God No, A Review

Charles Cicardi Scott sent me this book, which is subtitled "Signs You May Already be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales." Charlie told me he found it on the clearance rack at B&N for a buck, so if you want to read it, there you go. One dollar and about three hours of your life you can't get back.

I read it at Starbucks and at the allergist, where I go once a week to get my immunization shots, after which I have to sit for twenty minutes to see if I'm going to die from anaphylaxis. If I die, I want the last thing found clutched in my claws to be a book howling with atheist blasphemy. And this book fills the bill with interest. Penn loves to write about two thing: his genitalia, and how much he hates religion. Each page drips with contempt for piousness and descriptions of his dangling doodle.

I am not a fan of P&T. I don't like anyone who attacks the belief system of others for entertainment or for promoting their own agenda--and despite what P&T have said in interviews, both their show and Bulls*it are both redolent with Libertarianism and Atheism idealism. Both of which, oddly enough, I share, although not to the fanatical point of shoving down anyone's throats--which they seem intent on doing. So as both an atheist and Libertarian you would think I would like them. But I don't. People who rant and preach tend to make me tune out and go to my happy place, where large costumed people sing opera very loudly and 200-piece orchestras drown out conversation for miles around.

But about this book. If you like rants, it's pretty funny in places. He name-drops more than Kreskin (who, in one chapter, he trashes mercilessly and calls a scumbag) and it's obvious he craves attention and if he doesn't get it, he just yells louder and drops his pants--LITERALLY--and like a lot of fat guys (Chris Farley and John Belushi come to mind) he seems to be obsessed with getting naked as often as he can in public. He does this, he says, because he's a freedom-fighter who's making a statement in defense of the Bill of Rights. Groovy, but I'm a Libertarian too, and I have never appeared naked in airports. Perhaps he has blurred the subtle difference between "Libertarian" and "Libertine," which I have also done on occasion; an understandable malapropism.

Penn says there's no such thing as an agnostic. He says this is just an academic weaseling from people who are afraid to commit one way or the other. I find I tend to agree with this. Either you believe there is a Higher Power or you don't. Like being a little bit pregnant, this isn't something on which you can hedge your bets. He says "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer and I also agree with this. So did the early, original skeptics who concluded absolute knowledge of anything was impossible. On subjects like creator God, origin of the universe, the existence of a soul, the Buddha said, "Don't waste your time. Work out your own salvation with diligence." Not that I'm comparing Penn with the Buddha. Penn is an oleaginous slob with the social skills of a twelve year old, and I think this book is at least 60% self-serving flapdoodle; that he paints himself as far deeper and more reasonable than he actually is. Like a carny barker, he's presenting himself as a professor of erudition he doesn't possess. He's hung out with smart people and picked up some of the lingo but when he parrots it, it rings hollow. I keep in mind he's an illusionist, and that he's continually going for shock reaction, and that he hates religion. The chapter where he feeds bacon cheeseburgers to fallen Hasidim Jews and gloats with demonic glee is a good example. He's not content to simply dismiss the idea of God; he wants to take a crap on His head. Nothing seems to please him more than to piss off a pious person through some expression of outrageous blasphemy. This, to me, is childish. It was funny when you did it in high school, but like wearing a Karl Marx T-Shirt, once past the age of twenty-two it's no longer edgy and rebellious, it's just a lame cry for attention.

If you're going to read atheist literature, I guess this is a more entertaining read than Dawkins and if you can get it for a dollar or two why not?

My Piano

And a drawing I did in my recent Life Drawing class:

Schooling Old School Style

I have made a midlife decision to return to school.

For the past couple of years I've been sifting through the dregs of my life in an attempt to re-do or undo all the events from my past which made me unhappy. Taking music lessons was the first step of this process, and all humanity marvels at the benefits the world has reaped from this foray into the musical arts. If nothing else, the literary legacy of this blog will survive the ages as one man's brave journey into the terrifying world of sharps and flats; of tremolos and crescendos; and of scary German composers.

But it's time to take the next and even bigger step. One of the major turning points of my life was the derailment of my Plan A into Plan B, which eventually led to my somewhat shaky career as a professional entertainer. Plan A was to pursue a college degree to the PhD level and teach Art. I was going to be a Professor. Various life passages occurred which made this impractical. Then I entered a long, demanding phase of my life where I was too emotionally drained to create artworks. Instead, I got a degree in the Engineering field (I know, a complete 180 degree turn there) and worked in that area for a while, where I wasn't particularly happy, and when the big Recession of the 1990's hit, I segued into entertainment as a way out of a completely miserable situation. It wasn't the work: it was the people. I found I hated over-analytical, opinionated nerds who knew everything. There are several factors contributing to this reaction, involving Jungian archetypes and deep reaction formations, but in summation, if anyone other than me acts in this pernicious manner, I can't stand it.

