Little One Returns

 

After four whirlwind months (which actually flew by), Little One returned late, late, late last night. Despite flying all across Europe, visiting something like ten countries, the only struggle she had was getting from Newark, New Jersey to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Powerful thunderstorms all evening up north, and massive flooding down here in Texas around the airport conspired to make her seven or eight hours late in returning to her home here with us. I’m the only one working today, so I went to bed around 11:30, but the Mrs. valiantly stayed up and picked her up sometime in the wee hours of the morning.

This was the second half of her sophomore year at college, and the vast majority of her class spends it abroad at the school’s sister campus in Rome. She took courses in literature, philosophy, art and architecture, and took field trips to the Vatican and to Greece. Imagine reading Plato’s dialogues while sitting at the Parthenon! She did. Imagine spending an Easter vigil in an 800-year old Irish monastery! She did.

She also, like I mentioned above, took advantage of her location, and she and her friends spent many weekends flying out to various countries to explore and experience (a weak Euro really helped with this part). At my recollection, in addition to the Vatican and Greece, she visited Austria, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Czechia, Ireland again, and finally France only few days ago. I was worried for her in light of the immigrant crisis many European countries are facing, but they always travelled in packs and her girl pack usually travelled with a corresponding boy pack. The only sketchy situations she found herself in happened on a ferry in Greece and the town of Nice, France, which was not very nice, especially with the “no-go” zone surrounding the train station they had to circumnavigate to stay safe.

Anyway, she’s safe back at home. I’ll have to wait to debrief her later today, maybe much later. Have no idea what time zone her body is currently in, but knowing her she might sleep all day, make an appearance at dinner time, then go back to bed. I may not have an intelligent conversation with her until sometime this weekend. But that’s okay, and she deserves some rest after four months of pretty intense study, essay writing, and never-ending on-the-go backpacking through Western Civilization.

 

Montezuma

 

 

Jimi Hendrix never died.

 

After Band of Gypsies in 1970, he retreats to the studio and produces two modest albums supported by selective stints of short touring. There are hints of something secret, something great, but the guitarist is silent for 18 months. Then, in 1975, he releases his second double album, Montezuma, to critical and commercial success. It quickly goes on to become one of the most influential albums of all time, mentioned in the same sentences with Sgt Pepper, Pet Sounds, and just about anything Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones are putting out.

 

It is, in fact, more than a rock album. It is also more than a jazz or “jazz fusion” album. It is simply the next generation of electric guitar music, welding all facets of rock and jazz with nearly everything that had come before. Musicologists find hints of Bachian fugues, echoes of the masterful intricacies of Mozart and the sturm und drang of a mature Beethoven, an orchestra translated through the fingers upon an electric guitar in a multitrack recording studio.

 

Montezuma revolutionizes music and the music industry. And this soon overflows pop culture and the zeitgeist. The album is the impetus for a generation of young and hungry musicians to push the boundaries of music and expand into newer, unimagined and previously unimaginable terrain. That revolt-against-rock, punk, does happen, but it is muted into extreme niche-dom. The 80s synth style does not, alas, happen. Nor does the phenomenon of the “hair band,” though heavy metal does develop, but more like a weed choking in a garden of impossibilities. Rap does not evolve, nor does the materialism, sexual immorality, and violence typically associated with the genre.

 

Instead, Hendrix becomes the spiritual father of a new type of music. Along with the synthesis of baroque, classical, and romantic ideas and motifs, hundreds of his musical offspring explode and branch out, hydra-like, fractal-like, toward new and higher peaks, leaving nothing unturned, unexplored, unchallenged. Since the ultimate foundation of music is mathematics, time signatures segue into more intricate expansions: exponential time signatures, time signatures  based on pi, imaginary (i) time signatures. The studio becomes a laboratory of infinite possibility. Fugues with several hundred tracks of interplaying guitar lines, chords, melodies, harmonics, become commonplace. Revolutionary advancement in electronics and computers drives it further onward and upward. Forward-masking, backward-masking, multi-dimensional masking.

 

The guitar itself evolves. At first, some physical changes – eight- and ten-string guitars, guitars with bass strings added, guitars where the body and neck can change length and shape, mid-song, to mold new sounds. A guitar is patched into a board and sent to a next generation Cray computer where the data is scrambled, rescrambled, and deconstructed based on complex mathematical notation and fed back through a Marshall cabinet. The most cutting edge guitarsmanship features that which is neurally-linked directly into and through the musician’s mind.

 

And in spite of all this, the music is, inexplicably, listenable.

