Imagine you’re in charge of piloting a tug boat, pulling a barge, from Erie, PA to Buffalo, NY. At 4:30am or so you finally make port in Buffalo, pleasantly cheered by the good time you’ve made on a breezy night on Lake Erie.
That’s when you realize that you don’t have your barge anymore.
Luckily, it’s easily found, as it washed up on the shore near Dunkirk, about halfway from Erie to Buffalo.
Well, maybe “luckily” doesn’t apply. I’m sure there’s a tugboat crew that’s going to be seeing some unfortunate entries on their next performance reviews.
There’s something particularly fascinating about the composers who labored in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. These artists had to walk a very fine line between personal expression and the creation of art that would earn the approval of the State’s apparatus, and many composers found themselves drifting into and out of favor. (Shostakovich in particular had to deal with this.)
Dmitry Kabalevsky was one such composer, and he managed to pretty much avoid internal controversy, perhaps by being more conservative and less adventurous than some of his musical colleagues. Nevertheless, you listen to his music and you can’t place it anywhere other than 20th century Russia.
Kabalevsky’s suite The Comedians is one of his most popular works. A ten-movement musical depiction of clowns, the piece abounds with invigorating rhythms and with plaintive melodies. The second movement, the Galop, gave me pause when I listened to the work this weekend. I’m certain that I actually got to perform it at some point, but digging a little deeper, I’m not sure if that’s the case or if it’s just the fact that the Galop is itself one of Kabalevsky’s most popular compositions. Sometime I’ll have to dig out all my old orchestral programs and see if I did in fact play this piece.
Meantime, here is The Comedians by Dmitry Kabalevsky.
Had things gone according to plan, today would have seen the launch of Artemis I, the first rocket in a series of missions intended to return humans to the Moon. Sadly, Artemis did not launch. This is not a bad thing. There is a reason why we say something is not difficult via the pithy metaphor, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science.”
So, no launch…but there is still something amazing and beautiful about a rocket being readied for its flight.
I had a lovely writing session outside yesterday, but here Carla appears to be laughing at my work. Hmmmm.
In other news, my newest newsletter issue is available! You should sign up, because it’s fun getting things in e-mail. Link is in the sidebar! And hey, if you don’t feel like going to the sidebar, there’s a link right here!
My friend Jason Bennion, who really should be a writer (and whose edits always make my books better), offered this on Facebook the other day. (He lives in Salt Lake City, so his experience of summer is quite different from mine.)
It always takes me by surprise.
One-hundred-degree days for weeks at a stretch and nights that aren’t much cooler. And then a cluster of rain storms and suddenly something has changed. The days are still hot but they’ve softened somehow, like a campfire you’ve stopped adding fuel to. And the nighttime… well, it’s just different now. And somewhere deep in the back of my head, there’s an ancient nudge trying to tell me it’s time to break out the leather jacket and long pants, time to get back to school, even though I’ve been done with that routine for 30 years.
Fall is coming, and one more of my allotted summers has slipped away..
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Not one of Jason’s evening skies in late summer, but I think I can feel what he’s getting at….
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Here’s a sad song about a relationship coming to an end. Gordon Lightfoot wrote “If You Could Read My Mind” about his own divorce, and the lyrics are shot through with the bitterness of a man who realizes that the woman he married is now almost a complete stranger:
I never thought I could act this way And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it I don’t know where we went wrong But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
Confessional songs always have a tough path to walk: they have to convey the emotions and the heartache, but they always run the risk of going too far, either into “too much information” territory, or they somehow don’t go far enough, relying on clichés and too much easy language to make the point. Lightfoot’s lyrics for this song are interestingly complex: “If you could read my mind” itself, the way the song begins, conveys his desire for his wife to understand him, even though he later acknowledges that he can’t find his way back to how he used to feel.
What I love most about this song is the way the melody interplays with the lyrics. Lightfoot’s words make clear that there’s no way, the love is gone, it’s gone forever–but there’s something in the melody, the way it occasionally yearns upward, that feels like maybe Lightfoot doesn’t quite believe that the love is gone yet, even though he’s heartbroken that “he just can’t get it back”. The melody here deepens the lyrics and exposes them. That’s what a good song can do.
Here is Gordon Lightfoot with “If You Could Read My Mind”.
As my personal fashion style continues to develop, I continue to find appreciate not just for new styles of garments, but new fabrics as well. Denim, obviously…and more recently, flannel. But I’ve also been finding linen to my liking.
I thrifted these two shirts a few years ago. Both are made of linen, and I like both enormously:
More recently, I’ve purchased a couple new linen shirts from Etsy dealers. One is still in transit (there were some shipping snafus and errors, of which I am being forgiving since the seller is from Ukraine!), but I got the other a few weeks back. It’s the shirt I wore to the County Fair week before last, and I loved it. (I honestly thought I’d see more people in overalls that day, but alas! Just one or two. Though I did overhear a woman behind me saying to her date, “I used to have a train engineer hat just like that guy’s overalls!” I’m perfectly happy to provoke your nostalgia, y’all.)
