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Showing posts from October, 2015

Spatial Test Neurosis

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My daughter was invited to take the tests for the talent search for the Johns Hopkins Center for TalentedYouth. Yay – yikes! Holy projection of stress onto my child! So, there is the Spatial Test Battery , and then another standardized test for ye old above grade level achievement whoza whatsa. It's the STB that's getting me all worked up. Emile and Lucy and I constructed our own block manipulation problems with Legos Wouldn't I have loved to take that test as a kid?  Really. I would have.  And, because parenthood is a  constant losing crisis of not keeping my own feelings out of it, how can I make sure my daughter does well? The spiral goes like this: we don't allow video games in our house because it always and inevitably leads to melt down hell in our children, which means she's undertrained by a decade of playing Minecraft, as all her peers will have under their belts, so we must prep, which requires much research on Mama&#

Golden Slippers

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I just learned the D Major  harmony ( Cathy Clasper-Torch graciously allowed me to record it and put it up on youtube so you can see the fingering ) on a song, but now I have mixed feelings. You see, after poking around a bit (mostly on Wikipedia ), I found out that what most of us call " Golden Slippers " (as played by Beth Williams Hartness) is actually a minstrel song, to be performed in blackface, and a parody of the song made popular by the Fisk Jubilee singers . Fisk University (named after abolitionist Clinton Bowen Fisk ), in Nashville, is an African-American institution, established in 1866. The Fisk singers were recorded, and you can hear them here  - though I'm not sure when that recording was made.  The Fisk Singers toured first the Underground Railroad path, and then Europe. Spirituals, including “Golden Slippers”, were their usual fare. But they also sang minstrel songs written by Stephen Foster, a white musician from Pennsylvania

Toad versus Frog

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At Starbucks, the guy ahead of me asked “Vous êtes Française?” and me, toadish look on my face, because I'm not always charming, n'est çe pas, replied, “Non.”  “Then, part of the French American School?”  “No,” I said, wearily. After just having had an argument with Laurent, I was totally not wanting to play “let's speak French.” Not that I ever enjoy that game much. “And you speak French with your daughter, why?”  I relented. “Her father is French.” Comprehension dawned.  I even asked a follow up, “And you?” “French. I teach at Brown.” Honestly, I didn't care, but I liked him, felt bad that he'd had an interaction with such a crabby human. Homework Question: how on Earth does an artist and writer have a successful life without applying some social grease? Welcome to my tutorial on how not to get along...

Saved by the cushion

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As a kid, my mother had taught me yogic meditation with a candle, as she understood it. And we did a lot of yoga, back in the late 70s and early 80s. Then she learned some kind of South Asian meditation practice, and had us repeating “Nam niyoho renge kyo” for a while. That stayed with me as a soothing thing to say when I was stressed (nearly all the time...) When I went to Japan, I was studying many of the arts associated with the zen and shinto culture: tea ceremony, kyudo, calligraphy, kendo. I became obsessed with an English translation of koans – that brand of thinking felt like home to my atypical brain, much in the way of the works of Lewis Carroll. Real efforts at meditation started out after college, with Vipassana, following the recorded talks of S. N. Goenka. I was 22 and in England, and my American friend, Clare, wanted to go to do a meditation retreat  in Wales. Luckily, for once my lack of self determinism was useful! For those who don't know it, Vip

Haapavesi Waltz

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Another obsessively played fiddle tune these days: the Haapavesi Waltz. Here  is the version my teacher, Cathy Clasper-Torch , taught our class at the Blackstone River Theater . Unlike the version below, the version she played starts on A, but in all other ways is a direct transposition, no change in fingering. I know nothing about Haapavesi, Oulu, Finland, other than that it maxes out at about 61 degrees Fahrenheit in July , but in other ways looks a bit like Northern Minnesota. About the waltz, I found out not much more. It appears to have been written in 1991 by Keith Murphy , a distinctly unFinn name, and yet it reminds me of the Varttina music I have grown to love. And a touch of the tight, odd rhythm of the Steve 'n' Seagulls version of AC/DC's “Thunderstruck”. I get a huge smile every time I listen to this. I was never an AC/DC fan, but now... Here is more on traditional fiddle in Finnish music.

Orbit

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Understanding Orbit Ball bearings are shucked from the hub There's an escapee. I'll tell you how the others feel They turn away, watching their cycles of disbelieving love Lapped and doubled by stunted lack They respected their bothersome pact. Sometimes. When choice wasn't there. A gob of grease is applied, and I think it will spin. I can't afford a replacement.

Pooh sticks, fairy songs, and the sound of aurora borealis

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Brown and beige haired heads on Catholic school blue uniforms turned toward me – only one other redhead in the sixth grade. I was proud that my work had been noticed, that I had been seen as worthy of standing up in front of the class to read what I'd written. Also, dread. Two paragraphs in, my nuclear reactor nervous system started overheating, my face lit emergency red. Too much high soaring language. I felt I wasn't supposed to write words like this – it was not fitting in with my peers. And too, I'd been taught this was “purple patching”. I'd written one typed page, maybe two? Two would've been worse. But the teacher, Old Dragon Breath, made no critical comment when I finished, and no one said anything mean. I'd read my class a description of something strange at my grandparents' farm house, in the northern third of Minnesota. Their nearest neighbor was a mile away, the nearest town many more.  While grandparents slept –

Spinning Cogs

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How interested am I in Alan Turing? My library fine and fifteen tabs open on my web browser would seem to say he is very interesting to me. Or, alternatively, that I am working very hard at making myself interested in him, and failing. I asked myself, "What would the world of computing look like if Alan Turing had lived?" I quickly found that others had already asked this question, wrote Quora posts about it, and published books on the subject ( fantasy by Rudy Rucker, imagining the writer William Burroughs and Turing in a relationship...) But it turns out that I am most interested in an idea not everyone agrees upon: Turing as someone on the Autism Spectrum. Steve Silberman pointed at the irony of so many people on the spectrum being the source of the Nazi defeat in WWII (think Manhattan project), even while the Nazi's began their massive Eugenics machine by killing autistic children. Maybe the might of the Allies was already on the spectrum, with Alan Turin

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