concert at my Mom’s nursing home. Most of yesterday was spent moving my Mom’s stuff. So I didn’t have time to practice piano or treadmill. I have many other piano pieces up my sleeve that I can perform tomorrow. Today I want to move the rest of my Mom’s stuff into her new room.
I did do some church stuff yesterday. It makes me a little crazy that I can’t get my church to keep a master calendar. On the Sunday bulletin, it said that there would be a Movie Night on the Wednesday of Holy Week. On the church’s google calendar (which is supposedly the master calendar), there was no mention of this. Of course, I later noticed that the Maundy Thursday service and the Good Friday service were also missing. The Easter Vigil was there, but then I remembered putting it on myself during a Worship Commission meeting.
Calendering probably seems like a small thing to you. But it makes it difficult to plan if there is not master plan. Whippy skippy. I emailed my boss and she told met that there was indeed a Movie night planned, but that I should go ahead a schedule a rehearsal as she didn’t foresee much overlap between the movie people and the music people.
Sigh.
This morning I finished all the John Updike poems on http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ . I think I will order a large book of his poetry. I own a couple of small ones (one that I purchased as a teen). I am thinking of re-reading them until a new arrives. It turns out that I have had a practice of reading poetry books all the way through, just not huge collections.
I also finished Payback by Margaret Atwood. Part of “Mom day” yesterday was convincing her to go to her shrink appointment. At the end of the appointment he finally talked to me about mom. It’s her third appointment with him. I have tried to cue him in to her history by mentioning the psychological base test they did several years ago when I dragged my parents to the area (he has access to her files through the Pine Rest network to which he belongs). He told me that Mom didn’t really want to come today. I laughed. I told him he wasn’t the first shrink she has resisted. I began saying that she cycles through depression and described for him her attempted suicide (not a terribly serious attempt admittedly… mostly she took a few tylenol and then said she took the bottle… ) and her stay in the Pysch Ward in GR. By this time he was saying they should have another appointment in three or four weeks. I then told him that her previous talk shrink (psychologist) invited me in at the close of the appointment for a three way discussion. I told him I was open to that but was comfortable with however he wanted to proceed.
Dope.
Anyway, sitting in the waiting room while Mom was in the appointment gave me an opportunity to read Payback.
It’s an interesting book, but more on that later maybe.
Yesterday morning was busy for me. After relaxing for a bit, I went to see my elderly mother. She and I made a list of stuff in her room she wants to move to her new room and stuff we can get rid of. I’m planning to try and get her in by Wednesday evening. This gives me some time to box up stuff she is discarding and take it to the thrift shop. She has lost the little emergency button that was hanging around her neck. They gave her a new one and asked me to watch out for the old one as we move her.
I came home and discovered that my noon class had canceled. I emailed Amazon help because the Kindle deal cookbook I attempted to purchase on Sunday didn’t load properly. By the time I received their reply it was working. I also emailed Gateway, the people who manufactured my netbook. I have broken it again and am hoping they will replace the screen for a reasonable price (as they did before when it was under warranty).
I called the American Medical Response of Michigan company. They are the company whose ambulance took my Mom to the ER back in January. I received a bill saying that they couldn’t get Aetna Medicare to pay f0r it. I tried to call them last week, but they put me on hold so long that the twenty minutes I had allotted for the call was insufficient and I had to hang up on them.
Yesterday I borrowed my Mom’s Aetna card, came home, called AMR of M and put them on speaker phone while I typed up the list of what furniture my Mom wanted to keep and discard. Clever steve. Eventually they came on and I cleared it up by providing more up-to-date insurance info for them.
Today is both church day (the day I think about upcoming church stuff like Hell week) and Mom day. Eileen is going to go over and pack a few boxes to go to Bibles for Mexico this morning I think.
After class, I plan to do some of this myself, as well as maybe move some of the furniture into the new room.
I am playing for the March birthday party at my Mom’s nursing home on Thursday. When I do these kinds of gigs I try to mix it up. Most of the music doesn’t need prep but I include some substantial music each time. This Thursday I am planning to perform “Danse” by Debussy as well as a few other classic pieces which I haven’t chosen yet. “Danse” is something I have been practicing and think I can pull off by Thursday. I think it sounds like Spring.
