We are having our bathroom floor redone and the workmen have been showing up good and early for the last three days. This means I have a bit less time to blog for some reason. They should get here about ten minutes and hopefully finish the job.

Yesterday, Eileen helped me run down the songs usually associated with all the service branches: Anchors Aweigh, From the Halls of Montezuma, Off we go into the wild blue yonder, The Caisson Song, & Semper Paratus (Always Ready) – I think this is the Coast Guard one. I am playing a party for Veteran’s Day tomorrow at my Mom’s rest home. Most of the patriotic hymns are in the hymnal and are scheduled to be sung in a little ceremony. They asked if I could have these others up my sleeve as well.

I also had an interesting email exchange with my former teacher, Craig Cramer, about that passage I mentioned in Buxtehude. It turns out that Craig is actually performing this piece Sunday a series of concerts in which he performing all of Buxtehude’s organ music so the question was apropos.

His comments were helpful. And it was fun to actually talk shop with someone about Buxtehude. I need to get more of the Broude edition, I guess.

Finally, I decided that since my piano trio is scheduled to play a movement from a Mozart piano trio on the first Sunday of Advent (known to everyone else in the bloody world as the Sunday after Thanksgiving), it might be fun to transcribe a chorale prelude on the closing hymn for us to play as well.

I landed on Charles Ore’s treatment of the tune, EBENEZER. With just a bit of adjusting I made it work for piano trio. I put it up a third and gave the strings the vigorous obbligato (which I made a bit more vigorous and string like).

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No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America – NYTimes.com

Good article about racism in the USA.

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Ohio Turns Back a Law Limiting Unions’ Rights – NYTimes.com

This doesn’t seem to be all that partisan a deal. But still interesting and encouraging.

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In Overheard Comments, Nicolas Sarkozy Calls Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘Liar’ – NYTimes.com

Ah, technology! Is this mic on?

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Health Law Survives Test in Court of Appeals – NYTimes.com

“The fact that two leading lights of conservative jurisprudence decided against positions held by opponents of the health care law threatens to upend the popular notion that the fate of the law will be determined by judges along political lines. In lower courts, judges appointed by Republican presidents did tend to rule against the law while those appointed by Democrats issued rulings in its favor. Those expecting the pattern to continue have predicted defeat for the law at the Supreme Court.”

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Personal Foul at Penn State – NYTimes.com

“Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique.”

I still wonder if I was remiss in reporting my own suspicions about people who later turned out to be criminals in the RC church (Detroit).

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Trouble Beside the Bay – NYTimes.com

Yay Ishmeal Reed. He gives a little insight into the complexities of outside people coming to join Occupy Oakland and the ongoing struggles with the police there. He is also a very interesting novelist in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut.

Tuesdays are my usual deadline for picking preludes and postludes for the weekend. It’s about the latest I like to do so. Better to plan more ahead.  After my morning ballet class, I waited for Eileen to leave for work, then headed for the church to pick out music. I quickly landed on a lovely (but rare) Milhaud piece for organ.

It’s called “Pastorale.”  I found some info on it here. It’s quite lovely and will make a nice prelude.

I had much more difficulty choosing a postlude. At first I thought I would consider matching Milhaud with a contemporary like Bloch or Copland. Unfortunately though I have compositions by these and others I couldn’t find an appropriate piece.

I spent more than an hour with this frustrating task.

Gave up.

Returned to it later in the day.

I had examined some organ works by Buxtehude as possibilities.

He was a north German composer a bit older than Bach. I love his music but it’s not all that contemporary listener user friendly.

They tell the story that Bach took several months off from his regular duties and traveled to study with Buxtehude. Buxtehude wanted to apprentice Bach and have him marry one of his daughters, but Bach did not do this.

I have the idea that he loved Buxtehude but thought his daughter unattractive or not marriage material.

The pieces are long and actually written for large wonderful organs

in resonant buildings.

Although it is a bit of a project, I finally landed on a Buxtehude Praeludium for Sunday’s postlude: The A Major BuxWV 151.

Came home and queued up some recordings to find the BuxWV number. I was surprised that all the recordings I listened to omitted a section I quite like.

Bah. It’s probably spurious, but until I find some evidence for this, I plan to keep it in.

This recording also skips the section I like.

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Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause by Ezra Klein | The New York Review of Books

Review of Susskind’s Confidence Men.

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‘Back to Work’ Has Bill Clinton’s Ideas for Economic America – Review – NYTimes.com

Bill Clinton’s new book.

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Computer Experts Building 1830s Babbage Analytical Engine – NYTimes.com

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Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows – NYTimes.com

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Since I have been sitting at the piano and practicing between classes on Mon and Wed, I spend 3.5 hours on the bench on these days. That’s what happened yesterday.

During that hour, I played through all of Bach’s 3 part inventions (sinfonias) and several of Joplin’s piano rags and marches.

I have been systematically playing through a book of Joplin’s rags that I own in order to better understand the piano rags of the living composer, William Bolcom.

I find Joplin very elegant. I read through the Groves entry on him yesterday. Bolcom is much harder. He writes in difficult keys, creates intricate harmonies, in short he calls on much more keyboard technique.

I can’t help but wonder if this might have been partly in response to the pressure of other U of M music department profs. Bolcom writes in a style that acknowledges the importance of popular music. Music departments in major universities have long held back their approval of entering popular music styles into their accepted canon (although this seems to be changing).

Bolcom may have felt compelled to demonstrate his compositional prowess by making his piano (and organ) music a bit more difficult than it needed to be. Or maybe he’s just a very fine keyboard player and composer who thinks in difficult ways.

At any rate, Joplin is simpler and more elegant in my opinion. But I am intrigued by and happy that Bolcom writes such nice music that nods to the historical American popular styles.

I have been contemplating submitting some of my work to publishers again. I do believe in my work but have found very little encouragement from publishers over the years. I knew the man who founded the church music publishing company, Morningstar. His name was Rod Schrank and he went from an important position at the prestigious church music publisher, Concordia, to starting a little publishing company of his own.

He was very critical of my work and labored in a very Lutheran way to get me to write more conventionally. I didn’t find writing in that style very difficult, just not terribly attractive and definitely not my own compositional voice.

Anyway, Schrank has retired and my connections in the music world grow more and more meager. I also knew the executive editor of GIA for many years. He is also retired. GIA rejected every manuscript I ever sent them.

But I am thinking that the market might be coming closer to accepting my own style of writing for church.

I don’t see my church music as particularly important in my work. But I don’t really think about my work in that way. I persist in writing music in sort of a local on-the-ground way, visualizing the actual musicians who will help me perform it.

It was bit serendipitous that yesterday I received a royalty statement from Morningstar.

