I spent all my energy yesterday morning going to the Farmers Market with Eileen, then searching for a book case for my Mom’s room at the nursing home.

Mom has been devouring Christian Amish novels from the library. I keep a list and deliver books to her. Not just the Amish books but also other books that I think she might enjoy reading. Usually they are CHRISTIAN fiction. Which is ironic since I find the entire concept pretty distasteful. But my Mom likes them at this time of life.

Anyway, she’s pretty much read all the ones at the library at least twice. So I have been looking for other books. I have searched the interlibrary loan system and found a few. But Amazon has been the best resource for this small niche genre of Christian Amish novels that my Mom hasn’t read yet.

I have been using her credit card to buy her used copies of these novels. Recently I noticed that they were piling up around in her room. She and I discussed getting her a book case and replacing her TV table with it, which was the goal yesterday.

By the time we had scoured three or four stores and found one, I was exhausted. I had dressed too warmly for the day and Mom’s room was stuffy and warm. Eileen and I went through bags and stacks of stuff to clear away and organize Mom’s room a bit. Only a bit, you understand, since it would be another major project for Jupe to do more.

By the time I arrived at the organ bench in the afternoon for my daily practice I was stiff and exhausted. Later Eileen asked me how my practicing went. Not good, I responded. I discovered that I was taking today’s prelude by Gwyneth Walker a few clicks too slow on the metronome. This was the result of confusion not adaptation (as I sometimes do with music for accuracy’s sake). So that was good. But mostly it was one of those times when I had trouble concentrating and doing well.

I read this article later in the day:

The insults of age: A one-woman assault on condscension by Helen Garner

I am feeling my age. I noticed in pictures of the AGO potluck how older and different I look from the rest of the group. See for yourself.

Then while attending an opening of an presentation of a project called The Human Canvas yesterday, I noticed how invisible I was suddenly when I was unable to get the eye of the presenter. She simply didn’t see me.

Anyway, the article by Helen Garner is probably a guilty pleasure read for an old fart like me. I read parts to Eileen last night.

Toward the end of the article Garner quotes from Marilyn Robinson’s novel Gilead.

I have thought about reading this book. It was recommended by my friend Rhonda. I had unfortunately temporarily filed it under the “too-fucking-Christian-religious” part of my brain.

“On the tram home I thought of the young waiter with a chastened respect. It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological manoeuvre. When I got home, I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead where I’d left off and came upon a remark made by Reverend Ames, the stoical Midwestern Calvinist preacher whose character sweetens and strengthens as he approaches death: “It is worth living long enough,” he writes, in a letter to the son born to him in his old age, “to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.” from Helen Garner’s article linked above

I found the novel in my Calibre library in the section of  books my brother has shared with me. Started it. Reading it reminds me very much of my father, brother and grand father all of whom are ministers I love.

The fact that Rev Ames is writing the book as a letter to the his adult son for him to read long after he is dead has some resonance for me since I don’t think I every really knew my own father the minister.

It’s probably a good read for now.

Last night was the AGO potluck which the chapter has every year at the end of the season. I had just about talked myself out of going, when I had a change of heart. I feared that the attendance would be low and my absence would be rude. This turned out to be completely wrong. A good number of members and significant others showed.

I took the opportunity to make a pan of marinara sauce and some fresh hummus to go along with some locally made fresh bread. I do enjoying cooking.

I chatted with some of the younger people (a college junior and recent grad). I was surprised when one of them told me he gets his news primarily from the New York Times online via a discounted student subscription.

I hope I wasn’t too much of an old ghoul but I asked these young people several questions about tech that I wonder about. No, they had never heard of the news source, Vice News. No, they didn’t know much about using Ipads or other tablets to read  music on and facilitate page turns.

They seem impressed with my new Android phone and the fact that I could add a tablet to my subscription for only 10 bucks a month.

Pretty soon I wandered off worrying slightly that I had made them a bit crazy with my intensity. But that’s my life.

I continue to cross compare the two versions of Freidman’s last book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

It’s interesting to note when the editorial changes in the later edition changes meaning and when it clarifies convoluted syntax.

This morning I was mulling over Friedman’s notion that differentiation is a life long process. In order to make it work, one has to be dedicated to “continually transforming” one’s self.

It’s a “life long commitment,” Friedman writes.

I especially liked this section (which the ruthless editor of the later edition seems to have cut).

“The effort to ‘differentiate oneself in one’s family of origin’ should not be confused with therapy. This is not about pat concepts such as whether someone had an authoritarian father and therefore has problems with authority figures nor whether unresolved issues with one’s mother have resulted in problems relating to women. The problem with parents is that they had parents. 

Differentiation has more to do with the self-regulation that emerges when individuals can gain more autonomy over their reactive mechanisms as a result of moving toward their families in new (often playful) ways rather than distancing from them.”

Ed Friedman (emphasis added  in the first instance)

It’s helpful to me to have heard Friedman’s voice and seen him speak in person. I hear the book (especially the first version which retains more of his phrases) in his twangy ironic Mr. Natural voice. It helps.

New laws to target radicalisation – BBC News

David Cameron to unveil new limits on extremists’ activities in Queen’s speech | U

It looks like Great Britain may be moving toward some more weird repression. I couldn’t find this story in the US press online yesterday. In fact, I had difficulty running it down after I read it on my phone via the UK paper, The Guardian’s app.

When I went on to the Guardian’s web site I couldn’t access anything but a US version of it. It was only by searching this morning that I found the original article I had read in it.

In the Guardian report, Cameron’s government and the new Conservative manifesto uses language about closing Mosques and “cracking down” on people. Hmmm. I would love to hear Alan Moore’s take on this.

Finished Kent Greenfield’s The Myth of Choice last night. I learned a lot from Greenfield’s argument and will be thinking about it for a while.