I finished Woolgathering by Patti Smith and am thinking of a second poet to read besides Ann Sexton.
John Updike (1932 - 2009)
This morning I read half of the poems by John Updike on the Poetry Foundation site. I like Updike and have read tons of his novels. I bought a little book of his poetry when I was young and still remember poems I read then. Here are a few I enjoyed this morning.
Bookmarked this musician’s blog. He was mentioned in a NYT review as a composer who delineates his work into classical music and popular music. I find this amusing. Reminds me of Graham Greene’s designation of his work as either entertainments or literary stuff. I think this kind of thinking is a bit artificial. As Duke Ellington said (paraphrased) “there are two kinds of music, good and the other kind.”
“…. we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.”
The key is to determine who was standing his ground and defending himself: the boy with the candy or the man with the gun
More reflections on Trayvon Martin’s death. I had a Facebook “friend” put up a reactionary link about Gun Control yesterday. A link to a blog post about an incident in the U.K. last year to prove that anti-gun liberals want to destroy the fabric of our society. I had to respond. Allowing things I so disagree with to stand unchallenged is part of the problem of the echo chamber. So I replied, “What this particular soft-headed anti-gun liberal wants is for people not to shoot someone carrying skittles and wearing a hoody….” The Gun people were undaunted of course. But I just had to write something.
My internet connection kept failing this morning. So when I came across a good quote in Payback by Atwood, I found myself pulling out my old journal to jot it down.
This helps me understand my own blogging habits. I have kept journals on and off for literally forty years. As my brother pointed out to me recently writing is part of a process of thinking and reasoning. It has certainly been that for me.
Blogging has constrained me a bit to be more appropriate since it is technically a public forum. I get about 40-50 hits a day (according to counter) which is low for web sites. But there is still the possibility that anyone with an internet connection could read what I write. My constraint is borne out of consideration for others. Privately I write with little constraint.
But I still find this helpful. A release, if you will.
Anyway this morning’s quote from Atwood:
“In narratives involving irrational and obsessive hatred, especially of some person or group, such hatred—say the Jungians–is the mark of a person who has not come to terms with his or own Shadow.”
Margaret Atwood, Payback
It’s tempting to use this kind of thinking when trying to understand others’ hatred and confusion. Better, I think, to look in the mirror.
While I was jotting in my journal I came across a poem I wrote last year: “Apologies to my 2nd Grade Teacher.” I decided to polish it up a bit and post it.
I keep making up music and poetry.
I often think of a friend who in my youth read my poetry and ruefully shook his head and said with a rueful smile, someday it’s got to get better.
Maybe not, but I still like making up stuff.
That’s my attraction to the dance class. It’s a place where I can sit and make up music.
The music went well yesterday. I noticed earlier in the week that I had made a note to myself last year in the margins of the music for the prelude: “Fell apart. Practice more next time.”
I don’t remember how it had “fell apart.” My suspicion was that in attempting to replicate the piece on my tiny organ I had over planned the extra-musical stuff like stops and crescendos and diminuendos. Whatever it was, yesterday I played it pretty accurately. Until I arrived at the last statement of the melody in the right hand and accidentally had the wrong stop. I smiled to myself and finished the phrase without changing the stop. Still. I played it and the postlude well.
I think I have found a new author to read: Antonya Nelson.
Checked this out of the library and am thinking of reading it.
She has a short story in the new New Yorker (March 26 issue) called “Chapter Two” which I quite like.
What I usually do with the fiction in the New Yorker is read the first paragraph or so. If it doesn’t bore me or annoy me, I go on. This story is the story of someone telling a story. To her A.A. group. About her very eccentric neighbor. And it hooked me in. I would link in the full text but the New Yorker has made it available online to subscribers only. Since I subscribe I have access to the New Yorker online but it annoys the heck out of me with its antiquated simulated magazine interface.
You know the kind that simulates the turn of a page and has no links in the index or anywhere else for that matter. Nice exploiting of the technology!
Good grief. So I never bother to use it. I just read the magazines when they come in the mail.
Eileen and I went to see Hunger Games yesterday.
I was surprised to find myself enjoying it… much more than the volume of prose it was based on. I continue to maintain the first volume of the books starts weak. I don’t have a copy to re-examine but I do know it took me several tries to get going in it. I recall I was annoyed at the simple-mindedness of the prose style and the fact that there was a cat called Buttercup. Buttercup!