I have sold one copy of each of two of my three compositions they have published. Net royalties are $.19 ($.13 for  one and $.06 for the other). There was also a polite unsigned notice with the statement that since the dollar amount of my royalties is under $10 (!!) they will carry forward the amount they owe me.

Ah the life of a composer.

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Was King Hammurabi a Commie? by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Stein’s Picasso Poem

Bitter little article about the lessons of history by Simic. Reminded me of the linked Getrude Stein poem.

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Day of the 40,000 Dead by Alma Guillermoprieto | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Interesting glimpse of life in Mexico.

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Here Comes Solar Energy – NYTimes.com

“[I]f you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.”

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7 Pakistanis Are Indicted in Benazir Bhutto’s Killing – NYTimes.com

Sooprise, sooprise. The Pakistani government was involved in this political assassination.

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Free Signs for Panhandlers Receive Mixed Reaction – NYTimes.com

Weird idea, I think.

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Andy Rooney, Mainstay on ‘60 Minutes’, Dead at 92 – NYTimes.com

I continue to peruse obits.

“He ]Roooney] once concluded that “it is possible to be dumb and be a college president,” but he acknowledged that “most college students are not as smart as most college presidents.”

True and true.

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I sometimes complain in this space about how local musicians and professors seem to ignore me and my work, so I should report faithfully that almost every music prof who attends my church complimented me yesterday.

Rubbing up against so many different people as I did yesterday in the course of my work leaves me a bit frazzled. I think this is the introvert in me, the person who values solitude and sitting and thinking. At the same time, this very solitude does lead me back to community, whether flesh and blood or the community of composers, poets and writers I experience in my playing and reading.

All Saints is a big feast in the Episcopal church. We celebrate this musically by combining efforts of several groups of musicians: an array of instruments (flute, viola, cello, guitar, electric bass, handbells, marimba), the Youth Choir and the Chamber Choir. Negotiating and leading this group was both fun and freaky.

The violin teacher from Hope remarked he found it satisfying to watch the viola player hold her viola and sing sections of the little jazz arrangement I did of “For All the Saints” (I think this was a compliment).

I was astonished this morning when I noticed the congruence of the different books and poetry I am reading. I discovered that the section of William Carlos Williams’ book length poem, Paterson, I am reading seemed to correlate precisely with two other books I am reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde and American Empire by Charlse Maier. Williams and Hyde both specifically refer to Walt Whitman whom I am also reading.

(More confluence occurred when I noticed that the Google logo for today celebrates Marie Curie’s birthday and the section in Paterson I am reading and studying right now uses her as symbol of both radioactivity and feminine success…. weird)

I guess it boils down to the idea that art is cannot avoid becoming political “simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the collective” (Hyde).  And in all of these books I am referring to here, it specifically refers to American spirit.

“Whitman envisioned drawing isolated individuals into a coherent and enduring body politic without resorting to the patriarchal articles of the social contract. In short, he would replace capitalist home economics with ‘the dear love of comrades.’ His politics reveal an unspoken faith that the realized and idiosyncratic self is erotic and that erotic life is essentially cohesive. He assumes that the citizen, like the poet, will emerge from the centripetal isolation, in which character forms, with an appetite for sympathetic contact and an urge both to create and to bestow.” Hyde in The Gift:Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

This relates to what I said earlier about my own solitude leading me back to community.

I’ll close with another quote that shows how important the artist is when the society is sick.

“So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will, whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not….  In times like these the spirit of the polis must be removed from the hands of the politicians and survive in the resistant imagination. Then the artist finds he is describing a world that does not appear in newspapers and someone has tapped his phone who never thought to call in times of peace.” Hyde, ibid.

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An Undertaker With Purple Nails – NYTimes.com

The decorative pillow above Ms. Amen’s head was embroidered with the words “Behind every successful woman is herself.”

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Broadway Revival of ‘Godspell’ – NYTimes.com

Church and church music has changed so much that this revival of Godspell is so sincere that it unpleasantly reminds this critic of church. Very funny.

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In an Iranian Prison, Tortured by Solitude – NYTimes.com

First hand description of experiencing solitary confinement.

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Telling Americans to Vote, or Else – NYTimes.com

Did you know that Australians are legally supposed to vote in every election or get fined?

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A Russian Robot, a Martian Moon – NYTimes.com

Russians on the move in space. Cool.

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His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives – NYTimes.com

Inspiring library/education story.

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A Visit to Typhoid Mary’s New York Domain – NYTimes.com

Visiting an island near NY where Mary Mallon and others were quarantined.

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After Eileen and I had breakfast at the Wooden Shoe, we went to a local used furniture store and looked at tables.

It was my idea because I had looked at some pieces the day before while my Mom was in the Dollar Store.

I was thinking about how small our kitchen is and how every time Eileen and I have breakfast together we have to sort of stand to the side while the other one gets their plate from the cupboard or orange juice from the fridge.

I call it the breakfast dance.

I was thinking our old table sort of needs replacing anyway, so we settled on this one.

It was only $250. We also bought this one for when we need to seat a few more people:

It comes with chairs that fold neatly inside it.

It was $200. I think the prices were pretty reasonable. We put it on Discover. I plan to pay it off with the reimbursement check from Eileen’s flex medical fund for 2011. But I did think of this Saturday Night Live skit I saw recently online.

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Lush Workers Cut Wallets From the Pockets of Drunk Train Riders – NYTimes.com

Apparently this kind of robber is an endangered species.

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The Privileges of China’s Elite Include Purified Air – NYTimes.com

The future is fun. It’s like living in a 20th century sci-fi novel sometimes.

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U.S. Commander Fires Senior Officer, Fuller, for Remarks on Afghans – NYTimes.com

Why do I suspect this guy got fired for telling the truth?

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3 New Elements Named – Darmstadtium, Roentgenium and Copernicium – NYTimes.com

Two pluses on this article. The basic idea of new elements is cool. And also it mentions Tom Lehrer.

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Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography Spurs Debate – NYTimes.com

Just finished Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks which describes the life of convicted sex felons.  This article points out that if this guy had molested a child instead of collecting kiddie porn he might have received a lighter sentence.

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With New Book, Bill Clinton Makes New Bid to Bolster Obama – NYTimes.com

Hmmm. Sounds a bit self-serving if not totally unhelpful to Obama’s reelection. Bill Clinton just keeps on keeping on. Sheesh.

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David Gelernter Discusses Patent Claim Against Apple – NYTimes.com

First the Unabomber blows him up, then Steve Jobs steals his ideas. Wow. Wonder how much of this is true? Probably the bomb part.

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Edging Toward Equality – NYTimes.com

It does seem that the abolition of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” will lead to better rights for gays and others.

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Finished Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel yesterday.

It is beautifully drawn and written.

