Coals and Cauldrons

It has been a quiet but agreeable Halloween. Papa is still in Glasgow and Gi. is still at Uncle Pu's and K.'s house, and T. was not particularly lively because she had spent the night (very much to my admiration, by the way) finishing her homework for university, hence the quietness. At around noon the coal for our stoves arrived and Mama eventually lit a fire in the corner room. I am huddling in one of our impressively good sleeping bags anyway, but for the first time in many months I have been able to assume my favourite perch on top of the oven, without it being cold as a tomb.

We watched television together — news of the American elections and of the Congo, glimpses of an apparently terrible docudrama on Martin Luther (the wedding scene with Katherine Bora, or I presume it was that, looked like a made-for-TV romance, except that the groom wore a monastic garb and coiffure) that aired in honour of Reformation Day, and the Halloween special of The Simpsons (which we have not watched in ages). Normally I am ambiguous about Halloween, because I don't like the garishness and mindless-consumption aspects of it, and I don't like horror films or stories. But I do like candy and pumpkins, and at times I like costumes — which, I suppose, makes me sound like a four-year-old, but what do I care. (c: As far as the Simpsons Halloween specials go, my favourites are the tale of the time-travel toaster oven and the riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven." Once I did undergo a sinister Raven- (or Birds-)like scenario; it was on a chilly dawn after I had stayed up all night, and I was passing innocently along the kitchen counter when I heard a thumping, so I looked up, and there was a crow standing on the skylight and pecking at the glass, its beady expressionless eyes fixed in my direction. I was quite glad to get out of its line of sight.

Anyway, so J. went shopping for candy, and then we whiled away the hours at our computers as evening fell. In the course of said evening, two trick-or-treating groups came to the door, and Mama offered them chocolate bars. All of the sugar candy had been dumped into bowls, one for us and one for Papa and Gi., and we nibbled away at it in the meantime. Fortunately there was plenty of chocolate left for us, too. It is a pity that we hadn't any pumpkins, because in Victoria it was fun to carve them and to roast the seeds that were in the interior, and oddly I liked the musky scent that rises from the pumpkin flesh as the tealight heats and bakes the inside of the lid. (Then, less enjoyably, there was the fruit's inevitable disintegration into pale pulp, much accelerated by the onset of frost. But at least it was a fresh supply of nitrogen for the soil!) A last reason why I like Halloween is, by the way, that it is one of the dates that I psychologically clung to during my school years as the forerunners of Advent and Christmas.

After we had eaten our fill, Ge. and J. dressed up as a 19th-century gentleman and as a woodcutter, respectively. The first costume consisted of dark jeans (I think), a shirt, and a woolly grey vest; the second consisted of jeans, an orange flannel-like plaid shirt, a cap, and an ax. As for their faces, they had held a saucer over a candle so that it was coated in soot, then they dabbed the soot onto their visages to create heavy black eyebrows, a mustache, and, in Ge.'s case, impressive mutton chops. I was considering dressing up as someone from the 60s, but I haven't the least notion how to do a beehive hairdo, etc., so this year I was "person who couldn't be bothered to change out of her pyjamas." Which was a trifle awkward, because I dislike being seen in my pyjamas (it makes me feel guilty about not being ladylike and proper), and so when the people to deliver the coal came, I ducked into our tiny pantry and contemplated the courtyard for something like a quarter of an hour.

A Musical Interlude

Lately I've started investigating a spate of new pieces on the piano. One of them is the piano part of Felix Mendelssohn's Trio in d minor, which I listen to frequently, and which is among my favourite music. (Altogether I like Mendelssohn's compositions very much, as may already be evident from all the songs without words I've recorded. I think they are imaginative, sensitive, sincere, simple but not stupid, and quite healthy.) So far I've been playing the second movement, which is sentimental in a very satisfactory, wiping-tear-from-corner-
of-eye-and-sighing way, as long as one doesn't cross the fine line to kitsch. Here it is, as performed by the trio of Gregor Piatigorsky, Jascha Heifetz, and Artur Rubinstein, in a 1953(?) film:

A Transatlantic Coup de Main

When Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London, I was of course disappointed that Ken Livingstone had not won, but his successor did not make so bad of an impression. I thought that his "buffoonery" was more of a façade than an indication of fundamental incompetence. This impression was justified when, through Hendrik Hertzberg's blog, I came across his endorsement of Barack Obama in the Daily Telegraph. (Even if, on a purely pedantic writerly level, I think that his use of the term "double whammy" is too undignified.) Of course I don't think it's ethical for a politician to declare support for an electoral candidate in a foreign country (except if, let's say, the candidate's opponent is a dictator); still, it appears to be a common practice. In any case, what I liked was not even so much the fact that Johnson is for Obama, but how he explains his reasons for the endorsement. It does not come across as an opportunistic leap to the winning team, but as the cumulation of long-term thought. I also like the surprisingly nuanced tone. In any case, my favourite sentence is possibly this one:

If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

A Debate on Long Island

Once again I stayed up all night to watch an American presidential debate, this time the third and last. The intended topic was domestic policy, but the answers did roam a little, as John McCain unwisely stuck to his shtick of attacking Barack Obama's record with the kind of "gotcha" mentality that he has criticized in the press, making much of minor mistakes rather than of major failings. On the whole he was a vigorous opponent, and he and Obama appeared to be even, as the latter was unable, due to time constraints, to offer rebuttals to the spates of accusations.

What disturbed me in the first presidential debate and in the only vice-presidential debate was that I had the feeling that the Democratic candidate did not emerge as clearly the victor as I would have liked. The reason, as I just realized, is that, if the confrontations had been fistfights, McCain and Palin would have won, or at least been equally matched, because they were more emotionally invested and therefore more aggressive. But the confrontations were debates, and in both cases, upon reading the transcript later, the flaws of the Republican candidates were clear. Joe Biden, in terms of experience and seriousness and intellect, was in every true sense the victor in his debate, as Obama is in his debates by the force of superior reason and civility. What is particularly impressive about Obama is that, as his demeanour indicates, he can take verbal blows without interpreting them as personal affronts or even letting them permeate his defenses (though this time he did not seem as unmoved).

Anyway, a central topic was health care. Obama intends to offer all American citizens who are not satisfied with their present health insurance, or who have no health insurance, the same insurance that federal employees are currently receiving. He also wants to prevent companies from denying people health insurance on the grounds of pre-existing medical conditions (in other words, the people who are actually sick and who really need the insurance presently have a high chance of not obtaining it). The disadvantage of this plan is that it is, firstly, difficult to finance, and, secondly, difficult to pass through Congress unless it is dominated by the Democrats, though Obama's refusal to mandate health insurance is likely to make it more acceptable for the Republicans. McCain wants to give a $2500 tax credit per person or $5000 tax credit per family to buy health insurance, and suggests that people shop across state lines to find the best plans. The problem with that is that this money is not nearly enough for many individuals and families, and also that this leaves the problem of no health insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions unsolved.

Then there was the issue of the budget and taxes. McCain reiterated that Obama would raise taxes, and Obama reiterated that those who earn $250,000 or less per annum would actually not have to pay any more taxes than they do now, or even pay less taxes. (At the rally event where he first encountered Joe the Plumber, a citizen who asked him a question about taxes for businesses and who was adopted as a symbol of the ordinary American by McCain for the purposes of this debate*, he has said that for those earning more, the taxes would rise from 36% to 39%, and that this was the level of taxation during the Clinton administration.) McCain then suggested that taxes not be raised if no one wants to pay them. (What about the eleven trillion dollar debt, or the fact that, in life, everyone must do a few things that he doesn't want to do?) Then he assured the American citizenry that he was certain that he could balance the budget, and mentioned that the last person to raise taxes during a recession was Herbert Hoover (a Republican, as the Daily Show pointed out), and look where that got us! He also hacked around on the one billion dollars of earmarks that Obama supported, and on the three million dollar overhead projector in a planetarium in Chicago(?), which McCain has mentioned before. This is the sort of petty artillery that is no more significant than the arrows of the Lilliputians against the bulk of Gulliver, especially if one considers the heavy artillery that might be levelled against the Republican administration on account of the Iraq War expenses, the Treasury's decision to let the Lehman Brothers go under, etc.