Greenfield dissects what motivates us to choose. He opens up the notion that often when we think we are exercising our free will we are, in fact,  driven by factors like culture, context and implicit values that might surprise us if we analyzed them.

The good news (as Greenfield puts it) is that awareness is often key to more free will in our decisions. For example, we can be aware that the attractiveness of someone can seduce us into giving them more credibility than they deserve and factor that in when considering their opinions.

We can remember that if an article or a person lines up with our own views and opinions, it’s time for some healthy skepticism to balance our predilection to give them too much easy credibility.

We can also try to be open to those with whom we disagree for the same reason in reverse.

If we recognize framing (how a question is posed or facts are presented) is occurring, we are better equipped to protect ourselves from its influence.

I particularly admired Greenfield’s discussion about the myth of personal responsibility as perpetuated by those who would limit government and emphasize an individual’s right to make their own choices despite the wisdom of the choice.

Mature choices in life are identifiable.

Better to wear a motorcycle helmet than not (see previous blogs or the better yet the book itself).  When the community allows citizens to make any choice, the idea is that they then take on the consequences for that choice, good or ill.

The problem is that the chooser is not the only one who suffers the consequences. Whether it is an ER team picking up the injured person on the side of the road who has chosen not to wear a helmet or it is the society at large which is desensitized by its own indifference to those who “choose” to be hungry, either way, it essentially a false choice.

At the end of the book Greenfield points out that change is difficult and usually doesn’t occur or only occurs in very small bits.

He encapsulates what we can do in this way.

1. recognize the power of situations in our lives over our choices
2. acknowledge our own very real irrationalities
3. be mindful of the power of our own habits
4. cultivate an awareness of cultural influences over us

We can only do so much. Greenfield mentions humility again and again in the book.

He encourages the reader to strive for it when thinking about our own choices and especially judgments of other people.

He is particularly hard on the judicial system (being a lawyer).

He insists that good judges are able to put themselves in other people’s places, imagine other people’s stories in the context of applying law

Then he points out that we are all judges and could use this handy little technique as well.

It’s a light read with a profound subject. Recommended.

Whew. Yesterday took a lot out of me. Eileen and I went to the Farmers Market in the morning.

Since it wasn’t clear to me if Eileen wanted to go with  me I waited until she got up to find out. During this time I exercised. Exercising (treadmilling) in the morning might be a good thing. On full Wednesday like yesterday I can get it out of the way and not have to skip it later because I am exhausted and trying to preserve my energy.

We bought asparagus, cherry tomatoes, basil and locally roasted coffee beans. We also had some fresh baklava and I had an amazing shortbread cherry cookie. Eileen got cold so we left.

I spent a couple of hours meeting with clergy.

Most of this was with my boss. It was the first heart to heart we had in months. I do enjoy working for this woman. I like the fact that she wants to hear my insights into our situation at church.

But being an introvert, after a long period of this kind of back and forth I am drained physically and emotionally.

Eileen and I also shoved furniture around yesterday. We moved the big loom in front of the window seat where the harpsichord was. As we were moving the harpsichord I told Eileen that it was the “corpse” of the harpsichord (since it hasn’t worked for years now).

Then there was our final choir rehearsal of the year.

Suffice it to say that this takes tons of energy and by the end of the rehearsal I was whipped (as my Dad used to say).

I’m still very tired this morning. So here are some links.

The Bitter Backdrop to 2016 – NYTimes.com

Recently David Brooks ascribed our malaise as a country to a lack of character (thereby plugging his stupid new book which Eileen purchased and is reading). I think Frank Bruni is close when he says we are suffering from a “mood of overarching uncertainty and profound anxiety.”

Conviction Rates Count More in Chinese Justice Than Innocence – NYTimes.com

It’s difficult to conceive of a societal judicial system like the one in China. They have an acquittal rate of 00.007 %. Recent concerns about police beating confessions out of people has led the police to get a bit “better at inflicting pain without causing serious injuries.” Nice.

For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word – NYTimes.com

According to this article we (presumably the USA, eh?) spend half our waking time in front of a screen. Also, the market is madly going mobile.

Luke Bauerlein | B O D Y

A couple of “happy” poems for today.

One of the results of working on constantly improving practice techniques is the freshness with which one returns to previous attempts at learning or practicing pieces.

Thus Prokofiev’s piano sonatas and Chopin’s nocturnes feel more intact as I rehearse them more slowly and carefully.

Fine tuning the tempo of rehearsing has helped me since I am practicing slowly but not so slowly that I can’t still hear the music idea clearly.

This may have something to do with my own ear continuing to improve.

I don’t mean to sound like I have arrived or anything. Quite the contrary. I feel more and more like a beginner as delve more deeply into learning piano and organ music.

This Sunday I have schedule an organ piece by Gwyneth Walker, “Reverence” from Sanctuary.

This is the piece that turned me on to this unusual living composer. I bought it in a sale from a publisher and set it aside. Then I read through it one day and was impressed.

Walker admits to the strong influence of folk music and the music of the Beatles on her composition aesthetic.

Wow. I can relate to that. And I heard it in this piece. Unfortunately there was a page of pedal work that would require some prep so I buckled down and got to work.

I did get to the point I could play that section but by that time I didn’t need the piece for work (Lent).

I went back to it recently and discovered some more places that I thought needed more work than the obviously challenging (to me at least) pedal passage.

I think  I made this discovery because I am gradually improving the way I practice.

Anyway, I think the piece will go well Sunday and am looking forward to finally performing it.

Likewise I have worked on William Bolcolm’s setting of “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Mouvement” by Jean Berveiller.

Like Walker, both of these composers are speaking a language that is distanced from the usual academic organ music. That is my attraction to them. Plus I find them both challenging.