I especially enjoyed the way he incorporated the beautiful Arabic script and its mathematical/philosophical heritage into this story about a young woman and a younger man in the Middle East.

I’m still processing the story. Eileen is planning on reading this one as well.

I also finished Limits of Power last night.  This book, The Gift by Hyde and “Song of Myself” by Whitman are helping me understand both myself and my country much better.

Bacevich makes sense of the last 30 years of American history I have lived through. He basically sees us as blind to our own flaws. Flaws like thinking the historical rules of war no longer apply because of our fancy new technological toys and like forgetting the historical lessons of hubris.

I have begun reading this one for a second read, mostly because of the clear way he lays out historical events and puts them in perspective for me.

I continue to be on a roll with music.  I incorporated my review of tangos into my playing yesterday at class. That was fun. Also I felt very good about my improvs rhythmically, melodically and harmonically.

After spending some time with my Mom (lunch and errands), I put in several hours on the organ bench, mostly with Bach (the trios, the Prelude and Kyries of the Clavierubung III). Very rewarding to me.

Eileen and I attended a thank-you meal for workers and volunteers at the library last night (We missed you, Johnny Crookedfingers!).

The high point had to be this guy who was the evening’s entertainment.

He was pretty bad. He rolled a little amplifier on the stage and stood patiently waiting for the Elvis Vegas “Also Sprach Zarathustra” intro so that he could begin singing Elvis tunes into a very bassy hand held mic.

Very reminiscent of Kaufman waiting for his record player to get to the good part of the Mighty Mouse theme.

Good times.

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Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say – NYTimes.com

Clarifying the errors in the recent release of statistics on US Poverty.

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The Senate Puts Millionaires Before Jobs – NYTimes.com

The hits just keep on coming. It’s not a partisan thing however. Republocrats.

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In Ukraine, Drinking on the People’s Tab – NYTimes.com

Interesting on the ground look at surviving in Ukraine.

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In Pakistan, Drones Kill Our Innocent Allies – NYTimes.com

Nothing like knowing someone who was accidentally killed by one of our drones.

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I find that I am experiencing some surprising pluses about getting older.

It seems that along with the usual silly memory lapses (“you know, the guy with the thing in the place….”), my ability to think and read clearly has improved. I find that prose and poetry is much more accessible to my understanding and even retention to some extent.

Some of this is I know that as I have gotten older I have intentionally slowed down my reading to better comprehend the ideas.

This helps.

It seems there is a corollary in my musical abilities.

When I was a young hapless kid studying composition at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio, I remember thinking (even saying to others) that all the piano technique I really wanted was to be able to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.

I now have that technique and more.

I also have the understanding that my performance ability is mostly limited by my willingness to spend hours with certain pieces. This is a return to the approach all music students use in college: limiting the pieces you work on to a few and then learning them in depth over months and months before you perform them.

Over the years I have developed a pretty fair skill of sight reading music. I have heard people say of musicians that they can play anything you put in front of them. This may be true but it seems pretty unlikely to me because of the wide range of styles and specialized difficulties.

Unlocking a complex notation is different from getting the over all idea of medium hard music.

But maybe that’s just me. I don’t pretend to myself to be a virtuoso of musical skill. More I see myself as a lover of music.

Speaking of loving music, I have recently fallen in love all over again with Bach’s 4th English Suite, especially the prelude. I like this recording of the Prelude because the harpsichordist takes it a bit slower than your typical pianist. The slower tempo actually sounds more rhythmical to me. This recording also includes the lovely Allemande as well.

And finally speaking of rhythm, I have noticed an evolving change in my playing for Ballet classes. First, I consciously play a little differently for each teacher. For one I feel very free to play a wide range of improvisations in style (also I feel like she understands the delicate playing whereas other teachers sometimes perceive my delicate playing as tentative). For another I feel that she likes a more bombastic emphatic improv and adjust according. And so on.

Secondly, I am playing much more rhythmically, subdividing and exploring rhythm  within the context of a clearly delineated 8 measure phrase. This is kind of fun, but I have found that my tangos could use a reinfusion of original thinking about them, so this morning I returned to my stack of notated tangos and revisited the musical ideas in them. I tucked a couple away to take with me and use verbatim.

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Tourists Still Drawn to Tomb of Mussolini, ‘Il Duce,’ in Italy – NYTimes.com

Sheesh. Dictators become beloved. What a bizarre thing.

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Noted Dutch Psychologist, Stapel, Accused of Research Fraud – NYTimes.com

Lies, damn lies and research.

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Georgia Men Held in Plot to Attack Government – NYTimes.com

Still not clear exactly what these men were doing. Possibly it will come out in a subsequent trial. If the perps live long enough.

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Meeting With Chinese, Official Tests Limits Set by Congress – NYTimes.com

This looks like more unwarranted strengthening of the executive powers of the presidency…. hard to tell.

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Bill Moyers: “Our Politicians Are Money Launderers in the Trafficking of Power and Policy” | Truthout

Moyers makes good sense to me.

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WARNING – THIS POST IS BASICALLY A BOOK REVIEW… WORDS ABOUT WORDS…. HAVE TRIED TO PUT IN PICS TO MAKE IT LESS BORING

Finished Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks last night. It is the first book I have read by this man and I’m pretty favorably impressed. The story is of the Kid and the Professor. The Kid is a convicted sex offender, porn addict and is still a virgin and innocent of much of life. Like convicted sex offenders everywhere in the US, he is on a public registry. He is also on probation for 10 years with an electronic tether that keeps track of him. Due to this and the restriction of being within 2500 feet of where children gather, he and his ilk only have three areas they can live in Calusa (Banks’ fictionalized city of Miami): the airport, under a causeway bridge support and a swamp area east of the city. The Kid begins the story under the bridge.

The Professor enters quickly thereafter. As far as I’m concerned he saves the book. It doesn’t seem that Banks could sustain his novel of the truly marginalized and outcast of the US Society: convicted sex offenders , without a foil. The Professor takes us into fantastic hardly believable but still interesting swirls of plot. He is a extremely morbidly obese man with a genius IQ and a background of informing and spying between 60s protesters and the government, actually working for both sides at points.

He is now a professor at a local college and is interested in the marginalized lives of convicted sex offenders. The story of his relationship to the Kid and the subsequent twists and turn of the plot include revelations about the Professor’s past that threaten to undo his life and huge symbolic things like a hurricane and a man-eating python in the swamp.

I like it when a book lingers with me and gives me something to chew on. This book definitely does that.

It’s not a short book (400+ pages in all).

And by the last fourth of the book, I was beginning to lose my suspension of disbelief and wonder how the author was going to finish the plot. Not a good sign, unless one is reading a mystery.