Where Obama really shone, however, was when he defended himself against the insinuations that he was a terrorist sympathizer for associating with William Ayers, and that ACORN, the voter registration organization where workers filled in forms in the name of Mickey Mouse and other fictitious individuals (in the vein of the Simpsons episode where the people and pet cemeteries of Springfield apparently temporarily relinquish their dead to vote for the Republican candidate), is part of a big Democratic conspiracy to commit electoral fraud. In any case, there are so many things wrong with the ACORN scandal, not least of which is the tendency of less reasonable Republicans (including McCain, in this debate) to warn with horror about the possible subversion of democracy and terrible injustice in this election, blithely ignoring the GOP's filthy machinations in 2000. He was also straightforward and firm on Roe vs. Wade, and he countered McCain's attacks on his abortion voting record (while he was a senator in Illinois) with admirable precision.

As for McCain, he made odd slip-ups. He said that Sarah Palin "understands" special needs, specifically autism. But Palin's baby does not have autism; he has Down's Syndrome. He also said that Obama voted against the appointment of Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, whereas Breyer has been on the Court since 1994, a good decade before Obama was in the Senate. Then he said that Obama opposes offshore drilling, when in fact Obama already said in the last debate that he was not. (Then he said that Obama's phrasing that he will "have a look" at offshore drilling was telling, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one might research an issue before taking an absolute stand on it. Not to mention that the oil extracted through offshore drilling will only cover a fraction of the US's consumption, and that until the oil actually begins to flow, a decade, I think I've read, will have passed.)

One hint that McCain may not be as distant from Bush as he argues is that he fervently argued for cutting taxes to improve the economy. Bush has tried it – it has, in fact, been a cornerstone of his economic policy – and it hasn't worked, as the rising unemployment, budget deficits, etc., prove. It is also becoming evident that the "trickle-down effect" is not only theoretical, but also imaginary. (This effect is the tendency of money, when given to big companies, to trickle down through the economic hierarchy, gradually enriching the middle and working classes; for, so the argument goes if one couches it in Shakespearean terms, the quality of money is not strain'd, but it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.)

But McCain's least finest hour came when Bob Schieffer – who was an excellent moderator of the type who asks probing questions and demands proper answers and keeps the debaters within the time limits (unlike Tom Brokaw, who only forcibly grumbled about it) – asked both candidates about the negative campaigning and the ugly tone of the election campaign lately. First McCain blamed the uncivil tone on the lack of town hall meetings, which he had wanted and Obama had turned down. Then he spoke as if he was the principal victim of negativity, because John Lewis (member of Congress for Georgia and a leader of the civil rights movement) recently responded to the McCain and Palin rallies where people shouted out "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" about Obama, by saying that politicians who tacitly permit or even encourage a climate of violent antagonism can end up being responsible for a great deal of damage, as Alabama's governor George Wallace was during the 60s.** McCain interpreted this to mean that he and Palin are segregationists. But I think that there is an enormous difference between such unflattering parallels that, if unjustified, can be ignored easily, and an incitement to violence (and, if inspired by Obama's national origins and perceived Muslim background, hate speech) that is especially disturbing because of the recent history of the United States. So I was seriously displeased by McCain's very selective moral outrage, which hints that his sense of right and wrong is much skewed by a post-Vietnam tendency to rate his own moral comfort, however propped up by half-truths and self-deception, as the highest good. Of course that would be no concern of mine, if he were not running for president.

What I also dislike is the tendency of politicians, even Obama at times, to say what citizens want to hear even if it's not truthful. McCain said, for example,

I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they're great citizens.

This is like me saying that Democrats are all compassionate, open-minded, intelligent people. Of course they're not! Saying otherwise is a blatant lie. And that is what I came away with from this debate: it is not only Sarah Palin (who falsely insists that she has been "exonerated" from misconduct in the firing of her former brother-in-law), but also John McCain, who tells outright lies and repeats them.

* I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that Joe attended the rally at the behest of McCain's campaign, as a gimmick, because it is weird for one political candidate to address the questions raised by those who attended the rallies of his opponent. (Actually, he was outside playing football with his son, in a quintessential American touch, when Obama came down the street while visiting his Ohio hometown, and he decided to ask a question. Still possible that it was pre-orchestrated, but I guess that there are graver matters to worry about, and this is not an allegation that should be made seriously without proper proof.)

** Admittedly the comparison to George Wallace is a forceful one, and one which Obama's campaign did quickly criticize, because Wallace was a very outspoken proponent of segregation.

P.S.: Sarah Palin is not a "role model to women," or at least not to me.