The Bolcolm is designed for a much bigger organ than I have. I only this week figured out how to register it on my little instrument. The piece has to be scaled down in a way I hadn’t thought of since most of my practice is about getting the fucking notes correctly (slowly).

This week I began to think I might actually be able to schedule this piece this summer sometime.

The Berveiller is a piece given to me to consider by Rhonda Edgington. (Thank you, Rhonda!)

Written in the fifties it is more successful at using a driving almost rock and roll feel than most attempts I have seen and heard.

It’s not that easy but not that hard. I just need to practice it until it’s in my feet and fingers.

All of these pieces have benefited from my improved practice techniques. Cool beans.

Tuesday May 12, 2015  2:41 pm

I’m writing my daily blog later in the day today.  I exercised earlier, then Eileen and I went out for a late breakfast together.

Yesterday we upgraded our phones. I had been having difficulty charging the battery on my old Windows phone. Finally, yesterday I was unable to get to charge at all.

When we went to the Verizon store, the guy helpfully pointed out that we could switch batteries between our phones and recharge it that way.

But we decided to upgrade instead. We bought matching Android phones made by Samsung.

The Android system is definitely better than Windows. We were able to add these phones with minimal out of pocket expense. I also bit and ordered a tablet for myself.

It was a deal. $99 bucks plus an increase of $10 monthly to our plan. I can see that things are heading this direction and decided I should get a bit more tablet savvy.

They’re drop shipping it in a few days.

Eileen and I have been playing with our phones since we purchased them. One of the coolest things about the new phones is that we purchased wireless chargers for them.

It even charges a bit quicker than the plug in charger which came with it (Eileen checked this out earlier today).

In his book, The Myth of Choice, Kent Greenfield develops a devastating notion regarding his take on personal responsibility and government.

He tells the story of being a young man with his first job living away from home on his own for the first time. He was too poor to purchase a used car so he purchased a used motorbike.

Sometimes he wore a helmet, but sometimes he didn’t. When he was taking a young lady on his bike for a ride he liked to give her the helmet and he “played the daredevil with a leather jacket, sunglasses, and flowing locks.”

He goes on and points out how stupid he was to do this. He then uses helmet laws to talk about two notions of personal responsibility.

The first notion is that it is responsible (mature) to wear a helmet.

The second notion is the idea that the law should leave the choice up to the rider. This kind of personal responsibility does not endorse a choice but gives the individual the freedom to wear a helmet or not. It also usually says that the person should suffer the consequences of her or his actions.

It is the second notion that many politicians (mainly Republicans) use when they talk about helmet laws or Obamacare or other “nanny state” laws.’

Greenfield has a lengthy footnote citing quotes by Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Congressman Steve King and others on this very idea.

But the clincher is that does the person who makes the poor choice really suffer the consequences of it.

Greenfield asks if the person who makes the bad choice should simply be left by the side of the road suffering from their injuries instead of cared for by emergency and health care workers.

He does not want to live in a society that leaves hurt people by the side of the road just because they chose not to wear a helmet. Neither do I.

The second consequence is the effect of such heartlessness on a community itself. The community suffers psychologically from turning away.

I was pretty impressed with his arguments on this subject and am still thinking about it.

One of the nice things about exercising earlier in the day is that I read the paper earlier. So here are some links including at least one from today’s NYT.

Some Schools Embrace Demands for Education Data – NYTimes.com

This article gave me pause in the good ways they were able to use data. Who wudda thunk it?

Meditation on a Poem about Glass Embedded in the Scalp Jeanann Verlee

a poem I liked retweeted by a writer I like

Kate Atkinson’s ‘A God in Ruins’ – NYTimes.com

A book review. The book is described as a companion to her excellent Life after Life.

botar

free old time radio programs

McNeil Robinson interview

This composer died recently. In this interview he talks about church music in New York City in his career. Not sure I agree with all of his point of view (his aesthetic makes a weird theology), but I do find it fascinating.

Synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”

This morning I’m mulling on the synchronicity of my reading and the recent election in Britain as viewed through the eyes of Russell Brand.

Russell Brand is a sort of comedian who has recently started a pod/videocast that I have watched. During the past week or two, Brand began to  in to his own idealism and to believe in the possibility of affecting a political outcome in a positive way.

He changed from advocating not voting to advocating voting.

The days after the election in which his admirable positions were soundly trounced, Brand seemed to move back into thinking that public government was broken beyond repair.

I admire this movement of his. The line between idealism and despair is a fine one. I have moved back and forth on it my whole life.

In the end, I try to choose to act when possible. But probably fail at finding ways to do so besides voting and meager financial support of causes I agree with.

I was delighted this morning when at the end of his essay, “Letters to an Innocent Bystander,” Thomas Merton uses the story of the emperor’s news clothes to drive home his point that we can no longer be “innocent bystanders” in the world.

Brand’s new movie which i haven’t seen is called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

One can imagine his reasonable and unfashionable socialist ideas (with which I probably agree).

Merton’s world had some significant differences.

I mull them over as I read his work.

He hints then about where we have ended up in our time. But of course is speaking more about his time than ours.

One of the things I have always liked about Merton’s writing is that he addresses the reader in a clear and honest way, no matter from what context one is reading him. This is so different from most religious (especially Christian) writers I have read. 

The beginning paragraph of this essay is an example of this. In it, Merton hopes that

“we have not yet reached the stage where we are all hermetically sealed, each one in the collective arrogance and despair of his own herd.” Thomas Merton

This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the echo chamber effect of the internet.

Of course that’s not exactly what he meant. But he goes on:

“If I seem to be in a hurry to take advantage of the situation which still exists, it is, frankly, because I sometimes feel it may not continue to exist much longer.” Thomas Merton

Ahem. Again some resonance for the 21st century as it has turned out so far.