 

Because September 18, 1970, was a relatively uneventful day in the life of Jimi Hendrix, the maestro brings peace, love and understanding to the world by the third decade of the twenty-first century.

 

(thoughts while showering this morning, May 11, 2024)

Hyphenated Consonance

 

The Starlight Night

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

   O look, at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

   The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

   Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

   Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

 

Buy then! bid then! – What? – Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

   Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

   Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

 

*******

 

Nice.

One evening this past weekend I thumbed through an old copy of Astronomy, and a line or two from some classic poem was quoted within without attribution. I did some quick googling and came up with this poem of Hopkin’s. It is not the poem that the Astronomy author mentioned, though. That poem is still as yet unknown to me (but not for long).

Normally I am not a fan of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s not quite due to the prolix alliteration (actually, consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds within a sentence or line). I am quite a fan of alliteration, if only for a shlocky see-what-I-can-do shallow boastfulness when I write. With Hopkins I think it’s all the hyphenated consonance that irks me. Indeed, were I a lad a century ago passing by his desk as he labored over a poem, tongue jutting out the side of his mouth, I don’t think I could resist the temptation to “accidentally” bump his arm once his quill touched parchment. And I’d circle round and do it again and again, each time “accidentally.” All because of the cutesy hyphenated consonance.

But I dunno, there was something about this poem. Perhaps it was the lingering sentimentality I felt with the still-open Astronomy magazine still within arm’s reach. I walked out the backdoor, glancing up at the skies, the open bowl of the universe above me, noting the winter stars slowly receding towards the western horizon. The poem did evoke some neat moments of nostalgia in me. Observing the stars in the woods on cold February nights. Lake George, New York. Seeing constellation patterns and asterisms for the first time. Learning the names and locations of stars.

Yes, this poem will get a pass from me. Gerard, I won’t bully you for this.

In fact, I might pick up a book of his works next time at one of the local libraries.

Ten Years Back

 

A post from May 5, 2014:

 

Ah, it was a cool early Saturday morning, particularly – no, exceptionally – clear and crisp.  The air felt lighter, and instead of breathing in the new season, it breathed me in.  The wife and girls back home were frantically preparing for a family obligation while I, already freshly showered and in my Sunday Bests, motored off to run a few quick errands.

 

I pulled into a shady spot at the library parking lot.  Rolled down the windows, reclined the driver’s seat by twenty degrees.  The library would not open until ten o’clock this glorious morning, and I had the empty parking lot to myself for forty minutes.

 

I opened A Stillness at Appomattox, and as if stepping through some weird spacetime portal I was on those Virginian fields, convoying with the Army of the Potomac as it rushed feverishly to beat – unsuccessfully – Robert E. Lee and his forces to a sleepy crossroads town called Spotsylvania.  And a few pages after that, poor old General John Sedgwick of Grant’s Sixth Corps, known affectionately as “Uncle John” to his troops, was tragically killed by a sniper’s bullet, shot below the left eye, after bragging to his flinching subordinates that those Confederate sharpshooters hidden in the faraway trees “couldn’t hit an elephant from this distance.”

 

I put the book down and studied the blue cloudless sky, fragmented and framed by budding tree leaves, and appreciated ever the more this spring day commune.

 

*****

 

How much can change in a decade!

 

Now I live 1,500 miles away in a hot, arid environment unlike the northeast. My girls are no longer in grammar school and kindergarten – my oldest daughter is studying in Italy and my youngest just returned from her job – her first “on the books” – at a coffeeshop. I work three days from home and commute the other two to an office building adjacent to the Dallas Cowboys practice facility.

 

Back then I’d worry about how to pay for roof repairs or a new paint job to keep my home from assuming the position of worst house on the block to worrying about how to pay for two college educations and a retirement creeping ever so closer. I’m healthier now in ways I was not back in those day, but I am also unhealthier in other ways I thought not about in 2014.

 

But – I am still a reader.

 

And – I have another one of historian Bruce Catton’s works staring balefully from a stack behind me: Mr. Lincoln’s Army, technically Book One of the trilogy that ended with the book I read ten years ago, A Stillness at Appomattox. It’s been calling out to me patiently and incessantly for several weeks now, but I’ve told it in no uncertain terms that I must read through my Clancy phase first. So, perhaps, I will get to it by summer’s end in another great synchronous echo of time that seems to loop back in forth in my life year after year.

 

Ten years ago today I had pulled into a shady spot in a library parking lot. Today I have a similar semi-secluded spot to escape for an hour or so here and there and get some reading and thinking done. The more things change, the more they stay the same …