The ideas in the book are about addiction (the Kid – porn, the Professor – food), forces in life beyond anyone’s control (the Professor’s past, the hurricane which features prominently in part of the story, the python which flickers past but definitely is about the Kid’s choice of concrete or swamp for life background).

There are also some themes about reality versus unreality.  Banks attempts to construct the Kid’s porn addiction around the Kid’s need to feel like he is real. We learn eventually that he began his addiction while over hearing his mom’s multiple sexual encounters and becoming aroused (I think this is a bit thin). The Kid loses his interest very suddenly when he sees himself on an interrogator’s computer screen in a video of his arrest.

The idea is that he feels more real because he entered into the unreality of internet porn videos himself by being on the screen.

I think this is an odd take on sexuality in general and masturbation in particular.  Surely masturbation can be a compulsive addiction, but does that mean that the addict will have no normal sexuality available at any point to himself.

The Kid is a bit too compassionately drawn for me, but maybe Banks was counting on readers being repulsed by his masturbation and fixation on pornography.  I wasn’t repulsed. I’m interested in the marginalized since my training teaches me that society relies on the people on the margins to provide necessary ethical insights and ideas that cannot come from the center. (Sorry that’s a bit of theology, ahem)

Anyway, it’s a pretty good book. I’ll end with a little quote I wanted to keep somewhere. Might as well put it here.

In the narrative Banks occasionally veers into lots of description and more than once indulges in sort of stream of consciousness geological/historical background. The following excerpt comes from one of those.

“From the underbrush near the mouth of the Appalachee a half-dozen Calusa men step forward to greet the bearded pale-faced strangers and admire up close their shiny helmets and breastplate armor, their brightly colored pantaloons and their, to the Indians, colossal triple-decker canoe. It should be a simple matter to exchange food and other locally processed and manufactured goods with these humans for some of their steel and woven possessions. For decades they have been hearing about white-skinned people from a faraway land, heard tales of their several gods and their marvelous inventions and weaponry from fellow tribesmen and -women who have traveled overland along the canals and rivers to the peninsula’s eastern coast …

It’s hard for the six Calusa men to know which of the two types of Europeans has come ashore here—the traders or the slavers. These fellows seem friendly enough however and are not carrying manacles or chains…

The six native men emerge from the palmetto bushes and holding their bows down and their arrows stashed walk gingerly but with a basic trust in their shared humanity toward the Europeans—who draw their steel weapons and quickly surround them and clamp manacles on their ankles and wrists and chain them together.”

Up reading poetry again this morning. Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Then I turned to The Gift by Lewis Hyde. I am in the second section where he moves from discussing “gift” as a social construct to the poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, two of my favorites.

He quoted an amazing section of “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass by Whitman:

I hear the trained soprano . . . . she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me . . . . I dab with bare feet . . . . they are licked by
the indolent waves,
I am exposed . . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine . . . . my windpipe squeezed in
the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.”

This seems to me to describe a deep response to music and life. Before I knew it I had pulled out my Leaves of Grass and began reading, resolving to re-read the great poem of Whitman: “Song of Myself.”

I have the 1892 version which seems to be later revision (the first from 1855).

Anyway, reading Whitman’s poem

I was struck that he actually had John Cage’s understanding of music way before Cage:

“Now I will do nothing but listen,
To acrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.”

Thus he begins section 26 (of 52) which goes on to end with the first section I quoted.

I know that the 30 or so people that I suspect read this blog from time to time are not really into words and poetry (hence the pictures, ahem). But I can’t resist quoting Whitman’s music for failures (section 18) in its entirety.

“With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquered and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Vivas to those who have failed!
And to those whose war vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

Bob Dylan wrote and sang:

“In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all”

Love Minus Zero (link to Dylan website with lyrics)

I now return you to your regular scheduled links.

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A Dictionary Is Updated, and a Campaign Will Spread the Word – NYTimes.com

American Heritage Dictionary – Search

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Telling the Story of the Brain’s Cacophony of Competing Voices – NYTimes.com

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Midnight Labs and Martini Time – NYTimes.com

I link this one because the scientist recommends this:

On Finding a Mentor

I always tell students, “Go ahead and write directly to the person you want to study with; you just never know.” That’s what I did, and I’m always surprised to hear how seldom it happens. I met the Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, and went up to him and said, “Gee, you must get people writing to you all the time, wanting to work with you.” He says “Nope, hasn’t happened.”

I have said similar things to music students. Find the person you are most interested in and knock on their door. They just might accept you as a student.

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Dissenting, or Seeking Shelter? Homeless Stake a Claim at Protests – NYTimes.com

Interesting problem. Those dang homeless are not with the program. O, I forgot. They ARE the program. Heh.

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OBEY GIANT – WORLDWIDE PROPAGANDA DELIVERY

Web site of the originator of Obama art.  Being copied by classical music station WQXR campaign.

http://www.wqxr.org/

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Stephen King’s ‘11/23/63’ – Review – NYTimes.com

Stephen King’s new novel looks very interesting to me. Will probably read it after the dust settles.

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This will be a short post this morning, since I have used most of the morning to prepare parts for this evening’s rehearsal of GELO (Grace Episcopal Liturgical Orchestra, formerly known as Grace Electric Light Orchestra).

Three parishioners responded to my invitation to play their instrument this Sunday: the cellist from my piano trio, the bass guitar player and a flutist. The flutist was encouraged to do so by another choir member. I try not to pressure people. I just invite. Hence, in this time of low volunteerism and disdain for commitment, my usual low numbers.

I am, however, happier to work with people who actually want to be there.

So, yesterday, I wrote a little piece for these people based on the opening hymn, “For All the Saints.”

SINE NOMINE is the name of the melody of the hymn.

I emailed off the parts and then discovered a couple errors. I also decided to improve it a little. I corrected the scores this morning and will hand out the new parts this evening.

This afternoon I have a gig with my piano trio. We are playing for the Zeeland Women’s Literary club. It’s sort of a paying gig. Originally the cellist booked us at $50 (!). But the group upped it to $75, so we are each of us getting $25. I did agree to do this, but it is a bit discouraging that people think my work as a musician is worth so little of their money. Sigh.

We are playing a Gershwin piano prelude arranged for piano trio. It’s quite nice. And a Haydn piano trio movement.

Yesterday, I got in a bit of a cooking mood and made marinara sauce and used it in a shell pasta recipe. Served it with Bruschetta. All of these recipes were lo-fat and lo-cal. And excellent to the taste. We had Halloween Candy for dessert (Not lo-cal). Lots of trick-or-treaters at the door last night.

This is what our jack-o-lanterns looked like:

The “Boo” one is Eileen’s.

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Beyond Occupy – NYTimes.com

Bill Keller writes about what American protests look like from India where their government is even more paralyzed and inert.

