I'm on the hunt for a student piano. I have one prospect available for free (!) via craigslist that I'm investigating. It's a spinet; I'd prefer an upright or even a grand, but, hey, I'm strongly driven by economy right now.
It occurs to me that the problem with an acoustic (aka
real) piano is the possibility of driving my poor wife crazy with my repeated erroneous playing of troublesome passages. With the borrowed electronic keyboard I'm using now, I can turn down the volume, or even wear headphones. She claims that she can just retire to another room while I'm practicing, but I'd hate to hammer out my musical shortcomings and strident dischords throughout the home. Oh, well... with practice there perhaps won't be quite as many strident dischords.
I am now reading "Grendel," by John Gardner - a retelling of the Beowulf epic through the eyes of its beastly and murderous antagonist. It is excellent. I also like the
book cover art. At first I thought it was by Marshall Arisman (whom I have blogged about before), but no.
Much of Marshall Arisman's art deals with
eerie distortions. It's troubling;
not pleasant to look at. Arisman claims to see auras around people and I suppose that this informs and influences his art.
It's funny... in that book about the Greeks I was reading earlier this week, much was made of the
kouros, or the statue of the young man, who represented to the Greeks youth, vigor, masculinity and ideal form. Thomas Cahill echoed other writers when he supposed that the
kouros was the Greeks telling the world - and future civilizations -
this is the best we have.
Are Marshall Arisman's tortured forms truly representative of modern man? (And, perhaps, specifically modern
American man?) I would hate to be judged against, say, the image above as our 21st century
kouros.
But no, of course not. For every wretched prison inmate, modern brute or 21st C. Grendel there are many, many good people. We too often become fixated on the repellent.
A quote by Will Durant seems relevant: "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs and write poetry. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."
I like to think of the banks as being the domain of the genealogists.
Speaking of genealogy, I am trying again, after a fashion. Trying again at what? The great, nagging, unsolved mystery of my life's work:
Who was my great-great-great-grandfather Clark? I've printed out a list of all the Burlington County, New Jersey Clarks in the 1850 and 1860 census records, looking for likely candidates based on guesses about age. It's rather pathetic, really, but I'm running out of new ideas. I keep hoping that somehow if I view the data differently some new avenue of research will pop into my head.
Wesley H. Clark (b. circa 1818, died 1888), is my second great-grandfather. I know quite a lot about his descendents and, because of YDNA testing, his fifth great-grandfather or so, Gabriel Clark, born all the way back in about 1630 in Yorkshire, England. What I
don't know are the identities of Wesley's parents, siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins. If I can get any of that I can possibly link everyone together - one big happy family.
I can't describe how maddening this is to me... I sometimes feel like Captain Ahab obsessing over Moby Dick.
