Something for Thursday

The twelfth anniversary of Little Quinn's passing came, and went, the other day. This song always makes me think of him, and other things.

AHHHHHHH

Late last night, I dragged myself, weary and bloodied, across the NaNoWriMo finish line.

Well, not bloodied, but I was quite tired when I got there...especially since at one point Scrivener had my word count at 50,200 but when I plugged my text into NaNo's validator, it came back with a result of 49,850. So I had to stay up a bit and do a little extra work to get myself over that line. I could have just done it today, but when I'm that close, I just want to kick it into gear and get it done.

So after three consecutive years of falling short during NaNoWriMo, I've resumed winning. Huzzah!!!

Bad Joke Friday

This has been going around Facebook lately so if you're over there you've likely seen it already, but it still made me laugh, so:

Something for Thursday: Thankfulness Edition

If anything, the months since the last Thanksgiving have certainly reestablished in my mind how important it is to be centered before one goes forth to fight the good fight.

Here's a bit of Mr. Copland (I don't usually like to excerpt longer works, but this is an exception).

Thankfulness 2017

I remember it being very difficult to summon up true thankfulness a year ago as it seemed as if a darkness was settling over everything. And it has, to be honest--but it's not an all-encompassing darkness. There have been encouraging signs, though. People are showing up with lanterns to fight the darkness. After all....


Here's a list of things for which I am thankful this year:

Carla, the new dee-oh-gee
Cane, the not-as-new dee-oh-gee
Lester and Julio, the really-not-new cats
Rum
Bourbon
Scotch
Gin
Sparkling wine
Paula's Donuts
Ithaca, NY
Autumn Leaves Books
The Rochester Lilac Festival
Knowing where a bunch of gluten-free restaurants are between here and the Finger Lakes
The Finger Lakes
Letchworth State Park
Taughannock Falls
The Ontario County Antique Mall
Fountain pens
Fountain pen ink
Making waffles
Popcorn with butter
Kettlecorn
Corn dogs
Chiavetta's chicken barbecue
The Erie County Fair
Hot dogs at Taffy's
Hot dogs at Ted's
Hot dogs at home, on the grill
Star Wars
Casablanca
Hayao Miyazaki and the rest of Studio Ghibli
The Scarlet Pimpernel
88 Cups of Tea (podcast)
Functional Nerds (podcast)
Sword and Laser (podcast)
Our backyard firepit
All my various methods of making coffee (pourover, French press, Moka pot)
Mississippi Roast
The Instant Pot (which I still don't even use as much as I should)
Art and craft shows where I can buy gifts right from the person that made them
Picking out jewelry for The Wife
The Great Lakes region
Pittsburgh, PA (honorary Great Lakes city in my heart)
New York City
The two friends of mine who are finding a lot of new purpose in their lives of late
Chestnut Ridge Park
Sprague Brook Park
Emery Park
Canalside and the Outer Harbor
Knox Farm State Park
The Mill Road Overlook in East Aurora
Roads: US 20A, NY 240, NY 39, Girdle Road, Two Rod Road
Fried chicken
Chicken and waffles
Hot sauce
John Oliver and Last Week Tonight
The Resistance
Hector Berlioz
Sergei Rachmaninov
Alexander Borodin
JS Bach
Ludwig von Beethoven
John Williams
Jerry Goldsmith
Max Steiner
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Howard Shore
James Horner
All the new authors on my shelf whose works I an thrilled to read
The emergence of so many authors of color and the opportunity to read them and learn from their experiences and perspectives
Goodreads
Twitter (the parts without Nazis)
Harry Potter
My Fair Lady
The Chilling Killing Wind
The Song of Forgotten Stars
Princesses Tariana and Margeth Osono
Lieutenant Penda Rasharri
The characters you haven't met yet
The characters I haven't met yet
The days when the writing is easy
The days when the writing is hard
Pies on the table
Pies in my face
Well-worn bib overalls
Stiff raw-denim bib overalls
Vintage bib overalls
The Daughter
The Wife
The world
Our universe

That's not so bad, is it?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

22 November

Tone Poem Tuesday

I've been exploring with some fascination the American composers of the late Romantic era, the ones whose music is rarely heard these days because none of it really goes beyond the stylings of what was going on musically in Europe at the time. Everyone was basically writing European-style music in America, with no real nationalistic material to incorporate as a way of standing out. American music didn't start to break out until the arrivals of Modernism and jazz, but there was still important and meaningful work being written, and a lot of it is undeserving of its obscurity.