“In any case, I believe that we are sufficiently still ‘persons’ to realize we have a common difficulty, and to try to solve it together. I write this, then, in the hope that we can still save ourselves from becoming numbers.” Thomas Merton

Again AHEM. People as numbers. Go tell Facebooger.

Finally, I found myself thinking about the intellectual dishonesty that Greenfield exposes in Chapter 7 of his book, The Myth of Choice.

Since I’m over my 500 word limit and your eyes are glazing over maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Rain again this morning. I got up specifically to sit on the porch with my oil lamps burning and sip coffee and listen to the rain.

Eileen lay in bed most of yesterday binging on the TV show, “The Americans.”

We checked out the DVD. I found the show pretty mundane but she liked enough to use it to keep herself occupied while she feels ill.

I did my Greek listening to the rain and then read some Merton. I’m at a loss to say why I am drawn back into reading Merton. Many of his observations seem very dated. His poetry is almost as bad as mine. Nevertheless I am drawn to him especially when he is talking about the society at the time.

In his essay, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolph Eichmann,” he points out how sane Eichmann was. He draws a line from Eichmann’s sanity to the sanity of people in his world who would blow it up and “coolly estimate how many millions can be considered expendable in a nuclear war.”

I remember this fear, the one of the war coming to the USA via nuclear explosions. While this danger is not gone, our fear in America has changed. Now we coolly estimate how many civilians are expendable when we target (and buy valium in australia kill) specific terrorists.

It’s the same kind of sanity Merton was talking about.

What Merton leaves out and what we experience now is the anxiety and anger that drives the mad discussion.

Despite his sophistication and cosmopolitan orientation, he also leaves out the increase in the din of what is happening all over our world. I wonder if the very idea that what used to be news, a filtered selection of what was going on, has exploded into an unceasing 24 hour of expanded awareness of events in our world with an emphasis on the tragic.

Have events changed so much as one’s ability to know about them?

Hard to say. But it creates a constant barrage of troubling testimonies and stories of things that are happening to real people all over the world.

No wonder so many retreat behind reactive hardening of opinions and judgments. A retreat that seems to me to be related to Merton’s idea of the sanity of Eichmann.

Writing to Survive

I follow many people on Facebooger including a good number of writers. This link was put up by one of them. I shared it on Facebooger knowing that if certain of my Facebooger friends were to read it they would be angry. But I think it’s well written and is about the truth.

I moved myself out to the porch this morning so that I could hear the rain more clearly.

I was inspired to reread Merton’s essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” But first I wanted to open more windows and insert some portable screens we use.

We have two windows like this on the porch. When I went to the second one I discovered a bird had decided to build its nest in it.

I decided to leave that window closed.

I said yesterday that “The Rhinocerous” was about conformity. But both Merton and Ionesco himself say that while it’s about conformity, it’s also about totalitarianism. Ultimately they see that when everyone else in society is a monster, rebellion is as futile as transformation. Merton quotes Ionesco: “They [the spectators] leave in a void—that was my intention. It is the business of a free man to pull himself out of this void by his own power and not by the power of other people!”

So Merton’s essay uses the gratuitous nature of the rain and the image of a society of rhinoceroses to challenge the illusion of our lives lived together collectively: “Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, freedom remains abortive. Our capacities for joy, peace and truth are  never liberated… we are prisoners of a process, a dialectic of false promises and real deceptions ending in futility.”

You would never guess from reading these quotes from Merton that most of this essay, especially the beginning and ending hinge on the uselessness of rain and is rendered in almost poetic prose.

As I reread it this morning listening to the rain, the word, “collective,” rang around in my head. I realized that I had read a different take on this in our present society. That was in Kent Greenfield’s book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits.

Toward the end of the second section he calls “Limits and Influences” Greenfield makes the point that markets take away societal action and replace it with so many individual choices that the very idea of a social group determining its fate is “elbowed aside.”

He gives the example of when a box store like WalMart moves into a community. Before the box store, many smaller stores owned by locals provided people in the community with commodities. After the box store, people in the community make many individual decisions to purchase cheaper items at the Walmart type store.

The result is that locally owned businesses fail and probably the downtown dries up. At no point was there a collective decision to have this happen. The market elbowed aside any collective decision-making with many, many decisions by individuals to purchase specific items cheaper at the larger store.

Greenwood speculates that the change that results might not be the one the community would choose given a chance to do so.

This makes me ask the question: have we devolved even further into a new totalitarianism, a hollow and almost automatic loss of community replaced by groups of individual consumers and the corporations that sell things to them?

Suddenly, Tehran’s Mayor Becomes a Patron of the Arts – NYTimes.com

Billboards with art on them. Excellent concept.

After Nearly Claiming His Life, Ebola Lurked in a Doctor’s Eye – NYTimes.com

Science at its best.

A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science

12 points to consider when reading about science. They apply in other areas as well.

Finished reading the play, The Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco this morning.  I was 8 years old when Ionesco wrote this play. I think it’s a play about conformism. Gradually people are turning into rhinoceroses. Ultimately only one man doesn’t turn into a rhinoceros by the end of the play. The stage directions instruct that the sounds of the rhinoceroses off stage become more and more beautiful. That their heads also become more and more beautiful as the play continues.

The last human being ends up talking to a mirror alternating feeling left out of the transformations of his peers and being defiant.

I can see this reflecting the fifties even in France where it was written. Now I have to go back and see how Merton was using this play which was very fresh when he wrote his essay.

I have been fighting melancholia for several days. I hesitate to say I’m depressed because I still function. It’s more like I go blank. Reading over my journals from past years I see this is something that has been with me most of my adult life.

Rhinoceros (1965) Jan Lenica – YouTube

10 minute animated film treatment of main themes of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

Rhinoceros The Play – YouTub

A 2014 production from Chabot College in California. Not terribly good.