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Flat Taxes and Angry Voters – NYTimes.com

According to this editorial, Americans are warming up to the idea of tax increases.

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Reggie Workman and Eric Reed at Rose Theater – Review – NYTimes.com

Coltrane’s old bass player reconstructs Africa live. I quite like this music. I own the vinyl.

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Budapest Festival Orchestra at Carnegie Hall – Review – NYTimes.com

This article made me want to back and listen to all of Bartok’s piano concertos again. I do like Bartok.

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The choir sounded good again yesterday at service. I think I have actively interested the group in producing their voices better, blending and singing pure vowels.

I also was pleased with my performance of the two Schubert piano sonata movements. I had done some seriously thinking and rehearsing of both of them which came to some pretty good fruition from my point of view.

I listened to others recorded performances of both of them and was surprised at the liberties other performers took with the written dynamics. Schubert seems in both of these movements to distinguishing between moving gradually and suddenly between loud and soft.

In one passage that I heard a distinguished performer perform, repeated sections were treated as strict echo passages, that is playing the second section softer than the first. Interestingly, Schubert notated the “echo” passage with diminuendo which utilized the repetition in a less obvious way and in my opinion was sort of charming. So instead of repeating the passage as an echo, the  repetition faded away.

Anyway.

Pages of the Allegro I played for the postlude were loose in the book. I asked Eileen at the last minute to turn pages for me in case they were to fall as I was playing. She did so admirably. But at one point she reached over in front of me (wearing her choir robe) and covered the section of the keyboard that I needed to use. I had to pause and tell her that she needed to move her arm so I could continue.  (smile) It was a funny moment.

Parishioners paid a bit more attention than usual to the postlude. One plopped down next the piano. There was scattered applause afterwards (much appreciated).

As far as I could tell none of the music professors paid it the slightest attention. Whippy skippy.

I told Eileen that in order to perform well I had to rid my mind of my petty professional jealousies and awareness of my outcast status with this group. The music is most itself in my opinion when it is performed live for listeners. I wanted to purge it of any thoughts other than the musical statements I was making. It’s harder to do with professional musicians in the room, but actually it’s something I have had to do for years dating most onerously back to my work as a grad teaching assistant at Notre Dame (where creepy profs would be sitting in attendance and judgement on my work in the weekly chapel services).

How one thinks when one plays is so critical to the excellence of the performance.

There was one section in the postlude that was just beyond my ability to learn in a week. I adapted it by leaving out a couple of octave doublings. I worked that section over quite a bit in my prep. Interestingly when I performed it, I barely noticed the section. What struck me most was how quickly it had passed after (literally) hours of prep on it. Heh.

But I walked home satisfied with my performance.

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Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs | Online Only | Granta Magazine

I’ve read and enjoyed Burroughs since I was a kid. He died in ’97.

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What happened when he went to the store for bread

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus by Alden Nowlan | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

I seem to have found a new poet in Alden Nowlan. I inter-library loaned a few of his books yesterday.

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As a life long reader (“common reader”in Virgina Woolf’s phrase), I have only read a few book length poems: Moses by Anthony Burgess, Homer, and probably a few others that don’t pop to mind right now (old age).

But William Carlos Williams’ Paterson just seems to work for me. I continue to be drawn in and seem to make sense of what he is saying. I think it helps to have read a bunch of James Joyce. Williams even mentions Joyce at one point. Paterson in some ways is like Finnegans Wake and Ulysses since both of Joyce’s books celebrate a city (Dublin) and Williams’ Paterson is also a city in New Jersey.

Paterson is also mentioned in the twelfth line of Part 1 of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.

Paterson is the setting of many of Junot Diaz’s short stories and novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and John Updike’s 1997 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies.

Found this info here.

I have read Howl, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao And In the Beauty of the Lilies and am glad to know they take place in Williams’ Paterson.

I just ordered this book. I found the titled referenced in a wikipedia article on Patterson which says “Williams’ book In the American Grain is claimed to bePaterson’s abstracted introduction involving a rewritten American history.”

Excellent! Right up my alley for my non-musical reading these days.

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Abbas Says Arab Rejection of Partition Plan Was Error – NYTimes.com

The 1947 Partition plan, that is. Good grief.

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America’s Exploding Pipe Dream – NYTimes.com

Another good article by Charles Blow. Link to this chart is in article. As you can see this is what it shows:

Social Justice in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).

USA: Overall – in the bottom 5;

Poverty prevention,
overall poverty
child poverty
and income equality – in the bottom 5;

Senior Citizen poverty,
Pre-primary education
and Health Rating – in the bottom 10;

inter-generational justice rating – in the bottom 15 (our highest rating).

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What a Family Faces After a Murder – The First Week – NYTimes.com

This article details what it’s like after your Mom is murdered in New York. Good writing.

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James Hillman, Therapist in Men’s Movement, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com

Author I have read and sometimes admired.

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The Path Not Taken – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman

“Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.”

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Common Errors in English Usage

Interesting list

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My oldest daughter living in New York has been active in the Occupy Wall Street activities there. She narrates this newer slicker production of a video of one of her recent projects. I am so proud of her. It is interesting to see back and forth comments from her and her relatives on Facebook. Myself, Eileen, Sarah, Matthew and Jeremy; my brother’s fam; and my Mom seem to support what she is doing. But the rest of her relatives are either silent or reactionary to what is going on. Not surprising since the reactionary voice is so prominent in much of the public air waves and internet.

I have begun checking on this radio station which my son listens to out of curiosity.

Radio and TV do mostly spin in my opinion. There is very little careful information coming from these sources. I prefer journalism like the web sites of the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and others. I pick up a hard copy of the Wall Street Journal occasionally because they restrict access online.

I also find that historical knowledge doesn’t inform a lot of the talk. That’s why I’ve been doing some reading in history lately. I keep learning stuff from US history. I have a basic knowledge of history but of course it can always benefit from more focus and information.

For example, this morning I read this sentence which put a bunch of events near each other, most of which I was aware of but did not realize how close they occurred.

“The political struggle in Poland
the Moscow conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers
in April 1947,
announcement of the Marshall Plan in June,
the Czech coup in February 1948,
the Berlin Blockade and airlift,
and the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950
all dramatized the irrevocable drift into ideological and strategic polarization.”

You can tell I’ve been up reading poetry and history already.

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THE GOVERNMENT VS. THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT

I regularly listen to this program online.  You can stream this weeks program but transcripts don’t go up for a few days. The USA must be the only country that feels it should have a law to let it lie. Other countries probably just lie. I love my country!

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MOG

This is another streaming web site I just found out about. Not sure I need another one besides Spotify and Naxos, but it’s interesting.