Case in point: the tone poem Hero and Leander by Victor Herbert. Herbert was primarily known as a composer of operettas in the earliest days of the American musical theater (which, again, didn't really start to catch fire until jazz showed up), and his name is still slightly familiar to audiences because of his work Babes in Toyland, which still shows up in excerpts around Christmas each year (especially the "March of the Toys").

Hero and Leander is an impressive work, dreamy and Wagnerian, telling the story of two doomed lovers from Greek myth. Guided by a lamp she lit for him, Hero would swim to Leander's island tower each night. But one day a storm arose, blowing out the lamp and leaving him at sea to drown. When Leander saw Hero's body floating in the waves, she threw herself into the sea to be with him forever. Herbert composed this half-hour symphonic poem for his own Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and hearing it now I'm struck by its skill even if the musical language is straight out of the Liszt-Wagner-Strauss lineage.

Here is Hero and Leander by Victor Herbert.

Bad Joke Friday

Kind of existential....

Something for Thursday

Heavens, was today busy! Lots of stuff going on between my NaNoWriMo efforts and a seasonal uptick in things at The Store that need my attention.

And dogs. Mustn't forget the dogs. For one thing, if you do, they bark.

Anyway, here's a bit of Lerner and Loewe. It's always good to return to Lerner and Loewe.

Tone Poem Tuesday

Urg.

It's been a busy and hectic several days here, what with The Store ramping up for Thanksgiving and an annual visit from the people whose name is on the front of the building, to pounding out words for NaNoWriMo (I'm on track, yay me!), and having a cold the last few days. So I forgot to post anything at all.

It's not a tone poem, it's a waltz. But it is a tone poem. I'd explain, but I've had some rum and I'd rather just listen to the music. So here is the greatest waltz of all time, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, in the wonderful video from the New Years From Vienna a few years back when they intercut the performance with video taken from the Danube from source to where it empties into the Black Sea.


There's not a single day of the year when I couldn't listen to this piece and not feel better about the world.

The Final Victory of JR Ewing, and other thoughts on one year of Trump

One year ago today the American people, by virtue of the country's very odd system of voting for President, committed what might wind up being known as the greatest act of electoral malpractice in the country's history.

I.

Donald Trump ran a cynical, mean-spirited campaign that was almost perfectly designed to appeal to the id of every angry white voter in this country. He was the perfect candidate at the perfect time for a party that had been trending this way for decades. Many prominent Republicans have started to notice the rot at the heart of their party, but even now those same prominent Republicans are not coming to any kind of grips with the fact that Trump's emergence (or the emergence of someone like Trump) is something that many on my side of the political fence have been expecting for years. This past weekend, former President George HW Bush went on record as not approving of Trump or what he represents, but for anyone who has paid attention for years, there's a line to be drawn connecting Trump to the Lee Atwater-run campaign that got Bush the Elder elected twenty-nine years ago.

I'm reminded of a line from Aaron Sorkin's script to A Few Good Men, when toward the end of the movie Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) is putting Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) on the stand in something of a Hail Mary move:

Lt. Weinberg: And now you think you can get him to just say it?

Kaffee: I think he wants to say it. I think he's pissed off that he's gotta hide from this. I think he wants to say that he made a command decision and that's the end of it.

[Starts imitating Jessup]

Kaffee: He eats breakfast 300 yards away from 4000 Cubans that are trained to kill him. And nobody's going to tell him how to run his unit least of all the Harvard mouth in his faggoty white uniform. I need to shake him, put him on the defensive and lead him right where he's dying to go.

That's what Trump did to the Republican field, and then to the Republican party, and then to a lot of Americans. It's hard escaping that conclusion, given the sheer glee with which so many people are embracing the ugliest strains of thought that have been bubbling beneath the surface of American society pretty much since the beginning. Trump shook them, put them on the defensive, and then he led them right where they were dying to go.

II. 