The Lions of London and a Ferris Wheel

Lately there has been little to write about. One exception is that Papa brought out a videocamera for me to record songs on the piano without the poor sound quality that comes with the digital camera, so he worked out how to operate it for me, and I recorded Schumann's Kinderszenen and the beginning of Album für die Jugend, Mozart's variations on the march from Les mariages samnites, and the first movement of Schubert's Sonata in B flat major. All of these recordings were all right, but not exactly stunning, as far as the way I played goes. One reason is that I haven't played the Kinderszenen in a long while. Anyway, one major benefit of this session was to revive my ambition to improve and to find new pieces. Today, for instance, I played the piano part of the third movement of Beethoven's Archduke Trio again. It is lovely to play it when the piece is still fresh, because I consciously "live through" (to exaggerate a little) the progression of the music, and it isn't so familiar and mechanical yet. Besides, I am playing without the pedal except where indicated, because I tend to overdo the pedal, and because it encourages sloppiness in the way I play individual notes.

Then I am writing more of my England-in-the-time-of-Bloody-Mary story; it really isn't that great, but it is helping me to practice writing dialogue, plot, characterization, etc. It has also revived my interest in Shakespeare, since his phrases continually come to mind and I continually wish I could work them into the story as quotations, so I quickly dipped into The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure yesterday. It is fortunate that, the older I get, the more alive the plays of Shakespeare become and the better I can understand them. But he is one of the authors whose work I admire more than I like. A large part of it is probably because theatre is demonstrative and deals in more or less primal emotions, and because I am all for being undemonstrative and level-headed.

Aside from that, I watched television, starting with the (what I felt to be) very vague statements of Jean-Claude Trichet, José Manuel Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jean-Claude Juncker, at the live press conference about a unified plan to help Europe's banks in the present economic crisis. On the documentary channel there was an exciting film about the Ice Age, which featured visually convincing but conceptually absurd CG scenes to explain the topography of that Age in reference to present-day landmarks. We (J. was in the room, too, to do his Spanish homework) were treated to the sight of a row of curly-roofed Amsterdam houses, the Finchley Road Tube station sign, and Berlin's Sony Centre, embedded in the massive snowy face of a glacier. Then the subject turned to the balmier African climate that graced England in past times, so a living lion ambled past his stone brethren and ascended the Fourth Plinth(!) in the glare of the winking sun, hippopotami basked in the basin of a fountain, and vultures encircled Nelson's Victory Column, in Trafalgar Square.

Despite the fascinating nature of this documentary, I returned to another channel to see the end of Passenger 57, an action thriller with Wesley Snipes. It was amusingly old-fashioned in some ways, and middling in most ways. Executive Decision and other films have covered the ground as well, and mostly better. But the chase scene in the fairground, though not nearly as well-thought-out as it would have been in a Jackie Chan movie, was still pretty good, what with the head of a merry-go-round horse being exploded with bullets and so on. The part that I saw was also refreshingly free of bloody splurge and luridly inventive demises.

Anyway, dawn is breaking and it's time to go to sleep.

A Debate in Nashville

I've just finished watching the second presidential debate, and Barack Obama won!!! Especially on the economy, he was really, really good – sincere, truthful, and reasonable. What he said was far easier to listen to than McCain, because it did bear the marks of individual thought, whereas the honourable opponent was reeling off the usual stump speech fare. The strongest moments that McCain had in the debate were when he was referring to his service in the army, and even that is no direct qualification for office and it had no bearing on the sense of his arguments. As usual, he spoke in hushed, telling-a-bedtime-story-to-children tones, and as far as logic and reality went, he was totally off. The crack at Joe Biden, when McCain referred to hair transplants (which Biden has, and for which he has been laughed at) in the context of health care, was also unworthy. Biden consistently criticizes his record and does not deliver cheap, personal jabs. Then, after the debate had ended and they were beginning to talk to the audience, Obama reached out his hand to him but McCain did not shake it, so that he quickly shook hands with Cindy McCain instead. Earlier on, McCain referred to Obama as "that one." This man is seventy-two years old, not two years old, for heaven's sake. What is wrong with him?