My undergraduate career at the University of Tennessee was marked with a series of disasters which would rival Odysseus' adventures. My living quarters burned down, forcing me to seek temporary shelter in the loft over a friend's bar (and try getting quality sleep directly over a jukebox booming until 3 AM--when you have 7:50 classes). Then the death of a parent. An expectant wife, impending parenthood. My car stolen and turning up, engine destroyed, in Evanston Indiana. Seeking various employments to support my family while juggling school. I finally realized this dream of mine wasn't meant to be. I dropped out of school and concentrated on supporting my family. Until I divorced, then I went to State College and earned the degree in the engineering field, and worked there for a while.

One of the problems that plagued me all my life was a lack of focus and discipline. My parents never ingrained these values in us. They were too busy engaging in marital warfare to take interest in raising their children to be successful students. I know my parents never made me do homework, nor helped me with it when I halfheartedly tried do it. I don't think either one of my parents could even do math, even if I were foolish enough to ask them to take a break from plotting each other's ruin to help me navigate the puzzling maze of long division. Furthermore, I've decided both my parents were masters of self-destructive behaviors, which they passed on to their kids. I know I've dropped time-bombs along the path of my success pretty much all my life which detonated just at the moment of victory. I've tried to stop doing that but old habits die hard. One other thing I learned over the years if if you have trouble completely wrecking your own success, hook up with a destructive or needy life-partner who will do it for you and save yourself a lot of planning and effort. This is another behavior I've tried to nip in the bud.

I was an adult before I figured out discipline. Discipline and focus are the same thing, and both require you to eliminate distractions. If you eliminate distractions from your work environment your mind will become bored and focus on the task at hand. One of the huge problems with our information-laden society is that there are so many interesting distractions all around us. Between Facebook, Tweeting, e-mails, and Internet surfing, it's a wonder anything gets done.

Back to my decision to continue my interrupted schooling, it turns out I have to perform a course-by-course credit transfer from my old courses from UT to my current intended college, Indiana University. The complication? When I went to school circa 1982 (yes, thirty years ago) we were on a quarter system, not semester. We also wrote on stone tablets and used abacuses in math class. So transferring credits becomes problematical. There is a concept in math called homogeneity of units, which means you do not perform operations with disparate units. You must convert them to similar units before performing mathematical operations. In other words, you don't multiply inches by feet--you must convert feet to inches first, then multiply or divide. Otherwise, buildings fall down. This type of error is actually more common that you might think--which is why buildings and bridges fall down. So my quarter-to-semester conversion is causing the system to choke, hiccough, sputter, and beat its cybernetic breast. Not since Captain Kirk hurled the Imponderable Paradox to Nomad has a computer system been presented with a more baffling conundrum. So far I've been sent to four different departments and spoken with six department heads. Nobody seems to know quite what to do with me. But the Admissions Department is processing my application for Spring semester (not quarter) so the gears are turning.

I am both excited and apprehensive. I have no doubt I'll ace the classroom studies. But the studio art classes? Well...it's been a very long time since I've spread my artistic wings. This may be a good thing as my former works were a bit childish. Although well-executed at times the concepts were usually immature. I have grown a bit in the past thirty years and look forward to seeing what visions erupt from my long-repressed artsy side.

I want to make it plain this decision isn't simply a mid-life whim nor an attempt to return to my youth. I'm redirecting my career path. I plan on going for a Master's degree with the intention of eventually teaching on the college level; which was my original plan. I can finish this program well before my mid-fifties. It's within the realm of possibility. Barring house fires, the earth swallowing me, my head exploding, or someone dropping a nuke on the Midwest, I foresee smooth sailing.

New Beginnings

As I put the finishing touches on THE ENTERTAINER (not quite mastered it yet, but have learned the entire opus, and am polishing the final two sections with laser-like diligence) Teacher and I set out to make a plan.We will finish out the year going over Cristofori's Dream line by line, polishing out the lumps, and I'll place it and The Entertainer on the practice list, and then we'll start on a new and exciting piece of music. I found a piano transcription, by none other than Camille Saint-Saens, of one of my favorite Bach pieces: The Sinfonia to Cantata Number 29. I first heard this in the 9th or 10th Grade I think, on an album of Bach pieces, and it has remained dear to me. It puts me in a happy place. Bach must have loved it too, as he recycled the piece at least a couple of times, as a Viola Partita and as a Lute Sonata.