Donald Trump knows nothing at all. Nearly every time he opens his mouth about policy, one of three things becomes clear: he knows nothing about it, or he doesn't give a shit about it, or both. And that's it. Any policy discussion coming from this man is a nonstarter, and he is enabled in Congress by both houses in control of his own party that has been more and more firmly embracing ignorance across the board for years. It's clear to me that we're witnessing a slow unraveling of a lot of what Americans have spent the better part of the last century building. How far this process gets is a matter of concern, but things will be worse before they get better, and all Democrats can hope to do is contain some of the damage. But having one of the two main political parties in the most powerful and richest nation on Earth in the total grip of pure ignorance is a deeply dangerous state of affairs. Right now the main reason that things haven't fallen off a cliff is that in addition to being a know-nothing, Donald Trump is not especially competent. But this poses dangers of its own. Just looking at the averages, we are due for a recession any year now. When things start going south to a degree that genuinely affects Americans' livelihoods in a big way, look out.

III.

No, it's not Hillary Clinton's fault, either. We're the ones who make the decision. We're the ones who cast the ballots. We're the ones who call the shots, in the end. It's our fault. Saying anything else reduces elections to the political equivalent of Olympic figure skating, with us as the East German judges: "Sure, she's more qualified, but she didn't campaign in Wisconsin enough and she fell on that very last triple Salchow, so what can we do?"

Voting is an action, and actions have consequences. The consequences of America's vote in 2016 will be felt for decades, and there's no getting around it.

We screwed up. Everything that happens as a result is our fault.

IV.

As a writer I look at the world through the prism of fiction much of the time, and I can't help thinking that the rise of a Donald Trump figure is predictable in a country whose popular culture thirty years ago--when today's adults-in-the-prime-of-life were kids--was so deeply dedicated to celebrating the rich, the powerful, and the businesslike. I can't help thinking that Donald Trump's every move should be accompanied by a voiceover by Robin Leach, and I also keep thinking about JR Ewing.

I was a huge fan of DALLAS back in the 80s, and let me tell you, even as you winced at some of the shit JR Ewing pulled, it was really hard not to like the guy. For one thing, Larry Hagman's portrayal of JR is one of the great marriages of character and actor in teevee history, and for another thing, JR was often the focus of some really good writing. If you're a writer and you want tips on creating a delicious villain, you could do a lot worse than study JR Ewing (during the show's first seven or eight seasons, anyway).

But JR Ewing also seems to me redolent of the kind of "businessman" Donald Trump seems to portray himself as, which is the kind of person a lot of Americans seem to think is the way a real businessman is. Business in this view is all about maximizing one's money, and it doesn't much matter who gets hurt along the way. Business isn't about making a thing and selling it, so much as about buying things for no other reason than to sell them again sometime down the line. JR Ewing would cheat and swindle. He would do unethical things, make shady deals, and trick partners into giving him money only to wind up with nothing. And he was a womanizer who repeatedly cheated on his wife.

Did we elect Donald Trump because we loved watching JR Ewing on teevee thirty years ago? I'm not saying that, but it is illustrative to note that Americans have, for most of my lifetime, tended to equate money, and the having of lots of it, as a gauge of intelligence. At one of last year's debates, Hillary Clinton noted with disdain Trump's apparent success at avoiding paying taxes decades ago. One would expect that people would find that sickening; I know that I did, since I pay all my taxes. Trump's caustic reply, though? "That makes me smart." A lot of people approve of that.

For an awful lot of people, it was not a mark against Trump that he bankrupted a casino, or that his roster of utter failures in business far outstrips his roster of successes, or that his retail brands involved products made in China, or any of that. I suspect this is because of how we view money: we all want it, and in America we seem to inherently respect anyone who has it. We view money as a measure of success, and the lack thereof as a measure of failure. And if Donald Trump has ever done anything, it's convince lots of people that he has worked himself to the bone in order to pile up gobs of money.

But for all that, Trump has always been playing a part. Yes, he has all that money, but he started off rich, and he has always been adept at failing upwards, using various oddities in US bankruptcy and tax laws to make sure that even when his ventures implode he comes away with more money than with which he went in. I suppose there's some kind of perverse competence at work there, but for an awful lot of Americans none of that matters. All they see is a filthy rich man who has failed a lot and is still filthy rich, and they think that merely being filthy rich is a qualification in itself for office. It's the same impulse that drove a lot of people to support Ross Perot in 1992, despite his lack of policy knowledge (and he seemed like a total wonk in comparison to Trump). It's what led to Mitt Romney's odd stint at the top of Republican circles -- yes, he was a governor for a single term, but he won that by virtue of being a rich guy with a lot of money. This is why the pledge to "run government like a business" seems to carry so much weight with Americans, despite it being pretty much utter nonsense.

