Curiosity 87: Kasen renku, pt. 2

A couple of weeks ago I had an elaborate post about the poetic form kasen renku, and mentioned that my two writing buddies and I were embarking on an attempt to create one. Well, here it is. I don't know how "good" it is—i.e., adhering to the rules, flowing, wabi-sabi—but I do know that the moon and blossoms got inserted at the appropriate spots, and I think people we miss waft up throughout. It was a joy to look each day for our GoogleDrive document, see what had been added, ruminate on the very different, and yet at the same time similarly striving, lives each of us three lives. Appreciation! Celebration! I love our little howler pack. (The stanzas here go SL, AC, KSR, ... I would include the designators, but lining things up in HTML is crazymaking.)

It has no title. Yet.

setting sun weaves
orange, pink into blue sky
blanket for chilled night

a tapestry of birdsound
fills the morning gloom

under the rainbow
she drives for vaccination
upcoming travel

giant heron wades in river
peeks at paddling

gutter drips after rain
each plop
sparkling in the moonlight

waking her heavy from sleep
sore arm preventing any more

contented snores from
the hospital bed, even
exhales, inhales, rest

rumpled sheets
long orange cat

cumulus clouds lit
within, some glow, some glare
puddle reflections

hummingbird rests
beak points to gray sky

climbing the Eiffel Tower—
the Seine a silver ribbon
through prickly humanity

rust patinas metal
heating in noonday sun

waxing crescent with
earthshine, a footprint of our
light cast on the moon

three pairs of boots and a saw
lay the fallen redwood to rest

and you, father, rest
on a brutal hoarfrost day
deer-guards raise their heads

tender heart watches
cold strange world

old hand, veined and knobby
inspects child’s palm
for ancient lotus wisdom

mysterious winds cyclone
dry leaves and limbs in the air

grown daughter reassures dad
jet engine drones
  What?
    I’ll tell you later.
  What?

the luxury of three seats
on a transatlantic flight

shama pair sing-song
in iridescent dress
then cat stalks by

circle on a riverbed rock
cat naps in sun

round mirror reflects
flickering candlelight
shrouded in silence

palm fronds ripping in the wind
another system leaving detritus

red niners jerseys
roller bags
gray clouds
white dog peeks around corner

white dog surveys the street
in the dark in the rain

change of wind brings
a few foreign leaves into
the garage; welcome

the last leaf waves
flexes endurance

tireless, the moon pulls
the ocean, long waves
of liquid energy

big ‘ol male turtle basking on beach
one eye slowly closes

sun insists it’s still with us,
gives warmth, light,
hold on Spring is on its way

the treefrogs yell up a racket
delighted by the rain

finally blue skies
just in time for downy chicks
hatching from mōlí eggs

bridges stretch from Kentucky to
Indiana from Ohio River to gray sky

by the echoing footbridge
two frilly blossoms
promise sweet blackberry juice

morning tea disrupted by night
ginger perfuming thoughts of day

Curiosity 86: Frog calls

Another FB finding! This one is via a "friend," David Hillis, who lives on a ranch in Texas and raises longhorn cattle. He is also a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas. You can read about him in this NewYork Times profile. I love following him because very often he posts some fascinating morsel about biology (phylogeny, vertebrate systematics), natural history (he is the author recently of a book on biodiversity in the Texas Hill Country), or, lately, electric vehicles. 

And yesterday he posted this: "Here's a great discussion of the history and impact of one of my favorite audio albums of all time. It was originally released in 1958, but it is so popular and enduring that it has recently been re-released by Folkways Records. Read the story to learn how it was critical for my own mating success" (yeah, he talks like that—but in this case, it's for real: he is featured in the article)—with a link to an AtlasObscura article, "The Many Lives of 'Sounds of North American Frogs.'"

Which of course I clicked on, because we have frogs—the Pacific tree frog (Pseudacris regilla)—and I love their singing, which is happening right now: it's their glory time! And there's a whole record of frog sounds? Well, how wonderful!