I've included two videos here, both the original organ presentation of the Sinfona and the Saint-Saens piano transcription. I look forward to tackling this. I suppose it will take me a year or so to be able to play it at all. How long it will take to play it skillfully--who knows. But I love this piece so much I'm a highly motivated learner.

Octoberfest

It's now October, and I'm working on finishing up The Entertainer. I'm also looking into going back to school: Grad School that is, to work on a Masters Degree. A MFA, aka Masters of Fine Art. I will either focus on Art or Creative writing with the intent of teaching. I feel very peaceful at the thought of actually working toward a future, and not having to get up at the age of 75 and going out to perform shows.

I guess you're never too old to take care of unfinished business.

Sediment

That goddamned D section of The Entertainer is finally sinking in and coming together, which is a relief, as it really isn't all that hard and I was afraid I was suffering brain damage from my new meds or from malnutrition from my recent fifteen pound weight reduction. But apparently my constant practice is paying off because today I've been playing it fairly smoothly. I also began work on the final verse, the E section, which is also fairly easy.

This is the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attack by criminals against the country, so the mood today is somber. I also found out the cemetery where my dad's buried has been bought, so apparently I need to deal with this odd situation.

Father Guido

Virtually all musical compositions are recorded for posterity (for better or worse) in musical notation which has become systematized over a period of several centuries. The Grand Staff is a familiar icon even to non-musicians. Everyone recognizes sheet music.

But who came up with the idea of recording musical ideas as a line of dots and dashes on a grid of horizontal lines?

The answer is found in a Medieval text called the Micrologus, written around 1026 by a Benedictine monk by the name of Guido of Arezzo. The Micrologus became the most widely circulated treatise on musical theory during the middle ages, (which probably meant it was read by a hundred people) but what concerns us for the moment is that Fra. Guido, in this treatise, invented for the first time musical staff notation. Before then, the standard was Neumatic notation, an example of which is shown below, useful for Gregorian Chants and other monophonic works but for polyphonic compositions, well, something a little more sophisticated was required.

Fra. Guido noticed singers struggled to remember these Gregorian Chants and thought there had to be a better way than these somewhat arbitrary markings. As it turned out, there was. He published Micrologus and revolutionized music forever. If you look at the page from the Micrologus below, you'll see it isn't all that different from modern sheet music.

Take a moment to think about the momentousness of this accomplishment. In the 7th century musical scholar Isidore of Seville had written that it was impossible to accurately notate music. However, attempts to do so go back to 2000 BCE, although these efforts were very crude. An exact, scientific systematic approach had yet to be created. Guido took the first steps toward modern musical notation, and continued to develop musical instruction and notation all his life.

Apparently Fra. Guido's radical theories attracted the hostility of the other monks at the Abby at Pomposa, and he had to move to Arezzo, a more progressive town, to further pursue his musical experimentation. Arezzo had no Abby, but it did have a plethora of cathedral singers, whose training Bishop Tedald invited him to undertake. In subsequent years Fra. Guido developed valuable techniques, including a mnemonic which was the forerunner of our "Do-Re-Mi" system. He taught the use of "Solmization" syllables based on a hymn to Saint John the Baptist which begins "Ut Queant Laxis" and was written by the Lombard historian Paul the Deacon. The first stanza is:

1. Ut queant laxis
2. resonare fibris,
3. Mira gestorum
4. famuli tuorum,
5. Solve polluti
6. labii reatum,
7. Sancte Iohannes.

Guido used the first syllable of each line, Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol and La, to read notated music in terms of hexachords; they were not note names, and each could, depending on context, be applied to any note. In the 17th century, Ut was changed in most countries except France to the easily articulated Do, derived from the name of the Italian theorist Giovanni Battista Doni. Si, which has the S of Sancte and the I of Iohannes, was added in modern times.

Fra. Guido, who seemed sympathetic to the plight of musicians plagued with the task of memorizing abstract concepts of musical theory, also developed an interesting technique for mapping musical tones to the human hand.

Little is known of Guido d/Arrezzo's later years. It's known he attracted the attention of Pope John XIX, who invited him to Rome, where he went in 1028, but he returned to Arezzo soon due to poor health. After that, there is no information available about him, but his legacy to music--the Grand Staff--changed the world.