My own representative in Congress, Chris Collins, is pretty much worthless from a policy standpoint. He ran for Erie County Executive some years ago, literally entirely on the basis of "I'm a successful businessman," and he pledged after winning to do some weird business thing called "Six Sigma" in Erie County government, which was going to make everything better. Exactly how was never clear, but hey, he was a businessman! He must know a lot and be really good at running things! Except he wasn't, and he was defeated after a single term of not getting much done at all except pissing people off.

Of course, this being America where lots of people are impressed by businessmen, Collins was able to turn his failure as County Executive into several terms thus far in Congress (with, I am sure, more to come because his seat is incredibly safe, unless it gets redistricted out of existence).

JR Ewing (and other depictions of business people in the 1980s) shaped our idea of what business looks like and what kind of person is successful at business. This, couple with our idea that business is in itself the finest of callings (remember all the talk of George W. Bush being our "first MBA president"? Remember how well that turned out?). We see being successful at business as having the necessary skillset for anything, and since we also view our government as largely sluggish and incompetent, well then, what better sort of person to cut through all the nonsense and make it all better? Why, a businessperson! That is what we need. Businesspeople are all about getting shit done. They take no crap. Screw up and you're fired. There's no time for bureaucracy. (Which will come as news to anyone who has ever tried to cancel cable service.)

Thus we get President Donald Trump, a president who acts like he is the fictional head of a Texas oil company. We don't expect thoughtful, deliberate process; we expect quick and decisive action of the type that only a businessperson can provide. President Donald Trump is not just the unfortunate (and, it is to be hoped, ultimate) expression of our nation's sometimes-latent, sometimes-overt racism, sexism, homophobia, and general authoritarianism. He is also the expression of a nation that worships wealth and forgives nearly any sin committed to get it.

Tone Poem Tuesday

I heard this work a few weeks ago while driving home, and made sure to make note of it. Ernest Farrar was a British composer born in 1885, but his life and career were ended in September 1918, when he was killed in action in World War I, less than two months before the war ended. So many young people of promise, snuffed out in those trenches and on those fields.

This work, an orchestral rhapsody titled The Open Road, seems to be a musical portrayal of a walk through Scotland (or so I assume, from the bagpipe-like sound of the work's open bars and a motif that recurs). It's vigorous music in the Romantic mode, unsurprising and melodic and competent. In short, it's a pleasurable work, maybe not a masterpiece but not everything needs to be.

Bad Joke Friday

A bit of geek humor!

Something for Thursday

Here's a piece to which I return many times throughout the years. I'm actually finding that the onward lurch of current events from one awful thing to the next (seriously, humanity, why are we building such an awful future?!) particularly lends itself to the reexamination of great works of art and music from earlier periods. It's a constant effort to remind myself that humanity isn't just capable of staggering acts of being terrible.

Here is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (By the way, make note of the album cover pictured in the video, and if you ever see that album in a store, buy it. It's one of the great classical albums.)

NaNoWriMo begins!!!

Time for my sixth attempt at writing 50,000 words in thirty days! Can I do it? Stick with me and we'll find out! The project this year is The Savior Worlds, which will be Book Four of The Song of Forgotten Stars. I succeeded at hitting the 50K mark both of my first two years of NaNoWriMo, but the last three years all ended in failure: 2014 had some plot struggles with what ended up being Amongst the Stars, and then 2015 was a truncated month in which we traveled to New York City, so I wasn't able to cross the finish line despite a valiant effort. The less said about last year the better, but basically the results of the 2016 election sent me into a creative tailspin that had me unable to write anything at all for several weeks.

This year, we'll see. I'm optimistic, but you never know. At least we're not on the cusp of doing something so wildly bizarre as electing Donald Trump to the Presidency this year, right? Right?

America?

Hello?

Anyway, hopefully onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!