The post got lots of amusing comments:

I used to invite women to my room to see my tropical fish. (I maintained a strain of fancy guppies and another of black mollies for years.) The ploy worked more often than not, and I have a wife of 48 years as proof. 😍

To which David responded, "Another in the series of how we dated before the internet!"

I have a copy [of Sounds of North American Frogs] on cassette that I bought in the early 90's. I was fresh out of college and working at the Smithsonian. My "desk" was in the "sound lab" where they digitized frog and bird calls (I wasn't working on anything auditory, there was just space in there for a kid). Met some very interesting scientists and got to hear even more interesting bird calls. I'll never forget there was one scientist who studied the calls of tropical owls. He was a WWII vet and cussed like a sailor. It was the first time I met an "educated" person who swore like a working man.

I dated an ecologist for a while. He loved to show me videos he had collect of amphibians and insects having sex. I sure learned a lot about amphibian and insect sex 😂 He would fill my place with little bottles with wildflowers in them and sage from when he was out in the field at the Audubon preserve. Wonderful wooing smells. Is this the way field ecologists lek?

There was another one called, “Voices of the Night” that my Herpetology professor, Anthony Gaudin, played during lab while we were doing a dissection. While we were all working quietly, the track for Hyla avivoca came on, and I immediately blurted out, “it’s THEM!” It seems that the makers of my favorite science fiction movie of 1954 used that track for the sounds made by the giant ants!

I put tracks from this on EVERY mixtape I made for girls, back in the day.

 Here is the album cover:

And if you go to the link (just click on the lefthand numbers) you will be treated to an encyclopedic recital by such creatures as the barking, squirrel, and pine woods treefrogs (all Hyla spp. on the album, though things have changed since the 1950s nomenclature-wise), the southern leopard, Florida gopher, and pig frogs (Rana spp.), or the red-spotted, southwestern Woodhouse's, or Sonoran desert toads (Bufo spp.)—and many more. Sometimes there are duets, and even multi-species choruses! All accompanied by droll and learned commentary by Charles M. Bogert, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (As the article puts it, Bogert "pursued accuracy rather than vibes.") I gather the album is also available on Spotify, if you'd like to simply play through.

I wasn't sure I had anything to say about this, but the album sat there in an open tab, and I didn't want to lose track of it. What better way to keep it in my memory than to write about it here? And look! I did have something to say. 

Here are a few of the amphibians that are featured on the album (though their scientific names have changed a bit thanks to the efforts of developmental biologists such as Hillis):

Boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas)

Pickerel frog (Lythobates palustris)

Squirrel treefrog (Hyla squirella)

I'm sure I could find a poem about frogs or toads if I looked—since that seems to be my pattern lately—for today, I'll just leave this at that. Ribbit.

Curiosity 85: Magpies

Another post sparked by a poem, which I will include at the end. But first: magpies! The species I know from around here ("here" being California, but specifically the Central Valley and Sierra foothills as well as my Central Coast, where it is endemic—found nowhere else) is the yellow-billed magpie, Pica nuttalli. It resembles many other magpie species by being of distinctive black and white coloration—i.e., "pied"—but differs by virtue of its bright yellow beak.

Magpies, members of the Corvid family, are divided into three main groups: the Holarctic (black-and-white), comprising seven species in the Pica genus; the Oriental (blue and green), five species in the genus Urocissa and four in Cissa; and two azure-winged species, in Cyanopica. Here are examples of the latter three—the Sri Lanka blue magpie, Urocissa ornata; the common green magpie, Cissa chinensis; and the azure-winged magpie, Cyanopica cyanus:

All of these are found in East Asia, but a relative of the azure-winged is found in the Iberian Peninsula. In Europe otherwise, one sees the Eurasian magpie, Pica pica, exclusively. Here is "everything you need to know" about that bird:

Additionally, several birds are popularly known as magpies but in fact are not: the black magpies, Platysmurus, which are really treepies; the Australian magpie, Cracticus tibicen, a member of the Australasian family Artamidae; and the magpie-robins, in the genus Copsychus, which are actually flycatchers. But they all share that pied appearance, and humans like simple categories. 