I think this “Modern World” sums it up well:

This Church In Belgium Is Brilliantly Designed – 9GAG

This piece of art is a bit like the ones in the next two links.

Mayor de Blasio Is Irked by a Subway Delay – NYTimes.com

The thing I like about this story is that the mayor appears to have inadvertently sent it to the Times.

This morning after doing some Greek, I turned to Thomas Merton’s little book, Raids on the Unspeakable. It was with satisfaction that I found the first chapter in this book is about rain. Merton talks about the fact that what has no price can still have value.

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something ACTUAL is to place it on the market.” Merton in “Rain and the Rhinoceros.”

Merton has withdrawn from the Monastery in Gethsemani and is in cabin far from the others. He has no electricity there. In 1986, 26 years after Merton published this book, I visited Gethsemani with my psalmody class. Looking for my poem on the rain I stumbled across a few journal entries I made while there.

I find it ironic that Merton mentions his lack of electricity, since it was electricity that killed him. He was attending a conference of monks both Christian and non-Christian in Bangkok. He stepped from a shower and touched an electric fan and it killed him.

Solitude and rain are both themes in my life. When very young I wrote a poem about the rain.

Here is the torn day, rain

Here is the torn day rain
Broken like red small leaves
Under my feet

My last lover has to be you
I find you everywhere
And I sleep beside you

Every word or sound I have made
Was really made for you

Mute one silent with sound
You are on my hands

Someone tried to steal you
To make you faithful

You are the only one
I never asked to be faithful

Sticking your sounds
On the leaves, you
Are all around me

It took a little searching to find that poem. I think about it once in a while. I like that I chose rain as a muse.

Reading Merton helps me understand my isolation as solitude.

“Philoxenos in his ninth MEMRA (on poverty) to dwellers in solitude, says that there is no explanation and no justification for the solitary life, since it is without a law. To be a contemplative is therefore to be an outlaw. .” Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros”

I’m not a true solitary, but no one really is. Besides the company of my beautiful wife, I spent my solitude with people like Merton and Chopin. Rising to occasional contemplation, I am content “to be an outlaw.”

But I’m an outlaw who is addicted to the interwebs. This morning when I couldn’t find my copy of Rhinoceros by Ionesco, I found it in an online pdf. Free.

“The problem of Berenger, in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, is the problem of the human person stranded and alone in what threatens to become a society of monsters.” Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros.”

Maybe I’ll write here later about how Merton works this play into this essay. First I want to finish reading it.

My schedule is definitely lightening up. The virus I lived through seems to be hanging on in the form of a runny nose. Nice. Today I only have two things scheduled: a meeting with clergy at work and a choir rehearsal this evening. This is considerably less than my Wednesday with ballet classes filling up the morning.

Though I have been spending a lot of time with Chopin at the piano I feel pretty unmotivated.

It doesn’t help that Eileen is basically holed up in bed trying to get better. I have managed to ease back up into 45 minutes a day on the treadmill and my blood pressure has been down ever since classes stopped (a correlation?).

Only three more Sundays of choir and I’m done with that. I enjoy my work but I find it frustrating that people miss so many scheduled events like rehearsals and services thereby causing me to dumb down a bit so that our performances are not disasters.

I ordered copies of Peter Schikele’s “Four Curmudgeonly Canons” so that we could have a fun end of the year thing to sing through. They were only $1.66 a copy so I paid for them out of my pocket since there not really something we could use at church.

They arrived in the mail yesterday. I purchased them without really getting a chance to look at the compositions. (I should have searched on google images which is where I found the above images). They are not all that great. There’s basically one joke: I can’t wait until this season is over. I will probably have to explain the “Pinter” reference to the choir. (“Everything is bleak as early Pinter.”)

The Road to Character

So David Brooks is using the interwebs to gather info for his next book. About character. You can click on the link and contribute your ideas about your own life and its meaning.

Mummy Displayed in Hungary Sets Chinese Villagers in Pursuit of Lost Icon – NYT

I find this interesting because some guy was looking at his phone in a village and recognized the lost god.

Japanese American Museum Acquires Internee Artifacts – NYTimes.com

Art from tragedy.

Contrary to goals, ER visits rise under Obamacare

Rep Huizenga (MY rep in the house) tweeted this link as evidence of the continuing failure of Obamacare.

He or his tweeting intern apparently did not read the dang article since part of the rise is the increase in need of doctors for newly insured people.

I tweeted this to him (or his intern) but as of this morning he has not responded. Sooprise.

The first time I was accepted by a college music school was around 1972. I had lost a few years since high school. I attended Flint U of M for a few semesters but was pretty disenchanted with college. However, I got good grades. These classes later transferred and helped with my degree.

Driving back and forth between Flint and Columbus Ohio I noticed the grand old buildings of Ohio Wesleyan University which can be seen from the highway.

For some reason I got it into my head to study composition there. I moved my first wife and my son to Delaware Ohio where OWU is located and with the help of my parents bought a house and began studying piano with Richard Strasburg in order to make the entrance exam requirements.

I can remember my goal as a pianist and composer was to be able to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, both volumes.

About two years later this study ended when I left my first wife and hitch hiked to Northern Michigan to play in rock and roll bands and meet the woman who became my second wife (thank God!).

Strasburg was a good teacher. I learned a ton from him but was never to study with a piano teacher again.

After quitting my Roman Catholic church job around 2001, I began to practice piano and organ with a renewed intensity. All this is to say 14 years later, I think I am improving as a pianist.

When I was younger so many people seemed to over estimate my abilities as a musician. Now that I am 63 I feel very few people see my abilities clearly at all. In fact living in Holland at this time I feel pretty invisible.

You know. The old don’t matter in our society.

And I’m getting old.