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Moving Beyond Civil Rights – NYTimes.com

I wish more reactionaries would pitch their criticisms of entitlements the way this author does:

The problem is not simply the judiciary. The attempt to achieve collective justice through individual entitlements is inherently conflicted. Litigation driven by individuals often produces perverse effects. For example, because laws prohibiting age discrimination outlaw mandatory retirement, older executives and professionals who suffer little if any discrimination can extract lucrative “golden handshake” retirement incentives from their employers. But because job seekers rarely sue over the job that got away, those laws don’t address a bigger problem: age discrimination in hiring.

I find this much more compelling than spin.

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Huddled Masses, Turned Away – NYTimes.com

Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than $1.6 billion for removal and deportation in the last fiscal year. It can cost $23,000, by some estimates, to remove someone from the United States.

Though it has assured Congress that it concentrates on those who pose a danger to public safety, the agency often deports immigrants guilty only of technical violation of the immigration laws. A study group based at Syracuse University analyzed 187,000 immigration cases that were completed in the 10 months that ended on July 31. Of those cases, 81 percent involved only procedural, not criminal, wrongdoing. Of all the accused foreigners, only two were charged with terrorist activities. Neither was ultimately convicted of terrorism, and the immigration court even granted one of them permanent resident status.

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Bargain or Fight? Advice for Obama – NYTimes.com Letters to the editor

To me, Big Government has always stood for compassion for the poor, the homeless and the huddled masses, as the poet of our liberty claimed, and not the callous greed being exposed by Occupy Wall Street; for improving the living standard for everyone and not just the top 1 percent; for confronting the plutocrat-generated fear of America’s decline constantly offered by Republicans over the soul-enhancing hopes and aspirations for all that Mr. Obama originally campaigned on and has now seemingly joined Occupy Wall Street in embracing once again…

PAUL M. WORTMAN

…Frustration with government incompetence is not a measure of ideological allegiances. Studies have found no consistent relationship between trust in government and policy preferences.

IRENE TAVISS THOMSON

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Up early reading poetry and history this morning. Poetry = Paterson by William Carlos Williams. History = Among Empires by Charles S. Maier. I suspect that reading instead of blogging over my first cup of coffee is helping to relax me more. At least my blood pressure has been more normal for the weeks I have been doing this.

I have been turning to some guilty musical pleasures for treadmill listening lately.

I still have the vinyl of a two record set of the Yardbirds. I tried to use Spotify to listen to cuts off it. This particular collection did not come up. When I tried to reconstruct it I found that certain cuts were not available on Spotify. Interesting. I found enough to make up more than the 40 minutes I treadmill so I was pretty satisfied.

If you don’t recognize the Yardbirds, you might be interested to know that at one time the guitarists included Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

Their work with the Yardbirds always interested me.  Solid writing and interesting production (especially for the time).

In a previous session treadmill session I pulled together tracks by another guilty pop pleasure of mine (I have classical ones as well): Janice Ian. I no longer seem to have any vinyl by her. I bought her first album new when I was sixteen (above). I remember because I noted that she was also sixteen when she made it.

Here she is on Johnny Carson. I have seen this clip. Probably not live. At the time, I was struck by how she made Carson and McMahon seem so funny with her calm sincerity. In retrospect I think I probably had a fan crush on her.

I pulled together tracks I recognized by her on Spotify.

I used to own all these vinyls as well:

I still think her song, “When the Party’s Over,” is a pretty good song.

Eileen and I saw her live at the Ark a few years back. I still admire her abilities and think she makes a great old lady.

http://www.janisian.com/index.php

She has a good web site as well and routinely gives away free recordings.

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Qaddafi and the Lives of Tyrants – NYTimes.com

I disagree with the notion that Quaddafi murder was “fitting.” But this is a fascinating enumeration of deaths of tyrants

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Crony Capitalism Comes Home – NYTimes.com

Nicholas Kristoff:

“… [I]n recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.”

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Charles Hamm, Author on American Popular Music, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com

I have watched academic scholarship go from grudgingly embracing non-classical music to enthusiastically pursuing it.

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Maghami Expelled From Corsica Chess Meet – NYTimes.com

Iranian refuses to play an Israeli in chess meet. Sheesh.

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China Proposes New Curbs on Entertainment and Bloggers – NYTimes.com

China fears the Arab Spring and may end up contributing to its own problems with taking away popular entertainment.

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In between classes yesterday, I decided to perform two Schubert piano sonata movements for Sunday’s prelude and postlude.

For the prelude, I decided to perform this lovely movement. It is one I quite like and have been playing on and off for my own enjoyment for years.

Then I decided it might be nice to play a quick Schubert movement on piano for postlude. Postludes are listened to very much by my congregation. A few people seem to be sitting around and listening. It’s hard for me to tell, because I’m deliberately trying to concentrate on just my playing while the chaos of 200 people leisurely chatting and leaving a room ensues.

This guy plays it faster than I do. I put both of these movements up yesterday. I discovered that the YouTube version of the fast one would not allow embedding. So I just deleted it. I will put this one up instead.

I just tried and it doesn’t seem to want to embed this morning either. Screw it.

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My daughter Elizabeth linked me in to this video. I’m very proud of it and her! She’s the good looking narrator.

Scenes from an occupation (OWS) « Not Your Sweetie

This is a blog post of hers with pics.

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Point Hope, Alaska, Is Split by Oil-Drilling Plan – NYTimes.com

This article has some interesting interviews with people living in Alaska.

With the Obama administration having lifted a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Arctic and elsewhere, Shell Oil has received preliminary permits to drill exploratory wells off the coast of Alaska as soon as next summer.

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Tunisia Liberals See a Vote for Change, Not Just for Islamists – NYTimes.com

Thoughts on the first election resulting from the 2011 Arab Spring.

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Ben Jonson | Ian Donaldson | Review by The Spectator

New book on Jonson. I admire his work (Jonson’s).

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E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything – Magazine – The Atlantic

I’m also a fan of Wilson’s.

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I’m reading two books that complement each other in fascinating ways right now.

Among Empires by Maier takes the long historical view of America and other empires. The Limits of Power by Bacevich is helping me understand how America’s power political structure evolved to the point of the incoherence I have witnessed in my life time.

I just used up my Amazon gift certificate from my brother and his wife (Thanks again, Mark & Leigh!) and ordered several titles by Bacevich and one bio of someone I had never heard of before, James Forrestal, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal by Townsend Hoops and Douglas Brinkley.

According to Bacevich, Forrestal’s rise to power in the inner circles of the so-called Wise Men that the US governmental executive calls on marked a turn away from a “cadre of distinguished” rich influential citizens to “pseudorealists” equally distinguished but who combined a “sense of alarm’ with a drive for action.

The “influential citizens” he typifies in a man named Henry L. Stimson who served several presidents beginning with Roosevelt.