Magpies are known to be highly intelligent. They are one of the few animals—along with the great apes, orcas, dolphins, giant manta rays, cleaner wrasses, and (so far) a single Asian elephant—to pass the "mirror test," which attempts to measure physiological and cognitive self-awareness. They are also known to be very curious.

In Chinese folklore, magpies every year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, fly into the sky to form a bridge across the Milky Way, reuniting the otherwise separated Cowherd and Weaver Girl for a single day. 

Rossini's opera La gazza ladra involves a thieving magpie who loves to steal the humans' silver, thereby wreaking havoc. (Though this characterization of magpies may not be entirely true to life.)

In Europe, the tradition of counting magpies to predict good or ill luck was first documented in 1780 with the publication of Observations of Popular Antiquities by John Brand, and the lines "One for sorrow, Two for mirth, Three for a funeral, And four for a birth." In 1828, chemist Sir Humphry Davy, in Salmonia: or, Days of Fly Fishing, wrote: "For anglers in spring it has always been regarded as unlucky to see single magpies, but two may be always regarded as a favourable omen;…in cold and stormy weather one magpie alone leaves the nest in search of food; the other remaining sitting on the eggs…when two go out…the weather is warm…favourable for fishing."

All of which has very little to do with the poem that launched this post, but isn't that how things often go? We see a reference to something in art, follow it up, and learn about a whole other world. Though in this case, that "mirror test" alluded to above does prove relevant.

Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror

by Kelli Russell Agodon

The night sounds like a murder
of magpies and we’re replacing our cabinet knobs
because we can’t change the world, but we can
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days, and some days it breaks itself in two.
I watched a woman have a breakdown in the mall
today and when the security guard tried to help her
what I could see was all of us
peeking from her purse as she threw it
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes,
the walls felt like another way to hold us in
and when she finally stopped crying,
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting, Some days
the sky is too bright. And like that we were her
flock in our black coats and white sweaters,
some of us reaching our wings to her
and some of us flying away.

Curiosity 84: Maps

A quick one today. I was searching for maps of downtown Los Angeles in 1941–42 for a project I'm working on—in particular, I was interested in how far removed the LA downtown library was from the erstwhile Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist temple (now occupied by the Japanese American National Museum). While looking, I stumbled on a video about an astonishing map collection:

Or more accurately, it was a hoard, because the assembler of all this cartographic wealth apparently grabbed up anything he could get his hands on. Rhyme and reason? Not so much. As the Los Angeles Times describes the collection, which surfaced in 2012,

Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down [in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of LA] were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates. Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases. A giant plastic topographical map of the United States covered a bathroom wall and bookcases displaying Thomas Bros. map books and other street guides lined a small den.

The Central Library's map librarian, Glen Creason (narrator of the above video), reckoned that there were easily a hundred thousand artifacts, doubling the library's extant collection. And they surfaced thanks to a realtor's intuition when he was directed to clean out and launch the demolition of the house upon its occupant, John Feather's, death, with no known survivors. The realtor, Matthew Greenberg, credited "the nagging voice of my mother in the back of his mind"—his mother having been a professor of library sciences. 

The trove contained everything from Esso and and Chamber of Commerce road maps to historic gems, Creason said.

“He has every type of map imaginable. There’s a 1956 pictorial map of Lubbock, Texas. He’s got a 1942 Jack Renie Street Guide of Los Angeles [and] four of the first Thomas Bros. guides from 1946. Those are very hard to find. The one copy we have is falling apart because it’s been so heavily used. We had to photocopy it.”
    Gingerly fingering an atlas-sized 1918 map with a faded blue cover, Creason opened it up to show the National Map Co.’s “Official Paved Road” guide to the United States. The tattered pages illustrated the location of paved roads with red and blue ink.
    Creason was also enthralled by the discovery of several “Mapfox” Los Angeles street guides published in 1944. Creason said in his 32-year library career he had never seen one. Also tucked into Feathers’ collection was a pocket-size “Geographia Authentic Atlas and Guide to London and Other Suburbs,” showing streets, parks, lakes and rivers that Creason dated as pre-World War I.

The oldest artifact was a 1592 map of Europe.