The movie began stronger with a different scene. I believe it was Flickerman the M.C. interviewing the Gamemaster.
As the movie progressed I realized that the subject matter that interested me in these books held some very real possibilities when it became a screen play.
There’s nothing like watching a reality show. Throw in enough bizarre stuff like Wizard of Oz haircuts and outrageous costumes and you have a mirror of just how inane our society can be.
It’s my hope that as they make the next three (3!) of the planned movies that they get nastier about the fact that the pampered rich obtuse people in the Capital who benefit from the work of the people in the outlying Districts are really a portrait of the people actually sitting in the theater and watching the movie.
I have been spending a lot of time with Debussy and Beethoven on the piano. There are a couple of piano pieces of Debussy I have long admired and played but never really learned thoroughly enough to perform: “Danse”
and “Passepied.”
I have been concentrating on them for over a week and thinking maybe this time I’ll learn them.
Last night after rehearsing today’s prelude and postlude I found myself drawn into Bach’s D minor trio for organ.
I love this music. It’s ironic because the slow movement is really the first Bach trio I learned years ago. I concentrated on the more challenging outer movements. Again I’m feeling perversely like I should learn this music and perform it. Maybe I will.
“…even a police officer is held to account for every single bullet he or she discharges, so why should a private citizen be given more rights when it came to using deadly physical force?”
It’s a gas to pick up a book and begin reading with no context, just to take it pretty much on its own terms. My daughter, Elizabeth, recently mailed me this little book by Patti Smith. I recognized the name, had a vague idea of Smith as a punk rocker/artist…. after googling her I recalled she was involved with the Mapplethorpe set in New York.
So I didn’t have much orientation but happily started reading. The books is dreamy bits of prose with many many obscure references. I like this in the day of being able to run unknown words and references down online. Smith refers to music I don’t know. Right now I’m listening to this:
As I first listened to this, I somehow had Tosca playing in the background. Earlier in the morning I began a play list of Smith music references. I inadvertently must have began playing the long aria, “Vissi d’arte” which Smith refers to in Woolgathering.
Later I began playing the Patty Waters YouTube (since she didn’t seem to be on spotify). I thought they were the same recording with Tosca being pretty much in the foreground.
How unusual and 60s and John Cage like, I thought. I even wondered how this recording got past me since the juxtaposition was so striking: Puccini and folk music and jazz…. the use of a recording in a recording….
As I poked around, I couldn’t find anything about this unusual use of Puccini. I started to suspect that either the YouTube video wasn’t the Patty Waters recording or something else was going on. Sure enough, I was playing Spotify and YouTube at the same time.
I’m now listening to the Patty Waters and it still sounds pretty determinedly avant-guarde for the time. I just went over to Amazon and bought the whole album in MP3s for the grand total of $8.99. What a bargain! Plus I love the immediacy of the interwebs. Discover it. Think about it. Preview it. Purchase it at a reasonable price. Listen to it.
The jokes on me for the supposed juxtaposition I guess.
I must be a soft headed goofball, because I am enjoying the Waters recording a lot now without Puccini simultaneously playing.
I was entranced with the Tosca aria because it begins with these words: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” – I lived for my art, I lived for love…
I quite like that.
I look forward to running down other references in Smith. I have added the little book to my morning poetry reading.
Speaking of which, I did talk to the doctor about getting up early and reading poetry as part of the lowering of my blood pressure.
“You’re going to laugh at me,” I told her. She took on that professional nothing will perturb me look that doctors have to know.
She wasn’t embarrassed until I asked her if she knew the work of William Carlos Williams. She murmured about not knowing much about poetry. I told her I only mention it because Williams was a doctor. I thought but did not tell this handsome 45 year old American Hispanic that Williams’ mother was Hispanic and that his middle name Carlos was the name of his uncle.
Some things are beyond the medical consultation room I guess.
I try to do what my doctor tells me.
But I think of it as having a modern witch doctor (not to disparage the profession). One superstitiously follows their advice, exercise, attempt to eat right. It’s all magic anyway. And luck. Maybe one will be spared a bit longer and get to taste life. Maybe not.
It reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s dedication to his poetry:
“I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: ‘I’d be a dam’ fool if I didn’t!’ These, poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”
This paragraph which I read in my youth has had a huge influence in my ability to embrace the idea of believing at all…. believing in the doctor or the priest… I often find myself thinking of Dylan Thomas’s shepherd.
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.
I have a doctor’s appointment at 10 AM. It’s my semiannual check-up so I am fasting for the blood work. My blood pressure is up a bit this morning so I’m probably worrying about whether my blood pressure will be high at the doctor’s office.
This makes me crazy. Worrying about worrying.
I also plan to ask her about my ears. My ears have been stopped up several times in the last few months.
It feels a bit like a cold and I can’t hear very well. I fear that I am losing more of my hearing this way and would like to have an ear doctor look at it.
Eileen is spending the night in Ann Arbor. I ended the evening last night with Beethoven at the piano then off to read myself to sleep.
Earlier I had jumped from bed to figure out a hymn tune my new Episcopalian colleague I met with yesterday was looking for. Ironic because it comes from the Roman Catholic practice and reflects the Roman Catholic background of the Episcopal priest she is working for. I tossed most of my Roman Catholic reference books and hymnals when I quit working for them full-time. But with a little searching I think I managed to figure it out.
I finished volume 8 of Sandman yesterday and also the Icelandic murder mystery, The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson.
About half way through Payback by Margaret Atwood
and The Influencing Machine by Brooks Gladstone.
Both good reads. Atwood is an eloquent hymn to the human concept of debt. Gladstone is an insider’s examination of media in America, both presently and how we got here.
Citizens for R & E have done extensive research on the money congresspeople spend on themselves and their relatives. Mostly legal. Mostly questionable. Have fun and look up your state or take their witty little ethics online quiz.
Clear essay about the lack of protection of rights in the USA.
Income inequality isn’t just about justice; it’s about freedom, too. One view of freedom minimises the state’s role in an individual’s life and maximises markets so that individuals are free to risk whatever they want to risk to be whatever they want to be. Another view sees the obligation of the state to hedge against the risk of the marketplace so that individuals can feel secure enough to be what they want to be.
Obviously, the libertarian view favours someone who can afford risk; the socialist view favours someone who can’t. One view has confidence in the market while the other is skeptical. One view sees income inequality as natural while the other sees it as politically oppressive.
Whew! I find that when I finally take some time off, I basically feel exhausted. That’s what happened to me yesterday. It’s happening today as well. I tried very hard not to do much yesterday. Basically spent the day reading and practicing. Finished Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf. I enjoyed this book.
When I finally got to the U.K. I had fun because I had read so much about it in novels and other books. Now that I have been there, when a novel like Woolf’s Jacob’s Room draws on a setting I have actually seen like Cornwall or London, that’s fun too.
It’s intriguing how Woolf writes a story about a character with brief glimpses set in between more general prose about other stuff and other events.
I think she might be writing about her technique when she says:
“It is thus that we live, they say, by an unseizable force. They say that novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by—an unseizable force.”
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Also finished off Sandman volume 8 by Neil Gaiman recently.
Checked out the next two yesterday.
I also began reading The Elementary Particles by the French writer, Michel Houellebecq. It immediately grabbed my attention. Martin who is the main character is a “clear sighted and deliberate engineer” of a new paradigm shift in human history (presumably the application of quantum theory to everything). Houellebecq wickedly and wittily tells his story. Lots of irony.
Eileen left the house this morning around 5:30 AM to go to a two day workshop in Ann Arbor. I have three tasks today: appointment with my Boss, piano trio rehearsal and a meeting with another Episcopalian church musician who thinks I might be able to connect her with some resources….
Not sure what that last one is about, but what the heck. She is the first Episcopalian musician to contact me in Western Michigan since I moved here in 1987. It’s weird because when I lived in the eastern side of the state I knew many Episcopalian musicians and the collegiality, networking and common vision was phenomenal. How phenomenal I didn’t know until I moved here.
You know you’re in trouble when the people at your Mom’s nursing home quickly agree that you need a day off (today) and your Mom’s tax lady asks you if you are alright.
Ay yi yi.
I put a lot on the schedule yesterday so that I could clear today of everything. So I planned to drop off my Mom’s taxes and get her back and forth to the pain doctor.