These forerunners were people who at their worst were “parochial, hidebound, and given to snobbery,” but at their best represented “trust, truth, justice, virtue, the reign of law, the call of duty, [and’ the shining example.”

But the first of the later group (which Bacevich insists has stayed influential ever since gaining credibility since the 1040s) was the man, Forrestal.

His type culminated in Paul Wolfowitz.

I am interested to learn a bit more about how this all came about and I think the Forrestal bio might have some interesting insights.

I spent most of yesterday looking at choral anthems for Advent and Xmas. Have now chosen 6 out of 7. Pretty complicated trying to find music that will fit my small, talented group; be relatively easy to learn, well written and possibly attractive to the ears of the congregation.

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BBC News – Viewpoint: Is the alcohol message all wrong?

This is a very odd look at the culture of alcohol in the U.K. It seems to ignore some pretty basic facets of alcohol consumption, but it contains some very British observations about drinking.

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The symphony and the novel – a harmonious couple? | Books | The Guardian

I disagree with a lot in this article by novelist, Will Self. It presupposes a canonical approach to both music and literature which can be useful but I don’t think is an entirely accurate way to approach either.

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Sex Offender Registry: First, Do No Harm | Michigan Radio

This article interested me because I’m reading Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks.

It is the story of a young sex offender who is struggling with the rules (like not living within 1000 feet of where children gather) to make a life after his conviction.

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My second ballet class was canceled yesterday because the instructor was ill, so I had a lighter day than usual. I took advantage of this and made chili – two kinds one with meat for Eileen and one without for myself.

I also made cornbread to go with it.

Eileen and I were able to have lunch together since she was out and about traveling from her old job to her new one in the middle of the day. That was nice. I also had a chance to speak with Elizabeth on the phone.  I have been missing chatting with her, so that was particularly pleasant. After we hung up, my daughter-in-law, Cynthia, called and we chatted.

Spent a lot of time with Schubert and Scarlatti on the piano yesterday. I am being drawn deeper into both composer’s works for different reasons: lyricism of Schubert and the vitality and rhythm of Scarlatti.

I also discovered that Zappa did an album with Jean Luc-Ponty of Zappa’s music called “King Kong.”

I quite like the versions of Zappa’s pieces on it. It dates from 1969 the year after Zappa released Uncle Meat which has the tune “King Kong” on it.

Bless Spotify.

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Robert Pierpoint, 86, Dies – Correspondent for CBS News – NYTimes.com

I wasn’t going to bookmark this obit and then I reached the story of this pic:

In his memoir “At the White House: Assignment to Six Presidents” (Putnam, 1981), Mr. Pierpoint wrote that he had hurriedly received a story assignment but was about to play tennis with Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s communications aide. He changed into a tennis outfit he kept in his locker at the White House, in anticipation of the match, while keeping the suit jacket on.

He wrote that when a photo of his full frame later appeared in a book and newspapers, “my superiors were far from pleased, apparently feeling that tennis shorts, a jacket and tie did not provide a dignified image.”

Marta Pierpoint said her father had relished that episode and would be buried in a suit jacket and tennis shorts.

I love it: “Buried in a suit jacket and tennis shorts.”

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Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com

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Seven Billion – NYTimes.com

Memorable quote from this article:

Providing modern family planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year.

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Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People – NYTimes.com

I sometimes wonder about this…… how tech has affected jobs….

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Yesterday was a good day for music at church. I had chosen music I was proud to play for the prelude and postlude:

“Homo Quidam” by Langlais, a surprisingly beautiful and subtle setting of a Gregorian chant melody in F# major.

and the last movement of Handel’s first organ concerto.

I played them both reasonably well.

For the first time this year, I spent about fifteen minutes on vocaleses with the choir.

Somehow, they made splendid sounds all morning.

Part of it had to be the time spent on warm-ups. One soprano (the only soprano actually) pointed out to me that she had been doing 6:30 warm-ups for weeks prepping for her role in a local musical. That had to help as well.

Anyway, I thought they sounded great. I could spare the 15 minutes because the anthem was simple and I thought they knew it.

After church, the sound persisted and we had a good rehearsal. Now to finally pick out Advent and Xmas music.

Earlier this week, when I was looking for music to treadmill by, I remembered an old album by pianist, George Duke. I still have the vinyl. I pulled it up on Spotify and quite enjoyed listening to it a few times. Many years ago, I used this recording to demonstrate a stereo I was selling in Oscoda at our used bookstore. Later I pulled a tune off it (Capricorn) for use with my church instrumental ensembles. I looked through the Real Book indices a prof gave me and couldn’t find this tune in any of the many Real Books that are available. Too bad. I quite like this tune even years later.

Zappa was where I first heard George Duke. He’s the one with the Afro in the pic above. I once heard him play live with Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty.

It’s a concert that sticks in my memory. It was mostly instrumental with very little of Zappa’s usual stage shows that people remember now.

Finally I notice that Charles Maier (author of Empire one of the books I am reading) keeps alluding to poetry. This morning he quoted from this poem.

Short Ode

by Stephen Vincent Benet

It is time to speak of these
Who took the long, strange journey overseas,
Who fell through the air in flames.
Their names are many. I will not name their names
Though some were people I knew;
After some years the ghost itself dies, too,
And that is my son’s picture on the wall
But his girl has been long married and that is all.
They died in mud, they died in camps of the flu.
They are dead. Let us leave it so.
The ones I speak of were not forced, I know.
They were men of my age and country, they were young men
At Belleau, at the seaports, by the Aisne.
They went where their passion took them and are not.
They do not answer mockery or praise.
You may restore the days
They lived beneath and you may well restore
The painted image of that fabled war,
But not those faces, not the living ones
Drowned in the water, blown before the guns
In France or Belgium or the bitter sea
(And the foreign grave is far, and men use the name,
But they did not go for votes or the pay they got
Or the brave memorial speech by the D.A.R.)
It is far, the foreign grave. It is very far
And the time is not the same.
But certain things are true
Despite the time, and these were men that I knew,
Sat beside, walked beside,
In the first running of June, in the careless pride.
It is hard to think back, to find them, to see their eyes
And none born since shall see those, and the books are lies,
Being either praise or blame.
But they were in their first youth. It is not the same.
You, who are young, remember that youth dies.
Go, stranger, and to Lacedemon tell,
They were shot and rotted, they fell
Burning, on flimsy wings.
And yet it was their thought that they did well.
And yet there are still the tyrants and the kings.

I continue to be amazed how the reality of war is expunged from public discussions.