A Pig in a Poke

The following is admittedly only my rambling sense of the worldwide financial crisis, as picked up primarily from Gawker commenters, and put together in my own head. It may be wholly inaccurate, so I guess it is, above all, a story:

At first I did not think it was serious, and that "the only thing to fear is fear itself," i.e. that if the market would not let itself be spooked, stocks would not fall and companies would not have lower earnings and stockholders would not lose their savings. But it is evident that the market is fundamentally unsound. In general I've read that stocks are far overvalued, and that they should realistically be at around 8,000 on the Dow Jones now (though apparently the Standard&Poor is a far better index). In particular, housing prices were overinflated, and so that industry has been quietly losing steam for at least a year now. But real estate is what much of the American economy is invested in, and when this real estate cannot be sold, the companies are unable to transfer the property back into the liquid money that they presently need. At the same time, investors have frequently employed the practice of short-selling, in which an investor sells stocks, expecting that they will depreciate in value (he may even help along this process by propagating unfavourable rumours about the company to whom the stock belongs), after which point he buys them back at a far cheaper price. But, due to greed, this has been done too much, so the Lehmann Brothers actually collapsed because of it.

As one investment bank after the other collapsed in its wake, the confidence of banks in each other has been ruined, so they are unlikely to lend money to each other. In countries like Ireland, Austria, and Germany, the government has promised the security of all bank assets, and is hoping that this will encourage lending again. At the same time, the plunging stock markets are decreasing confidence in the American economy in general, and almost every major company (with the striking exceptions of Campbell's Soups and Tivo) is seeing a drop in its share price. So that is the problem on Wall Street, and of course in stock markets around the world. Iceland was in serious danger of national bankruptcy. Even China, I read in a New York Times article today, will suffer if it can no longer unload its exports on other countries.

The problem on "Main Street" is that firms, from the investment banking firms and Hewlett-Packard to, oddly, Gawker Media, are cutting jobs. On Gawker, it seems that people are only half-joking when they depict their future selves holed up in cardboard boxes, eating crackers and cheese and shooting the occasional squirrel, in the alleys outside their present apartments. Also, the 401(k) retirement plans, where employees invest money in stocks chosen by themselves to finance their pension, are rapidly losing value (in double-digit percentages, even). Of course any stock owner is not going to be happy now. And I'm sure that's just the beginning.

I think that, had the first bailout bill been passed, it would have swung the stocks back on track, because it would have convinced people that the government was certain that it could remedy the crisis, and confidence would have been restored. But, as it was, the government betrayed incompetence and hesitancy, which undermined the stock market to the point that the two or three days that elapsed before the second bailout bill was passed were fatal. The extra $100 billion+ in earmarks (most infamously, a tax break for children's play-arrow shafts, introduced at the behest of the two senators from Oregon) that were added to the bill certainly did nothing for the repute of Washington. Oddly enough, by the way, the press is still referring to this legislation as the "$700 billion dollar bill," when it is really at least the "$800 billion dollar bill." Another valid criticism is that money should, most likely, be injected at the level of the consumer, to remedy the worst damage of the subprime mortgage crisis and to increase consumer spending.

Anyway, to relate this to the election, on thinking of the situation further, I fully understand now why voter support is swinging to Barack Obama in light of it. Imagine that John McCain is elected president. There would be no upswing in optimism, because he has such a long history of supporting deregulation and precisely the state of affairs that got us into this mess, and because he does not seem to have presented a new plan. He did not even manage to get his fellow Republicans to support the first bailout bill as he had said he would. As for Sarah Palin, the economy has clearly never been her specialty; she has only been proficient at cutting taxes, and, given the state of the household, this is not feasible now. Besides, it's what George W. Bush already did, and look where it got us. Nor does she present a serious or informed front. Obama, on the other hand, is both serious and informed, and he has new advisors and (presumably) new ideas, so I would guess that the stocks would rise on his election. It does not look, either, as if he would continue to pump $10 billion per month of American taxpayer money into the Iraq War; as he and Biden stressed during their debates, the Iraqi government does have a $79 billion surplus. (Of course this figure can be taken cum grano salis, but I trust them enough to be sure that it isn't that far off from the truth.) And Biden, while very much a Washington insider, is at least in the subordinate position of vice-presidential candidate.