Nevertheless I know my pianistic skills are on a tremendous upswing. I ascribe a lot of this to my improving rehearsal techniques which seem to exponentially help me. The more I learn, the better I am. The better I am, the more easily I learn.

I bring this up because yesterday I returned to one of my favorite piano composers, Chopin. I never studied him with Strasburg. I love his music and have learned and performed a bit of it. My Dad used to play him on the piano and I still have some of his scores.

It has been a while since I have practiced Chopin. I’m not always 100 per cent sure how to execute some of his ambiguously notated notes.

But yesterday things went well. I have stumbled on practicing slow enough to get all of the notes but not so slow that I do not derive any musical pleasure from it.

I also read through Liszt’s transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. Again it went pretty well.

How bout that?

Contrary to my expectation yesterday, two parishioners commented on the prelude I played on the organ. The piece was “Processional” by William Mathias which is a piece I think is attractive to the listener. I had not put the title of the piece in the program due to my illness and dithering with the choir piece for the day.

Immediately after I played it one of my tenors asked me what it was was and said that he liked it. Then after service walking in the parking lot, a parishioner asked me what it was that I had played for the prelude. When I told him, he reacted as though he recognized the title and said he liked it.

I guess more people are listening than I sometimes think.

Also, I had a good moment with a bass who often resists singing in his upper range. In between the pregame and the service, I had a chance to ask him if the exercises to extend range I have been doing with the choir for the last few weeks were helping him at all. He said he thought that they were. Woo hoo!

He also said how much he enjoys singing the Psalms in Anglican chant. Wow.

I’m looking forward to two days off. Eileen is starting to feel a bit better. I am hoping to shed a bit of burn out and exhaustion.  My cold or whatever it was is still with me, but I am feeling a bit better.

How Not to Drown in Numbers – NYTimes.com

Big data is not enough. It needs the “special sauce” of polls and human understanding and judgment.

The Medical Bill Mystery – NYTimes.com

If you’ve been paying attention this is not a revelatory article. However, it is troubling.

What Black Moms Know – NYTimes.com

This author’s approaching to raising kids is one I recognize more than the one I see around me.

Eileen is still ill. She spent most of yesterday in bed. As I mentioned yesterday I went to the string quartet rehearsal. I found it sort of frustrating. The music went fine. Then the bride arrived with her fiancee and had us play it through in its entirety for her three times. All of this was done from the nominal fee of $10 per person. It felt highly indulgent. I’m sure the bride had no idea how unreasonable it was to convene the group just to indulge her without substantial extra pay.

I couldn’t tell how sincere the string quartet was in its fussing over the young bride. I’ll think twice before accepting a gig with this group again.

I’m still recovering from my illness.

I’m hoping that my lighter schedule will help me with exhaustion and burnout. So far I’m pretty much in survival mode. Yesterday at church after finishing preparing for today’s service, I wanted badly to practice more. I read a bit in Widor and then realized I was not fit to practice and came home. After a rest, I  did manage to put in 30 minutes on the treadmill.

A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered – NYTimes.com

Michael G. Vickers is one of those people who has been influential in many US actions without too high a profile. This article is well written and frightening in its realpolitik.

Ben E. King, Soulful Singer of ‘Stand by Me,’ Dies at 76 – NYTimes.com

Instantly put some of his songs on my treadmill playlist yesterday.

Speaking of playlists, I have recently been listening to Black, Brown and Beige by Duke Ellington.

Brian Eno’s Before and After Science

Vaughan Williams Phantasy Quintet and String Quartets

Alabama Shakes’ Sound and Color.

I do like this group.

I finally had enough stamina to spend some time choosing organ music for this weekend. I am playing compositions instead of improvising. Since improvising is easy for me, it felt a bit like a cop out to improvise organ music two weeks in a row since I improvised last week’s postlude.

On the other hand, I have had to deal with last minute changes to the choral anthem and  the fact that I’m not high functioning due to my lingering illness. After doing some playing yesterday, I decided to resurrect a couple of pieces I like: Processional by William Mathias and Fanfare by Tony Hewitt-Jones. They reflect my own upbeat mood which is a reaction to both feeling better and the nice  spring weather we are having here in Holland Michigan.

I arrived at church yesterday to see this weekend’s bulletins printed and stacked ready to hand out. So these titles will not be in the bulletin. No harm done. Only a few people even seem to notice the prelude and postlude and probably most of them don’t check the titles.

I also did fifteen minutes on the treadmill yesterday so I am gradually returning to normal.

This morning I feel great. I have noticed however that my energy doesn’t last the whole day in this recovery period. I have to attend a rehearsal with a string quartet for an upcoming wedding. This is the one where the bride insisted on hearing us before hand. We are playing a kind of dopey piece, “Until the Last Moment” by Yanni. It’s on YouTube if you’re interested. It feels to me like a wandering George Winston sort of non-piece. But the piano has a prominent role in it and that’s why the quartet hired me.

Today is the first day of Tulip Time. There are activities all around the home where we will be rehearsing. I’m hoping I can drive most of the way over to it this afternoon in order to reserve my energy. Normally I think I would walk over. It’s not far. But we’ll see.

Banksy Finds a Canvas and a New Fan Base in Gaza’s Ruins – NYTimes.com

I actually think this is pretty cool. The artist Banksy sneaked into Gaza and did three murals.

Freddie Gray’s death ruled a homicide

Once again I was able to access this entire press conference. Although I am skeptical, this looks like a different approach to the death of someone at the hands of the police that other cities have taken. Certainly, the prosecutor is impressive.

Last Fuckable Day Sketch

I haven’t been able to get into the wildly popular Amy Schumer. This video however had me laughing. I mentioned it yesterday to my organ student who said that hitting sixty is difficult for her.

Update

I was at this point in my blog when Eileen got up (still very ill) and asked when my rehearsal was today. I checked and it was in 20 minutes. Yikes. Got dressed, went to it and came home.

