Read a story by Joyce Carol Oates about a nun and a more or less crazily serious college student named Allen Weinstein, In the Region of Ice, and enjoyed it thoroughly although the ending was not happy. In fact I thought the beginning was some of the funniest stuff I had ever read.

Had a collegial discussion with a young man of color who admired my piano playing and was watching me in the practice room. I opened up to see what he wanted, and he said he was “just watching” because he liked what he heard, which was the Beethoven #20 Sonata, played with metronome at 70. I have to use the metronome to make sure my notes are evenly played. Anyway, I met up with him by accident later in the Galleria, and it turns out we are both Christians, but I believe in the Big Bang and evolution, and he believes in neither. But it was a good discussion and we even got into vestigial tailbones and Darwin’s finches. He knew a lot but was mistaken about the etymology of ‘universe’, which he said means “one word” (as in “In the beginning there was the Word”) but which I looked up and means turned or combined into one. I was pleased that we were discussing the universe and religion and science and felt that I was doing the college thing. I just mention that he was a young man of color because he thought, mistakenly but earnestly, that the doctrine of evolution means something derogatory for black people.

Then I was tutoring a student and he said I should join the college choir which only has a few people, and Kira (the choir professor) said I should come and sit in as well, so there will be something else for me to do but it may help me to read alto parts, and we have a concert at the end of the October.

So far in Ear Training we have learned to recognize major and minor seconds and thirds, perfect fourths and fifths, the tritone, and of course the octave. We have yet to recognize sixths and sevenths and those are next.

Read a story by Edith Stein, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, in which Stein says, many times over, that the two women were “gay together” and that they were cultivating their voices, or cultivating something, anyway. It was supposedly a Cubist use of language, according to the editor, Susan Cahill, who cited John Hersey in The Writer’s Craft. (I hear that you have to cite everything especially when it comes to English courses so am getting into the practice here). I was somewhat fascinated with what she was doing which was a kind of playing with words more than analyzing people psychologically which is what most literature does, and she did some of that, too. A kind of Impressionism with the self-conscious brushstrokes if you ask me, but the repetition did seem Cubist.

I am trying to adopt an elevated tone here, and let me tell you it is difficult. Goes against my natural grain (only kidding). As Mozart says in Amadeus, “Elevated, elevated! I am fed to the teeth with elevated themes. Old dead legends…” I hope there is something for almost everybody in this blog, and it sure beats the loneliness of keeping a journal on a computer, only to be read, if at all, after I am dead! This is much more fun.

Well, good night.