Collecting—or as the case may be, hoarding—is so fascinating. Me, I collect Japanese tea implements with dragonfly motifs: I have one teapot ☜ and two cups. That's enough of a collection for me. (As for all my books, I suppose that's more of a hoard. But books are completely understandable. No?)

Curiosity 83: Apples

Going back into my Flickr archives for photos of apples and apple blossoms today. Plus, a poem by Louise Glück, "Nostos."

Nostos

by Louise Glück

There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Book Report: Stolen Focus

3. Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (2022) (1/17/24)

My friend BK Loren, a wonderful writer, recommended this book on FB. She's not much of one for doing that, so I figured her recommendation meant something. Plus, I found the title intriguing, given that I have oodles of time on my hands (being semi-retired/between jobs) and finding it quite difficult to get into a satisfying groove. I'd say a "productive" groove, but productivity per se isn't what I feel I'm missing. After all, is doing a jigsaw puzzle productive? No. But it's valuable—for relaxation, for brain stimulation, for flow, for concentration. For focus.

So I picked this book up, and immediately began having aha moments. Some topics struck home more than others, simply because of who I am (older, fairly well off, without outside time pressures, living in a pretty safe place), but all in all I found it a valuable read. (Caveat: The author tackles topics whose causes are often controversial—ADHD a case in point—and many readers have challenged the book on that basis. For me, most of the topics were either new or freshly presented, with expert commentary I'd not encountered before, so I found it worthwhile. Someone who is already well-read on issues of attention might not. As with everything, context matters.)

The introduction shows us a few scenes around the world—Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis, the Blue Lagoon of Iceland, the Louvre and Mona Lisa—where people are experiencing immediate reality largely or entirely through screens, whether it's via an iPod tour or trying to "capture" a moment with the phone camera. All too familiar, as in this shot from last New Year's Eve in Paris (unless of course it's a fabricated hoax, which wouldn't surprise me).

Hari identified several major systemic forces that are damaging our ability to focus, to pay attention to the things that matter. One of these is the simple onslaught of stimulation—distractions, yes, but also the demand that we continually switch focus, multitask, and filter vast amounts of information in order to get done what we need to get done. To combat this—and to find what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously defined as "flow"—it is important to strip back to the essentials, but—and this is important—in an expansive way. Flow, as summarized by Hari, comprises three core components: (1) choosing a clearly and narrowly defined goal that is (2) personally meaningful and (3) at the edge of your abilities but not beyond them. Too easy, and you go into autopilot; too hard, and you give up. There is a sweet spot where we can challenge ourselves—and find satisfaction, even joy.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the need for a good night's sleep (something I'm trying to work on, except I seem to have an internal 1 a.m. alarm clock anymore...). Chapter 4 considers the salutary effect of reading a good book, diving deep into a work of fiction and becoming wrapped up in characters and their stories (yes, he focuses on fiction, which can expand empathy, but I find that when I allow myself to relax into a good piece of longform journalism, à la New Yorker, my brain becomes engaged and I feel... wiser?). Chapter 5 celebrates the virtues of daydreaming, allowing your mind to wander. This may seem like the opposite of focus, but in fact mind-wandering allows connections to be made as various parts of the brain make sense of pertinent stimuli, memories, intentions and dreams, rhythms and gaps. Mind-wandering requires a stress-free environment, however; if times are hard, it can become rumination, and that's never good.

Chapters 6 and 7 are both devoted to a single subject: "The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You." I, personally, am not especially concerned with the tracking part. Whatever. The manipulation, though—it's very, very subtle, and not just at an individual level, but it's infiltrating all of society, changing our world. It's found in algorithms that feed us (benignly) advertisements on FB or that suggest "new friends" on social media or YouTube videos "you might enjoy." It's found in the bubbles created by Fox"News" or CNN. I might say even the Christmas music that starts to play already before Thanksgiving has passed is part of this trend, subconsciously encouraging us to spend money on presents no one really needs. In these chapters Hari talks to various movers and shakers in Silicon Valley, as well as psychologists and tech developers, to get at just what is being done, and how. It's fascinating. And if the earlier chapters about overstimulation didn't convince me just to put my phone away, these sure did. Not that I'm entirely successful. But I'm trying to at least be more mindful.