* * *

I think that John McCain is totally wrong as presidential candidate. He doesn't get along well even with his own party, and he has been well-to-do and embroiled in Washington politics for so long that he has no idea how 90% of Americans live and what is important to them, and the only issues he appears to care about are deregulation and anti-corruption and war. His proposal during the first presidential debate to freeze spending on everything except defence and veterans, and then to slash funding for the useless projects that litter the budget, was in my view a little off the deep end. Even where he is passionate about issues, like the war and torture and the economy, he has consistently betrayed himself in the past two years. He voted against the anti-torture bill that he had introduced; he voted against the GI Bill that would have ensured returning soldiers a good education; and he voted for a bailout bill that went against all his economic principles. Grumbling (or, to borrow from the vernacular, bellyaching) about the bill afterward is absolutely no substitute for action. Most politicians have consciences, and, however diseased these may be, not many of them constantly air their scruples to extort commiseration and praise or to bask in their own thwarted righteousness. That's a wimpy cop-out, not a redeeming trait. He was a maverick, who let himself be branded.

One thing that puzzles me, too, is McCain's visceral personal dislike of Obama. As people have pointed out, he didn't even look at Obama during the first debate. (Which, in turn, is like Palin's performance in the vice-presidential debate, when Sen. Biden had just mentioned being a single father after his first wife and daughter died in a car accident, and she didn't even acknowledge that but cheerfully went on to her next talking points. NYT columnist Frank Rich wrote a really good article about matters like this.)

Generally he prided himself on his "straight talk," and now he condescends to insinuation and smear tactics like everyone else. Yesterday, in a rally, he rhetorically asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?", and someone shouted out "Terrorist!" He looked disapprovingly pouty at first, but then smiled, as did his wife in the background. He continues, "But, my friends, you ask such questions, and all you get in response is another angry barrage of insults." No correction, nothing. At least his statement is true, if one applies it to himself and his supporters. It's the exact same maddening phenomenon that occurred in the quotation I posted previously, where he says that politicians are expected to leave partisanship at the door, and then he blames Obama for the defeat of the bailout bill. Forget medicine; the cure for low blood pressure is a politician with a penchant for projection. And he was doing no more than following the base lead of Sarah Palin, who irretrievably ruined my opinion of her when she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" (i.e. ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers . . . vide dark-skinned people who may be Muslim). His Straight Talk Express has not only taken a detour to Bullsh*t Town, to borrow an expression from Jon Stewart, but it broke down there and is rusting away in the wrecking yard as we speak.

A Straw in the Wind

I was just watching Hardball with Chris Matthews, the American television show, when he mentioned that hundreds of thousands of new voters have registered in states like North Carolina and Florida. But best of all was these figures:

Pennsylvania:
474,000 New Democrats
38,000 Lost Republicans

This doesn't mean that, though 38,000 Republicans may have left their party, new voters are registering to fill the gap a little; it means that even with the new registered voters the Republican party has a huge loss.

Yoohoo! (c:

A Song without Words

On Friday I recorded some of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. They were not note-perfect but reasonably good in musical terms, so I've gradually been uploading them to my YouTube account. Here is a "Presto agitato" that is more like an Allegro molto weak-o, but is all right nonetheless. As it was not filmed in the customary darkness, the viewer may admire my nose in profile. It turns out that the best way to reduce the crackling noise and droning sound quality that is annoying in my other videos, is to place the digital camera on the flute-case on top of the piano, and to lay a thin cotton scarf under it. That's what I did on Friday, and that's why the sound quality should be painless for a change. There was a drama during the "recording session" that the camera didn't properly capture, and that was Ge. opening the right half of the door in the background in order to inform me that the buns that had been in the oven were ready.



On the whole I haven't been very sanguine about the future (and present quality) of my piano playing, and in New York it looks as if I'll have to abstain from it entirely. On the other hand, I am contemplating bringing along my violin, and listening to masterclasses and student concerts at Juilliard, which is a very exciting prospect. The problem with the piano has been that I haven't had training for a long time, and I'm reluctant to place my playing in the hands of other people, for fear that they won't expect enough of me, or that they will make me focus on technique so that I lose sight of the music itself. Secondly, I have always doubted whether I want to play the piano for any purpose other than my own amusement, and the amusement of anyone who happens to listen and enjoys it. Thirdly, I think that I presently don't have the mental acuity or the intuition or the life experiences that are needed so that I can play pieces as overarching narratives, discover new (viz. more accurate) ways of understanding and playing single notes and phrases and entire works, and compel my fingers to be less clumsy (the music occurs almost more in spite of them than because of them).