Then I went downstairs and discovered water all over the floor. The hot water heater had given up the ghost. So I added the plumber to the list.
The taxes of course required some more leg work so I ended up calling a bunch of people to get more information to file. Turns out one my Mom’s IRAs doesn’t routinely report interest for tax purposes unless you cash it out. Why is that, I wonder? Also, they don’t really have a web site and couldn’t give me the numbers over the phone. But they are mailing it. Good grief.
Finally met my Mom’s pain doctor. I stayed with her through most of the appointment (they took her to another room for the actual epidural). Lo and behold, it was the shortest appointment ever. I blocked out 2 hours thinking it might even go 3 as it has in the past. But this time we were in and out in close to an hour and a half. And the doctor lowered the drug (Gabapentin) that I suspect is significantly contributing to her weakness and confusion even more than his assistant did at the last appointment.
After getting Mom safely back to her room I had time to go to church and choose music for the weekend. Supper with Eileen at the library and home to treadmill. A full but productive day.
Today I plan to read, relax and practice. Thank you to Mark for being concerned that I take some time off. I’m trying, dude.
This isn’t just art that exists in the market, or is “about” the market. This is art that is the market – a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue.
Observations about evolution of application of law. What begins by prosecuting, convicting and sentencing “violent racist thugs” ends up over punishing “stupid but nonviolent young people.”
I’m still feeling pretty burned out. Spent most of yesterday tending to Mom. She agreed to have lunch with Eileen and me at the library cafe. I pushed her everywhere in a wheelchair, but she was still exhausted right at the outset.
By the time we have made it through her doctor’s appointment, she was in bad shape: even more exhausted and her back was hurting her like crazy.
She, I and Dr. Nykamp (her psychiatrist) agree that it is time for her to move to more supportive care.
I informed the facility where she is living. This will only mean moving two rooms down the hall but will provide her with much more personal attention.
Today, I am seriously thinking of taking her tax info to the tax person. Her bank failed to do the mandatory disbursement of her IRA so this will be even more complicated than usual. Oy.
Then in the afternoon I am planning to go and sit with her at her pain doctor so that I can monitor her care there.
I am feeling a lot of physical and mental fatigue. But if I get this all done today, I will have literally nothing scheduled tomorrow.
Warnings from the former editor of the NYT who bit the Iraq invasion hook line and sinker but now regrets it. He raises 5 questions and 2 caveats about going to war ever again.
I am seeking lethargy. No ballet classes this week. But I seem to have other things to do. Like get my Mom back and forth to doctors. And myself as well on Friday. Meetings at church.
In the mean time, I seem to be slipping into a vacation mood. I do what I usually do: read, practice. But I am thinking I have less places I have to be less times.
Finished Berryman’s The Dream Songs this morning. Not sure exactly what I think about them, except that I enjoyed reading them.
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
I have been wondering if my morning poetry reading is part of why my blood pressure is down. I look forward to saying this to my doctor on Friday. If for nothing else to watch her reaction.
Once again the net book is left out of the discussion. I read on my netbook. But that doesn’t seem to be on the radar in the talk about the death of the book and the birth of the digital reader.
I loved this novel Trollope wrote late in his career.
I also find it odd that people speaking in defense of the book feel so threatened and seem to misunderstand that it’s probably a good thing that people read whenever they bother to and however they can.
This is the web site of a militant call girl. I linked into it via a Tweet of Nicholas Kristof. He pointed to it as critical of his series on sex trafficking.
I am libertarian enough to think that if someone chooses to sell their body this is totally their business (theirs and their customers). But I also am soft headed enough to be concerned when people are drawn into situations beyond their control.
Also I read some of this stuff because I am trying to reach out of my own echo chamber of sources.
But frankly, The Honest Courtesan seems more coherent than the article by Laura Augustin which begins with paragraph after paragraph reviling Kristof. I see more content in the former than the latter.
In both cases, I am in a learning stance. I guess do-gooders like Kristof inevitably open themselves up to charges of paternalism and “soft imperialism.” It does seem however that if he has developed the game that Augustin describes it’s pretty goofy.
Good grief. It looks like this is the deal. Click on this to go to the free online game. If you want to.