Anyway, back to the linen shirt, which I (obviously) paired with a pair of vintage Lee hickory-striped overalls, which I chose because besides looking cool, hickory-striped denim tends to be lighter in weight than regular blue denim.
This material is super comfortable. I just loved this shirt! I stayed cool the entire day–the material is light and of an open-enough weave to allow good airflow through it. I found wearing this shirt on a nice summer day (albeit a cool and low-humidity one) very comfortable. I suspect I was more comfortable in my loose, air-flow encouraging outfit of long-sleeved linen shirt under a pair of overalls than a lot of other guys were in belted shorts and t-shirts. I know that we want to avoid cultural appropriation and all of that, but surely we could listen to what other cultures have to tell us–such as the idea that hot weather doesn’t mean tight cotton clothes and bare skin. (Here’s more on linen as a summer fabric.)
Anyway….
(Same pic as immediately above, detail)
(No idea what that facial expression is about)
I like how “lived-in” linen looks. A nice crisp cotton shirt is lovely, but so is soft and worn-in linen.
(Detail and enhancement of last photo above.)
To sum up: Wear more linen, folks! You’ll be happy you did. Here endeth the lesson!
Karel Husa (1921-2016) was Czech by birth, being born in Prague. When he was just 33 he emigrated to the United States, where in addition to being a celebrated composer he taught for decades at Cornell University. Husa won the Pulitzer Prize for Composition for his third string quartet, and his piece Music for Prague 1968 is one of the most notable compositions for wind band of the latter 20th Century. Music for Prague 1968, in which the composer pays tribute to his own people in the face of Soviet aggression, was later transcribed for orchestra, whereupon it enjoyed greater success. Husa was a forward-thinking composer who employed wild dissonances and difficult melodic material, in addition to quotes from ancient works. He was also a great experimentalist with different sounds, as you’ll hear in this piece.
Today’s work is Apotheosis of this Earth, a 1971 piece that started for wind band and chorus, but was also later transcribed for orchestra. The work springs from Husa’s deep environmentalism. Here is the text of Husa’s own writing on the piece (credit):
The composition of Apotheosis of this Earth was motivated by the present desperate stage of mankind and its immense problems with everyday killings, war, hunger, extermination of fauna, huge forest fires, and critical contamination of the whole environment.
Man’s brutal possession and misuse of nature’s beauty—if continued at today’s reckless speed—can only lead to catastrophe. The composer hopes that the destruction of this beautiful earth can be stopped, so that the tragedy of destruction—musically portrayed in the second movement—and the desolation of the aftermath (the “postscript” of the third movement) can exist only as fantasy, never to become reality.
In the first movement, Apotheosis, the earth first appears as a point of light in the universe. Our memory and imagination approach it in perhaps the same way as it appeared to the astronauts returning from the moon. The earth grows larger and larger, and we can even remember some of its tragic moments (as struck by the xylophone near the end of the movement).
The second movement, Tragedy of Destruction, deals with the actual brutalities of man against nature, leading to the destruction of our planet, perhaps by radioactive explosion. The earth dies as a savagely, mortally wounded creature.
The last movement is a Postscript, full of the realization that so little is left to be said: the earth has been pulverized into the universe, the voices scattered into space. Toward the end, these voices — at first computer-like and mechanical — unite into the words “this beautiful earth,” simply said, warm and filled with regret…and one of so many questions comes to our minds: ‘Why have we let this happen?’”
Listening to this work several times over the last few days, I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s use of modern music (primarily Ligeti) in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The piece speaks of the industrialized destruction of our own habitat, along with the habitats of many others, and of the regret as our light slowly dies. It’s not an optimistic work, to be sure. But optimism is not always well-taken.
What will I be writing there? Well, there are a few issues up already, so you can sample them. It won’t be too different than what appears here, really, although since each issue is a self-contained thing, it will read somewhat differently. I don’t plan to echo content from the newsletter on this site, nor do I have current plans to monetize the newsletter content, though I certainly won’t turn away shekels or quatloos that people want to throw my way.
I haven’t totally settled on a publishing schedule for it yet, since I’m still getting my feet wet, but I’m gravitating toward an issue twice monthly (with occasional extra issues as I see fit). The newsletter will be a marketing tool as I hopefully produce more books moving forward, but I also want to provide something that’s not a waste of time to read. I will probably diversify the newsletter’s content as I get more used to it–one idea I like a lot is serializing a story there–so I hope you’ll come aboard!
It’s been rather strange the last few years, as I’ve watched once-prolific bloggers mainly shift toward Twitter and let their blogs kind of wither on the vine…and then, finding they want to write long-form content again, instead of returning to the blogs they instead go to newsletter platforms like Substack and Medium. And that works out great for them, as those sites are monetized. (It also results in some of my favorite commentators producing more and more content that’s paywalled, which is a development I am not in love with–but I’m also not in love with the idea that talented folks not getting paid for their work, either, so obviously I’d rather err on the side of the former.) I’m kind of pigheaded in my refusal to abandon this blog (which is itself a successor to the eternally-appreciated Byzantium’s Shores), but a newsletter that can double as an email marketing list for my books sounds quite useful, potentially.