Ambassadors of Harmony-2009 International Barbershop Chorus Champions – 

Somebody put this video up on Facebooger. It’s a bunch of insane barbershoppers singing and dancing 76 trombones!

Frustrating. Chrome has decided to upgrade its bookmarking system making it more visual and less  hierarchical.

I wanted to bookmark a blog I found this morning and put it under my sub folder of blogs in my music folder.

ArtsJournal: Daily arts news | Terry Teachout on the arts in New York Cit

I was unable to do so. Nice. I know that I am an eccentric user of tech, but I still find it defeating when changes are made that I can’t easily use.

I think part of the problem is that I have folders inside of folders.

Oh well. I’ll figure it out when I have more patience. Or more likely completely change the way I bookmark stuff to suit the overlords at Google.

Thursdays seem to be the day for me to discover just how I exhausted I am even with a bit lighter schedule.  I finished rehearsing with my cellist (my violinist canceled) and found that I was weak with exhaustion. I went home.

I ended up in bed watching and listening to YouTube videos. I do like Alabama  Shakes.

I began reading a bit in Terry Teachout’s bio of Duke Ellington this morning.

The introduction describes Ellington’s Carnegie Hall appearance for which he had decided to write a new lengthy work (Black, Tan and Beige).

I tend to think of Ellington as a great composer. But reading and thinking about him this morning I realized that i do so on my own terms. Ellington got mixed reviews for the premiere of his length work including reviews by academic composers which were very critical of his work.

In 2015, the classical musicians reviewing Ellington seem to be unaware of their own irrelevance. Popular music drowns out historical music in our time. But still the music in our ears somehow helps us be more human.

As I lay in bed yesterday listening to bands on YouTube I realized that I am drawn much more to music like Alabama Shakes than most music I listen to, study and perform that is being written today under the guise of “classical music.”

This includes silly songs like FourFIveSeconds:

Maybe it’s that all the training and the skill one can obtain won’t beat your own aesthetic out of you. Composers are encouraged to “find their voice,” performers to make the music their own and play with conviction.

Maybe my voice and conviction is that of a naive 17 year old listening to Zappa, Miles Davis and the Beatles in his bedroom in 1968.

In the meantime there’s always the Alabama Shakes.

I survived my stuff yesterday despite feeling poorly. The staff meeting was one of those strategic planning meetings. We have apparently hired a local consultant who took us through the predictable motions of this sort of process as a staff. It’s a bit disconcerting since we haven’t done very much formation as a staff, but what the heck.

I tried to overlook my own distaste for things churchy and phony and do my part as honestly as I could despite feeling like shit. That is one of the good things about working for my boss, Jen Adams, she seems to want me to contribute my warped point of view, so I tried to do so without offending my co workers. God knows if I offended the consultant.

Probably talked too much.

I planned the evening’s choral rehearsal, practiced Sunday’s organ music and checked on Mom. Eileen was still sick in bed. I stood in Mom’s doorway and chatted with her only coming close enough to show her the updated pics of Alex Daum the grand kid on my phone.

I think came home and realized that I would probably have no common soprano between this Wednesday rehearsal and Sunday’s service. I revamped everything, once again canning the planned anthem and substituting an easier one. Since my plan was to do music by one composer for the prelude, postlude and anthem, I also decided to can the organ music for this Sunday. After working on it for an hour or so, I realized that though it was well composed by Robert J. Powell, it might not be all that accessible or attractive on its own and would require a lot more prep.

So fuck it.

I emailed the choir a copy of the anthem and a link to a YouTube version of it (I decided on something in our Hymnal called “Like the Murmur of the Dove’s Song” words by Carl Daw, Jr and tune by Peter Cutts). I asked people who planned to be absent to learn this little melody for Sunday.

Then I sent an update to the office for the bulletin.

Of course at the rehearsal I learned that people who signed out for this Sunday were going to be there anyway and we could have possibly gone with my original plan. I decided not to change things back and go with plan B.

Goldberg: Variations: Gabriel Josipovici: 9780060897239: Amazon.com: Books

So the real reason my friend Rhonda showed me half a clipping from a magazine was the mention of four novels based on the Golbergs.

The Goldberg Variations: Nancy Huston: 9781552787557: Amazon.com: Books

So I checked them out online.

The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel: Rachel Cusk

So here they are.

Goldberg: Variations: Gabriel Josipovici

I’ll have to check them out myself sometime. Not sure I’m prepared for this kind of novel right now. But they do look interesting. Thank you Rhonda.

So Eileen is now sick. I’m getting better. That’s the health report from the old people at 20 East 18th Street in Holland Michigan.

I’m not quite better. I dragged myself out yesterday twice, once to grocery shop and one to do a little organ practice. At the church, I was interrupted twice. The first time my boss came up to see how I was feeling. The second time, the organ stopped in the middle of my rehearsal.

The lights over the choir area were still on so I knew it wasn’t a general power failure. I got up and started walking toward the office and met my boss halfway there. “Is something going on?” She asked. Apparently the lights in her office had gone on at the same time the organ music stopped.

She checked the fuse box to no avail. I told here I was just going to go home since I wasn’t feeling a hundred per cent.

I got an email later that Thom the janitor had been doing something and shut us off. So no permanent damage.

I dropped some music off at my friend Rhonda’s house. She gave me a clipping and a score to look at. The clipping was an incomplete article which I figured out this morning was “What I did on my Summer Vacation” by David Olds from The Whole Note mag (a Toronto music mag which provides all content online free. Woo hoo!)

TheWholeNote.com Home Page – The WholeNote

I haven’t quite figured out how to clip stuff from the fancy online version of the magazine, but apparently there is a way to do so.