I think this blog is pretty cool. It seems that Markson scans in pages of books he is studying with his marks in them or his name in them with a date. Then there is some prose regarding the concepts he is thinking about….. I like it.
I think this is a brave and wonderful telling of the early “tribe” of AIDS activists.
“If you come at a problem in a way that’s just disruptive and iconoclastic, but you don’t know what you’re talking about, all you are is a nuisance,” said Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when we talked last week. Act Up’s leaders, he told me, knew what they were talking about. As a result, they “cracked open the opaque process” of drug development, altered the patient-doctor relationship and “changed the whole face of advocacy,” he said.
Started reading Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth yesterday. A Facebook friend recommended the movie based on it. I was surprised to find it sitting on the shelf at my local library.
I’m not particularly good at money. I pay my bills and all that. But there is a limit to how interested I am in the whole deal. And now it seems to be a serious blight on my country…. the whole money thing.
So maybe I can learn something from Atwood. I like her approach which is historical and philosophical and not practical.
I was amused in the second chapter when she launches into a discussion of memorizing the Lord’s prayer as a kid. She immediately focuses on the use of the word, debt, versus trespasses in the “forgive us our ________ as we forgive others their ___________.
Atwood, a Canadian, writes: “The word ‘debt’—blunt and to the point—was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice drinking United Church, and ‘trespasses” was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and a more ornate theology.”
I remember when the new translation in the 1972 Book of Common Prayer (Episcopalian) settled on the word, sins, for this section, that I was uncomfortable with it. That is, until I picked up enough Greek to realize that it is indeed the word, sin, in the Greek.
Atwood goes further and says that in Aramaic (the other language that Jesus and the disciples spoke) the word used had both the meaning of “debt” and “sin.”
The 10 points:
How reliable is the source of the claim?
Does the source make similar claims?
Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
Does this fit with the way the world works?
Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
Are personal beliefs driving the claim?
There are apparently going to be four movies of the trilogy. Good grief. According to this interview the three actors playing the lead roles had all read The Hunger Games before coming to this project. Go figure. I didn’t know actors read books. Cool.
“Real or not real?” This is the question Peeta begins asking after he has been brainwashed by the bad guys in Mockingjay the concluding volume of The Hunger Games trilogy. I had difficulty getting started in the first volume of this work. But after the third volume, I think there is some elegance in the plot.
And I especially like the way the author, Susan Collins, poses some important questions about what’s real and what’s fake. Throughout the book, most of the actions take place before an unseen audience. The Hunger Games and their rituals are broadcast to the entire country of Panem as a sort of combination of propaganda, circus for the masses, and a warning since each “district” must select a “tribute” to participate in fight to the death. (Echoes of Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery.”) That audience’s perceptions are often what matter most. Hence the characters include a brave fashion designer who designs costumes for the people in the Hunger Games. There are a trio of people who administer make up and dress Katniss, the main character.
The omniscience of the broadcasting and recording camera is a nice touch. One that echoes a lot of places right now, especially England where the population is routinely monitored via Closed Circuit TV (CCTV).
And the question of what is real and what is not real is an important question to ask. “Crap detection” as Howard Rheingold has called it is an essential tool for survival both online and offline.
I like it very much that this Young Adult sci fi novel is asking some of these questions. I feel like the quality of the writing evolved. I still think the first pages of the first novel are weak. But by the end I was forgiving the unevenness of the writing because I got caught up in the concepts and the plot.
My used copy of Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine arrived in the mail yesterday. I am thirty pages into it and unsurprisingly it is excellent and informative.
From the introduction:
“We hunger for objectivity, but increasingly swallow ‘news’ like Jell-O shots in ad hoc cyber-saloons. We marinate in punditry seasoned with only those facts and opinions we can digest without cognitive distress.
Sometimes we feel queasy about it—queasiness we project back onto the media.
But we don’t really get agitated until we encounter the other guys’ media. Those guys are consuming lies. They are getting juiced up. Their media diet is making them stupid.
What if our media choices are making us stupid? What if they’re shortening our attention span, exciting our lusts, eroding our values, hobbling our judgment?
I admit that I think that TV news makes people stupider. “The more you watch, the less you know.” So I think that Gladstone is describing me in this paragraph to some extent. Great stuff.
