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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird.

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

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

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

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