The reason Rhonda had clipped the article for me was that there was a review of a recording of a two piano piano version of the Goldberg Variations by Bach.

The review had an interesting section on the history of this version.

Evidently Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901) felt that the original 1741 solo keyboard (two-manual harpsichord) work would provide enough material to keep two pianists busy and in 1883 made an arrangement for two pianos in which the liner notes tell us he “took substantial liberties with Bach’s original voicing, doubling melodies and fleshing out harmonies as he saw fit… [leaving] an unmistakably Romantic impression on the work.” Thirty years later Max Reger “smoothed out a few of the [remaining] rough edges” of Rheinberger’s adaptation and published the version recorded here

Rhonda probably thought I would be interested that these two composers, Rheinberger and Reger, had done versions of the Goldberg. These two guys are composers organists tend to know and sometimes perform so it is interesting.

She also was kind enough to give me a score of the piece, “Measuring What is Holy Across Time and Space” by Lee R. Kesselman. She recently participated in a performance of this piece. She even invited Eileen and me to attend and offered free comp tickets.

I passed on this. Even now I am putting off looking at the score of another sacred composition for the time being. I am, of course, grateful that Rhonda gave me the opportunity to hear a performance of it live. But as it turns out, even if I had the stamina to go hear it done by our local community chorus, I was ill.

I will check out the music later when my strength for things Christian and academic return.

The History of the Cyrillic Alphabet

In the meantime, I noticed something yesterday watching a Vice News report, The Pro Kremlin Youth Group: Putin’s Propaganda Machine Part i. The Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian appears related to the Greek Alphabet. The first two letters in Putin’s name in Cyrillic are identical to the Greek letters Pi and Upsilon.

So in one fell swoop, I began to see Cyrillic differently recognizing at least some of the previously impenetrable alphabet. How bout that?

‘Maus’ Book About Holocaust Is Removed in Russia – NYTimes.com

Getting ready for the celebration of the Russian defeat over Germany, swastikas were to be purged from sight, including those on the cover of the Russian version of Speilegman’s Maus.

The article linked above has a great Russian proverb used regarding booksellers who are hiding the book during this period: “An obliging fool is more dangerous than a foe”

I watched Obama’s statement on the Baltimore turmoil in full here yesterday. I do appreciate being able to hear something like that completely. I felt over all for a politician it was a pretty good statement. I did wince when he used the “thug” language.

There’s One Word We Need to Stop Using When Talking About the Baltimore Riots

I was amused when Kiese Laymon, a writer I admire and am “friends” with on Facebooger, began his Facebooger response with “Fuck Obama!”

He basically said that people who use the “thug” language are playing into the basic racism of our time.

I was amused because later he amended it:

(I initially wrote “Fuck Barack Obama” but some of my older heads have asked me to be more respectful of him and the emotional justice work we’re trying to do with black men and say “Im saddened by” so … ) I’m saddened by Barack Obama and his administration as a “staff, record label and motherfucking crew.” Any black political leader who calls young black folks “criminals and thugs” is sanctioning police terror. (from KL’s Facebooger status)

Anyway, here’s a link to some good background info on the Baltimore situation:

What you really need to know about Baltimore, from a reporter who’s lived there 

Listen to the US Supreme Court’s historic arguments on gay marriage – Quartz

I listened to the entire presentation on this site.

I was wondering about the phrase, “up to snuff,” this morning. I googled it. I was surprised to read a commentator that pointed out the “snuff” in the phrase was not the sense of “snuffing” out someone. That had never occurred to me. Instead, i was on the right track according to the OED (above).

So I’m feeling better. But I’m not quite “up to snuff.”

This picture was taken at the 18th Snuff World Championship held in Germany in 2012. Who knew?

The phrase is also apt because for the last six days my nose has been itching like it’s full of snuff.

One of the benefits of being ill is having time to read.

Yesterday I finished Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Apparently this is one of his more popular books in Japan. It’s been translated twice into English. The first time by Alfred Birnbaum and seems to have been done for an English reader for Japanese speakers. The second was by Jay Rubin which is the one I read. The fact that there are two translations possibly explains the weird headline on my used copy of this book which says “readers edition.”

“Reader” as opposed to “Language student” I guess.

Anyway, I love Murakami and this book was fun to read even though I was sick.

I also poked around and found an interesting documentary on YouTube.

Four Horsemen Film – The Four Horsemen Are Coming

The logo for this film reminds me both of Banksy and the TV show Mad Men.

According to it’s Wikipedia entry, “Four Horsemen”  is a 2012 British film pamphlet directed by Ross Ashcroft. The film criticises the system of fractional reserve banking, debt-based economy and political lobbying by banks, which it regards as a serious threat to Western civilisation.”

The Wikipedia article goes on to point out that this film makes its point “via a succession of insights from a group of smart, rational orators” quoting Derek Adams from a “Time Out London” review.

These orators include Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell and Prof Simon Johnson former chief economist of the International Money Fund.

There are many more excellent talking heads in this film including my hero Noam Chomsky.

It’s on YouTube.

Four Horsemen – Feature Documentary – Official Version – YouTube

After playing a bit of it laying on the bed in our guest bedroom (which adjoins the living room), I asked Eileen who was sitting in the living room vaguely listening to it what she thought of it. She said that it confirmed my bias that I often express that “Money isn’t real.”

I said, they go further don’t they? One guy says it’s disgusting.

I have been staggering back and forth from my chair where I read to the piano where I play. I have been finding Scarlatti, Bartok and Hindemith quite consoling this sick guy. I was surprised at the ease with which I read Hindemith (admittedly under tempo like practically everything else I read these days).

I can remember as a young man reading through Hindemith’s flute sonata with my friend Dave Barber. I barely hit many of the notes but was introduced to Hindemith’s compositional language which ended up influencing me quite a bit.

Thanks, Dave!