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Right, Less Might – NYTimes.com

I found reading Sam Tanenhaus’s analysis fascinating when I lay it next to Bacevich’s take on the last 5 or 6 decades of American foreign policy in The Limits of Power. Bacevich sees it in terms of American framing its actions since FDR in terms of national emergency and security at the expense of the rest of the world. Tanenhaus’s essay is much narrower in scope and understanding. Necessarily since Bacevich wrote a book and Tanenhause wrote an essay.

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Clarence Thomas’s Brand of Judicial Logic – NYTimes.com

I continue to marvel at the mediocrity of Thomas’s performance as a Supreme court justice. This is a critical look.

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The Man Who Stayed Behind – NYTimes.com

Kristoff tells an interesting story of an evangelical U.S. Christian missionary who became entirely committed to the people in Sudan.

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Metro and State | Snyder vows to push bridge plan ahead despite rejection | The Detroit News

Call me cynical, but I was surprised that Gov  Snyder’s pet project didn’t fly. I figured that was one of the reasons he was supported by powers that be.

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A handy fact to remember in life is that most data we are presented with is things put together by other humans.

Whether web sites, books, music or systems of information, it’s good to ferret out origins.

Humans are frail creatures and so are their creations.  The more one can examine the care and motivation of those who provide information the better one can process and use it.

Case in point is music notation.

A decidedly admirable trend in the publication of historical music like Bach and Haydn is the blending of the scholarly and the practical in preparing editions of their music for musicians to use.

When one is moving from web site to web site or from page to page of printed music or books, it is good to consider the many choices that go into to building what is presented to our brains.

We deal with this presentation in a cursory manner in order to better reason. But it helps to reflect.

I always look at the URL when I consider a link. This of course is does not completely assure credibility, but it’s where I begin.

The extra knowledge we bring when we take in ideas helps us evaluate its strengths and weakness, its accuracy and its mistakes (or even deliberate misleading facts in the case of many URLs).

This extra knowledge can include ascertaining what humans were involved with creating, assembling and editing what we are reading (or in the case of music, playing).

All of this is a preamble to the idea that I am replaying through a couple of major works of Bach in new editions: Clavierubung III and the first volume of the Well Tempered Clavier. Both are stellar in their currency of their credibility and care in preparing these final editions.

Both involved careful examinations of a staggering number of versions of these pieces, both published and hand-copied by Bach, his students and others who came later.

Since music usually exists in multiple versions, any printed page is a sort of snapshot of someone’s opinion about how one might play a particular piece. In the 19th century and early 20th century, this was often an idiosyncratic look at a piece from a highly opinionated musician which resulted in distortions of how we think of much music now.

Editors thought nothing of adding to and/or subtracting from the original music. The idea of presenting a pristine accurate version was rare until about mid-20th century.

Interestingly, Brahms (who is definitely a child of the 19th century) was himself a careful editor and did not usually distort music he edited. Case in point is the lovely edition he did of the French baroque composer, Francois Couperin in which he preserved the complex ornate original music. His contemporaries reduced Couperin and Bach to the vision of highly emotional and romantic sounding music by adding all sorts of crescendos, incorrectly and unnecessarily confusing written out ornaments, dynamics and so on.

The 21st century trend in music editing is encouraging. Editorial decisions are carefully noted and alternate readings are often given. May this continue.

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Our ‘Broken System’ of Criminal Justice by John Paul Stevens | The New York Review of Books

This is an excellent essay that refutes those who say racism is dead in America. Retired Supreme Court Justice, JP Stevens, provides a carefully reasoned critique of The Collapse of the American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz.

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In Memoir, Condoleezza Rice Tells of Clashes With Cheney – NYTimes.com

I just might have to read Secretary Rice’s new tome.

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Robert Bork on Obama, the Supreme Court, Nixon & Being Mitt Romney’s Adviser – The Daily Beast

Still grumpy and radical, but interesting! Provides some interesting affirmation of Joe Nocera’s recent condemnation of all parties for the current partisan mess:

• The Ugliness All Started With Bork

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After working on music that I am planning to perform Sunday (Langlais & Handel), I have found myself turning back to Calvin Hampton’s work.

I think I am enamored not only because I enjoy the sound of his music, but I also know from reading his bio that he was an active rock and roller in New York while at the same time serving an Episcopal parish.

I guess I relate to someone who  straddled musical worlds.  I sometimes wonder if many of the classical musicians I know (organists especially) think I’m a dang rock’n’nroller and if more relaxed musicians (rock’n’rollers?) think I’m a snobby classical music person.

Reading in the Hymnal Companion to the Episcopalian Hymnal (Hymnal 1982), I was surprised to learn that Hampton’s church music contemporaries in the Episcopalian world thought that the MUSIC he wrote was rock and roll. I find this pretty laughable. Hampton was a monster player. The more I study his music the more I think it is significant work.

Significant to who? Me,  I guess, for one.

So I have returned to his “Five Dances for Organ.”

I previously learned and performed his elegant little dance, “An Exalted Ritual” (number 4 of the 5). Despite being fatigued and ready to quit practicing at the end of a rehearsal at the bench, this week I kept playing through the first of the 5: “The Primitives.”

This is a very ironic title. I like the sound of the piece. It is, of course, a bit on the devilish side technically as are most of his organ pieces I have looked at.  It’s “primitiveness” brings to mind Stravinsky. At least to my it does so for me.

This morning I perversely began analyzing this movement. This means I numbered the measures and began trying to understand sections. One detail I worked over (the bass line) revealed an astonishing organization of recurring pitches. I especially like stuff like this when I have already decided it sounds cool.

Understanding this kind of organization seems to help me play pieces better. Learning music often means seeing the patterns, organizing your performing thoughts along the lines of what the composer may have thought or at least put into his/her music.

My ease of working these little puzzles out seems to come from my interest in composition and analysis. Most classical musicians I have known (who were not composers themselves) seem a bit intimidated by this approach. At least they seem not to use it much when I ask them about how they think the music they are playing is working.

I see this as a failure of education. Often it’s just a matter of connecting a few dots with words that intelligent performers have already connecting with their playing.

Anyway, today is a day off for me, so I deliberately started my day with some fun analysis followed by some careful reading in Empire: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors by Charles S. Maier. Even took down some notes. Just ordered a used copy on Amazon…..

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Police Eyes Hovering Over New York Muslims — Gotham – NYTimes.com

Yikes.

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Newark Lawyer, Paul Bergrin, Defends Himself in Murder Trial – NYTimes.com

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Chimp to Human to History Books – The Circuitous Path of AIDS – NYTimes.com

This is a revealing investigation of the pre-1981 progression of this disease. Surprising amplifiers of its process include inoculations for other diseases.

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#OWS, The Other 98%, US Uncut & Rebuild the Dream: A Look at the Shoes That Didn’t Drop | techPresident

Daughter Elizabeth recommended this, but haven’t gotten to reading it yet.

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