Chapter 8 is titled "The Rise of Cruel Optimism (or: Why Individual Changes Are an Important Start, but Not Enough)"—which certainly applies to other major dysfunctions on this planet as well, such as climate change and world hunger. Yes, yes, we can all make changes that are better for everything, but government (a functioning one, anyway), and corporations and technology (not to mention billionaires), all also have it in their power to do a hulluva lot more. In chapter 9, "The First Glimpses of a Deeper Solution," Hari discusses some ways that tech could become not just less invasive but also more supportive of, not to put too fine a point on it, sanity. What's more, we need to continue to have hope, to not fall into despair, but to keep demanding what is right.  That's how women got the right to vote, how dangerous chemicals were outlawed in the 1960s and '70s. It's what Rebecca Solnit writes about in her book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

The last few chapters consider the effects of diet and environmental pollution on our attention, and the rise of ADHD. There is an interesting discussion of the importance of free, unsupervised play for our children—which circles back to pushing boundaries, figuring things out, solving problems, even making mistakes. 

In his conclusion, Hari outlines six changes he made during the course of writing this book that have improved his focus and quality of life: (1) "I used pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much" (this included locking his phone away for long stretches of time during the day); (2) "I have changed the way I respond to my own sense of distraction.... I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind's own ability to focus deeply?... What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now?... Seeking out flow, I learned, was far more effective than self-punishing shame" for allowing himself to be distracted; (3) "based on what I learned about the way social media is designed to hack our attention spans, I now take six months of the year totally off it" (divided into chunks of two or three months); (4) acting "on what I learned about the importance of mind-wandering..., I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me; (5) "I am strict with myself about getting eight hours [sleep] every night; and (6) "I am very involved in the lives" of children, "playing freely" or observing them play, unsupervised. There are other ways, discussed in the book, that can contribute to better focus—daily meditation or Yoga, a more healthful diet, more actively engaged leisure time. So far, I am working on disengaging from online activities. It's not too hard. Until I forget...

I enjoyed this book, and in the meantime have been listening to various podcasts that treat ancillary topics—the rise of algorithms, the gift of uncertainty, and, yes, attention itself. It's a topic in need of exploration.

Curiosity 82: Emptiness

This daily business goes in spurts and lulls. I'm in a lull at the moment—what to say? So I googled "Japanese emptiness art," since I figure the Japanese would have something to say about emptiness—or as they put it more eloquently, yohaku no bi: the beauty of empty space. Here are a few images that came up that I liked.

Iwasaki Tsuneo, Migrating Birds

Yasuaki Onishi, Reverse of Volume (2009)

Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees (16th century)

Yamamoto Baiittsu,
Dragonfly and Pinks with
Waterfall (1830s–1856)

Of course, Westerners have long been intrigued by Japanese aesthetics. Here are a couple such artists musing on emptiness:

Giorgio Pahor

Sam Francis, Towards Disappearance (1957–58)

The Japanese symbol for emptiness:

Kara (empty), also sora (the sky)
and kū (the void)

And here's a short video on the Japanese concept of emptiness, one of the five basic elements:

All right. Maybe tomorrow I'll be more filled with inspiration. Here's hoping!

Curiosity 81: Two poems

Today was a day full of poetry for me: two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. Each session included a few poems as prompts. I especially enjoyed two of them. The first is a sort of praise poem, or ode, but presented in very plain, conversational language—straight reportage, no editorializing.