One more thing on this subject. Although I abhor Rush Limbaugh, I am troubled by people who want to force him off the air. But, I am much more troubled by his and Anne Coulter’s and other crazy hate filled people’s popularity. In a free speech zone, we will always have people selling their hate, it’s the number of buyers of this hate that worries me.
Amazing stupid laws about not teaching Mexican literature in Tuscon’s public schools…… Tony Diaz, the author, strikes back and plans a book tour, smuggling books into America.
Yesterday, the ballet instructor asked for a tarantella. The class before she had asked if anyone knew what a doppelganger was…. I like these words: tarantella and doppelganger. I wrote a poem or two using the latter word when I was younger.
The language of ballet is different from the language of music. The ballet dictionary defines tarantella this way:
“A fast Italian dance in 6/8 time.”
The music dictionary defines it this way:
“A Neapolitan dance in rapid 6/8 meter, probably named for Taranto in southern Italy, or, according to popular legend, for the tarantula spider whose poisonous bite the dance was believed to cure. In the mid-19th century it was frequently composed (Chopin, Liszt, S. Heller, Auber, Weber, Thalberg) in the style of a brilliant perpetual mobile. See M. Schneider, “La Danza de espadas y la tarantela”
Neither definition is much help in attempting to improvise one that would suit the needs of a ballet instructor.
I had mistakenly received the impression that the theme for the Alfred Hitchcock TV show was a tarantella. I think this was from quickly glancing at a list of them on Wikipedia. Ah, the dangers of taking in information too quickly.
What did help (as usual) was to watch the instructor teach the character dance to the class. “Imagine you have a tambourine…. move like this…..” She alluded to spiders several times as she outlined the routine. She even incorporated body slaps. When 15 or so ballerinas slap their body there is a sound. When teachers put sound in the dance I often treat it as a rest which enhances the unspoken dialogue between the dancers and the music I am improvising.
This worked okay, until about the third time through this vigorous routine, the dancers began to be a tiny bit late with their slaps. Unsurprisingly, the teacher told me not to slow down, so I quit leaving the beats on the slaps up the class.
This was the last class on the last day before spring break. I think it was wise of her to end class with this dance. It kept the students attention right until she dismissed them. Smart teacher.
There seems to be quite a bit of reaction to Greg Smith’s article in the NYT. I still think the original article rings true. But I am critical of institutions like businesses, universities and churches.
I’m writing a little later in the day, today. I got wrapped up in my reading this morning and before I knew it was practically time to go do class. I was struck this morning by the sound of birds singing. Relaxing.
I guess I am now on Spring Break from Hope College. I could use some down time. It looks like I will have plenty of other tasks during break: Mom has two doctor appointments, I am planning to initiate getting her taxes done, meetings at work…. so it goes.
A passage in Virginia Woolf made me think of Debussy yesterday, that and the beautiful weather we are experiencing here in Western Michigan. So I’ve been playing through some of his piano works. I do like his stuff.
I continue to be amused that most if not all reference books have errors in them. This article cites a comparison done by Nature magazine in 2005 between 42 comparative passages on Wikipedia and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia averaged 4 errors per article, Encyclopaedia 3.
Nevertheless this is a milestone (publishing the last print edition).
I do object to Wikipedia’s criteria of only using secondary sources and not factoring in better answers if they are not available in them. See the recent scandal of a scholar who had trouble correcting a widely held misconception:
Good quote from Secretary Hilary Clinton in this article:
“Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,” she told an adoring crowd at the Women in the World Summit at Lincoln Center on Saturday. “But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.
“Yes,” she continued to applause, “it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”
These are letters to the editor. Some great comments:
It’s time to leave. Let us bring our soldiers home and help them heal. Let us learn a lesson as a nation, lessen our hubris, expand our global awareness, get over our self-centeredness and cease our aggressions.
MICHAEL WALSH
Denver, March 13, 2012
It has been said that “the first casualty of war is truth.” In fact, as demonstrated by our soldiers burning the Koran, urinating on the dead and massacring innocent civilians, another casualty of war is the humanity of “the enemy.”
TIM IGLESIAS
Oakland, Calif., March 13, 2012
The disaster of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan becomes more apparent day by day. The shock and anger of 9/11 trumped reason and judgment as the United States blindly struck out, formed alliances with corrupt warlords and ended up alienating the entire population.
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