Ummagumma

This morning Kudo and I did our walk around my ten acres, checking everything out. The sun wasn't up yet, everything bluish and distinct, the kind of light that gets a little orange on top if there are clouds to catch it. She paused in the upper field to take a dump. She did, and I praised her for it, positively reinforcing a healthy dump like the proud parent I apparently am. My voice startled a fawn neither of us had seen, tucked in the privet hedge twenty feet away. It bolted deeper into the hedge. Its mother made herself known fast, moving along the hedge line, and Kudo took off after her. "Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait." I said it maybe a dozen times, firm the first half dozen, quieter after that. Kudo gave up the chase almost immediately. I didn't move until the doe stopped and looked at the two of us. Kudo turned when I turned, and we walked back through the wet grass, heavy with dew, to go do my laundry. The fawn stayed put the whole time, a tiny silhouette in the mi...

Lutoslawski looks admiringly toward his orchestra before he enthusiastically begins conducting. [ Read Part One ] In 1964, Witold Lutoslawski completed a string quartet commissioned by Swedish Radio for the LaSalle Quartet. He had the music. But there was no score. Not in any form the LaSalle Quartet could read, anyway. A conventional score — four staves aligned vertically, showing what each player does at each moment — would have been, in his own words, false. Misleading. It would have represented a different work entirely. So what had he given them? The notes each player was to play. The figures, the gestures, the precise melodic content for each instrument. What he could not give them was a document showing how those parts aligned in time, because the alignment was the piece. The four players were to operate independently of each other — their own tempos, their own rhythmic streams — converging at points the conductor would cue and diverging again freely in between. Write that down ...

Note: This review quotes the text from two novels verbatim, including racial slurs. It is not a word I would use myself, though I think about the power of the word today from time to time. I am quoting the actual text of a 19th century American literary classic. Percival Everett draws the same distinction publicly. In a 2024 interview with Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, Percival Everett said he still uses the word himself when lecturing in college, even though his students won't, adding that "it's just two syllables" and there's no reason to fear it when the subject is honest history.  Further, he says swapping it for a gentler substitute (like "slave") while keeping the same intention behind it is “no replacement at all.” Everett states if someone used a euphemism to insult him, he'd know they understood exactly what they were doing and chose to be insulting anyway. I quote Mark Twain and Everett here in that spirit. The word appears whe...

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] (11 a.m. Eastern Time) And then the whole mess started spilling over. Wars like to connect. Maybe they are drawn toward one another. If everyone's not careful this will escalate further in spite of the fact Iran's military is getting hammered. As I have said, whoever actually controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning the war . The Houthis have opened another maritime front in the Red Sea, attacking Saudi tankers and oil facilities while threatening shipping connected to Saudi ports. On July 20 they formalized it into a declared blockade against Saudi-linked vessels in the Red Sea. Tankers have changed course, disabled tracking equipment, and accepted higher insurance costs to move through waters that had already become dangerous. Saudi-backed forces have resumed attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, threatening to restart a civil war that had been mostly dormant since the 2022 ceasefire.  Iran's regional war now reaches both of the great shipping...