The Debate

by Alison Luterman

I’m listening to my father and his brother,
both in their eighties, debate their childhood
from adjoining La-Z-Boy recliners.
“We had no toys,” my father insists.
“What are you talking about, no toys?”
My uncle practically leaps from his chair,
except he can’t, on account of his back and his legs
and his feet and his hips. “We had tons of toys!”
Then he lists them: the playing cards
(“Those don’t count,” my father says);
the train set (“Oh, yeah, I forgot about the train set”);
the sleds—“Did anyone else on our block have sleds?”
Uncle Barry asks. “Nineteen-forty, people are crawling
out of the Great Depression on hands and knees, tell me:
Did anyone on our block besides us have a sled?”
My father’s father had a good job delivering newspapers
and brought home sixty-five dollars a week,
enough for Chinese food every Friday
and cupcakes on birthdays.
“We really didn’t have birthday parties,”
my father contends, and my uncle lunges at this.
“What are you talking about?
What about that surprise party
when you turned thirteen?”
“That was the only time,” my father counters.
Don’t even try, Uncle Barry, I almost say,
then catch myself. I want
this unwinnable argument to continue—
forever, if possible. I want
the Brooklyn music of their voices
entwined in a duet with no resolution. I want the song—
half lament, half celebration—
to go on and on and on. 

The second was presented as exemplifying the statement that poetry is "language listening to itself." Of the four poems given for the prompt, the presenter said: "I sense these poets on expeditions for raucous emphatic music that sends them into the heart of the poems as they write them." Here's the first one, by the ever marvelous Seamus Heaney:

Death of a Naturalist

by Seamus Heaney

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

    Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

~~~~~

And in case you're wondering what a "flax-dam" is, author Steven Hart explains: "preparing flax for cleaning and spinning into yarn involves soaking the bundled stems in a flax dam or lint hole, an artificial pond where the bundles (called 'beets') are kept submerged for weeks with clods of earth or large stones. As the flax stems rot and soften, the gas fizzing up through the water produces an appalling smell." What better place for a budding young naturalist to discover what lives in the muck?

Curiosity 80: Peter Schickele (and P.D.Q. Bach)

Peter Schickele, the great classical music parodist, died yesterday at age 88. I heard quite a bit of him as a teenager, after my father discovered him in, I'm guessing, the mid-1960s. His New York Times obituary spells out his genius, so if you want to know more about him, go there. (I strongly recommend it: he was quite the madman composer, and reading about his life is highly entertaining.) 

I thought I would just post a few pieces by him, selected randomly. First, in concert with Itzhak Perlman and the Boston Pops, John Williams conducting, the Konzertshtick for Two Violins mit Orchestra:

Here, sound only, the inestimable Concerto for Horn and Hardart, S. 27:

The Short-Tempered Clavier, S. 3.14159 (easy as), which really shows off Schickele's piano skills (he wasn't just a parodist; he was actually a very good musician—he just decided to have fun with it all): 

The multitude of moments in the above piece can be broken down as follows:

1:01 Allen - Chopsticks 3:08 Bach - Fantasia in C Minor 3:15 Vejvoda - Roll Out the Barrel 3:49 Beethoven - Symphony No. 5, Mvt. I 4:08 Beethoven - Symphony No. 5, Mvt. II 4:15 Beethoven - Symphony No. 5, Mvt. III 4:29 Beethoven - Symphony No. 5, Mvt. IV 5:00 Mason - Mary Had a Little Lamb 5:06 Pierpont - Jingle Bells 6:29 Trad./Bloom - Kradoutja/Streets of Cairo 7:21 Saint-Saëns - Bacchanale (Samson and Delilah) 9:25 Trad. - Children’s mocking chant 10:12 Strauss II - The Blue Danube 11:48 Trad. - Shave and a Haircut 12:58 Handel - Hallelujah Chorus (Messiah) 13:43 Trad. - Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (Ah! vous dirai-je, maman) 14:05 Brahms - Symphony No. 1, Mvt. IV 14:19 attributed to Haydn - St. Anthony Chorale 16:09 Tchaikovsky - Dance of the Reed Flutes (The Nutcracker) 16:17 Berlin - How Dry I Am 17:28 Trad. - 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall 17:39 Bach - Ricercar a 6 (Musical Offering) 18:16 Davis - You Are My Sunshine 18:31 Brackett/Copland - Simple Gifts/Appalachian Spring 18:32 Handel - Alla Hornpipe (Water Music Suite No. 2, Mvt. II) 18:42 R. Strauss - Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks 18:50 Katscher - Good Evening, Friends 19:41 Trad. - The Hearse Song/The Worms Crawl In 20:33 Trad. - Dies Irae 20:41 Chopin - Funeral March (Piano Sonata 2, Mvt. III) 21:46 Cortés - Cielito Lindo 22:21 Trad. - Over the Fence Is Out / Paine - Fuga Giacosa 23:22 Lecuona - Malagueña 24:28 Jowett/Randall/Crotch - Westminster Chimes 25:39 Aldrich - Great Tom Is Cast 27:58 Mozart - Rondo Alla Turca (Piano Sonata 11, Mvt. III) 30:31 Bach - B-A-C-H Motif 30:50 Trad. - For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow 30:54 Mozart - Leck mich im Arsch 31:54 Sibelius - Symphony No. 5, Mvt. III; or Ward - The Band Played On

Here is Prof. Schickele being interviewed in 1996:

And there's plenty more on YouTube. 

He also had an eclectic, and more serious, radio program from 1992 to 2007, oriented around themes, such as death, great octave leaps, animals, and surprising rhythm changes. Here is episode #35 (seemingly devoted to Bach—Johann Sebastian, not P.D.Q.) of the 810 weekly broadcasts that he aired. Some other episodes are available here.

I'd forgotten about P.D.Q. Bach until reading about Schickele's death today, and was glad to be reminded and reacquainted. Both of them brought great amusement to lovers of classical music.

Curiosity 79: Taking a tree down

I'm a little late at posting this, but last August, over the course of almost a week, we sadly had to take down a giant Monterey pine that stood in the corner of our lot. I was also a little late realizing I should document the process. But anyway, here are some photos I took, both scrounged from my archives (to show the tree as it once was) and taken once the process kicked in. 

It was quite an undertaking. I don't know just how tall the tree was, but I'd guess 80–100 feet. It was massive in its prime. Now the house, without its eternal shade, is that much warmer, and we have more roof space to add some solar panels. Unfortunately, the tree's removal means the hawks, bats, and owls have had to move elsewhere...

The first few photos are from about 13 years ago, when we rebuilt, showing the old house (that's the pine in the background; in the foreground is a live oak, which is still doing just fine):

The new house in the midst of construction, with the tree standing guard:

The old house in Google Maps (A). You can imagine that the neighbors were happy to see the tree go...

It's funny, but the only photos I can locate of the new (present) house don't include the tree. Well, except this impressionistic one, again from Google Maps, from sometime this year, when the tree was on its last legs (you can see how the house has grown!):

And here are photos I took as the takedown was occurring. The first one here is from a block over. They had already removed most of the lower branches, but a bit of the dead crown remained.

The view from my loft a day or two later:

(I have a nice little video of that top chunk of tree coming loose, but Blogger can't manage to process it...)

The side of the house, as the tree grows ever shorter:

The back of the house and big chunks of tree:

Truck full o' tree:

Wood and sawdust:

We figure the tree was planted when this subdivision went in, in 1953, which would have made it 60 years old. It may have been damaged by pine bark beetles, making for a somewhat shorter-than-average life span—though the internet tells me that 50–60 years is typical for Monterey pines beyond the coastal fog belt. So maybe it had lived out its allotted years. 

We miss the tree, but... cycle of life. We were glad to have its shade, and all the birds and bats it sheltered, for a couple of decades, anyway.

Curiosity 78: Representing the human body

The other day Maria Popova in her wonderful newsletter The Marginalian included an image from a vintage (ca. 1959) book called The Human Body: What It Is and How It Works.

(In an older Marginalian issue, she focused on the book, with copious illustrations. They're worth checking out.)

Anyway, that got me wondering about other ways the human body has been represented, so I've plucked a few highly random examples for you from the internet. Enjoy!? (And sorry in advance I couldn't find credits for all these, but I included them when I could. Click on the images to see them large.)

Smith's New Outline Map of the Human System, 1888

The Muscles of the Eye in Its Natural Position
and the Muscle of the Eyelid, Shown
Separately. From Thomas Bartholin, Anatome ex omnium
veterum recentiorumque observationibus (1696)

Jan Breugel the Elder, Smell (1617–18)

Pietro Paolini, Allegory of the Five Senses (ca. 1630)

The Five Chakras

Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Moody (1985)

Tavares Strachan, Robert (2018)