I tried.
And tried.
And tried.
Damn it.
Tag: Life
My, aren’t we feeling precious?
I cringe when I hear someone extolling poets – or anyone else in a given field, say professional athletes – as a somehow superior species.
Even outstanding individuals need to be tempered as imperfect humans rather than extolled as gods.
Not that we shouldn’t keep striving toward excellence.
How do we take pride in our own accomplishments while staying humbly grounded?
A doctoral thesis dilemma
Doctoral hopefuls in English literature are often cautioned against selecting their favorite author as their dissertation subjects. So I’ve heard. Seems they’re quite likely to wind up hating everything about the person by the time their deep-dive project wraps up.
Wonder if that will happen with me and my Quaker history project before I’m done presenting it one way or another.
Not that I’d want to be addressed “Doctor.”
A shoutout to vocal warmups
If you like to sing, even if only in the shower, let me encourage you to check out some of these online.
One of my biggest surprises after getting involved in serious chorus participation after I retired from the newsroom was the importance of the warmups at our rehearsals. I had come to four-part, a cappella singing through Mennonites in my mid-30s, and I had never cottoned up to practicing scales and similar exercises back when I was learning violin as a preteen.
What George Emlen and then Megan Henderson presented in our first 15 minutes or so of rehearsal each week with Boston Revels totally changed my attitude. A good warmup not only added a few notes to my range but also tuned to the entire ensemble into a more, pardon the pun, finely tuned and more responsive instrument. Some of the exercises were definitely fun, laughter filled, as well as challenging. Try singing “Many mumbling mice singing by the moonlight my how nice” repeatedly as the pitch rises and the tempo speeds up, for instance, and soon the sopranos sound like they’re the Chipmunks on laughing gas. Or any of the numbers games.
And then, when Covid interrupted in-person interaction, some online offerings stepped into the void. I’m still finding them very helpful during the week between the rehearsal warmups with my new group, Quoddy Voices, and conductor John Newell.
Here’s a sampling:
- Cheryl Porter Vocal Coach. One of my favorites. With her big boxing gloves (seriously) and irresistible if corny enthusiasm, she could as easily be leading a housewives’ weight-control calisthenics round. But her exercises are heavy-hitting, well-grounded, and even dance inducing. Suitable for group singers and those looking to solo alike. Diss her at your own risk.
- Nathan Dame. Great perspectives from an outstanding Wylie East (Texas) public high school music educator. This is an example of why music can be a crucial part of a well-rounded curriculum. Dame pours so much energy into his adolescent choruses, I’m left wondering how he recovers at the end of the day. The kids clearly rise to his challenges and respect them. Many of his insightful techniques, meanwhile, seem to arise somewhere within him rather than from a textbook or standing tradition. And you can practice alongside them.
- Roger Hale. Solid college-level sessions for both actors and singers, grounded in classical perspectives with his Dixie State University students.
- Madeleine Harvey. Her video series relies on the fundamentals of traditional vocal training, things like breathing, breath control, tone, range top and bottom, pitch, agility, and avoiding strain. These are the kind of sessions a singer encounters with a personal professional vocal coach.
- Eric Arceneaux, Professional Vocal Warmup. His technical understanding of the voice extends to many popular music styles. Makes snobby me appreciate the abilities of some top-selling singers, too.
- Matthew Gawronski Just follow the notes on the screen. Some versions include a full choir to sing along with.
- Church Music Dublin with Mark Duley. Practical, everyday stuff. He’s one leader who finds physical movement with the hands and arms or more can improve the sound. I was skeptical at first. Not so now.
- Tony Leach with the Collaborative Music Education series from Pennsylvania State University. Professor Leach adds rote training in the African and African-American traditions to his excellent classical discipline. You’ll definitely get a sense of what makes Gospel such a focused genre to perform. I just wish the videos included his student choruses so that you’d get a feel of singing with others.
- Paul McKay One Voice. Not all of the warmups are for folks who read musical scores. McKay’s especially fine for explaining the inner working of things like riffs and runs and other techniques that greatly extend today’s vocal expression.
- Cincinnati Youth Choir. Don’t scoff at some of the children’s choirs. Their energy, clarity, and precision can be contagious. Just listen to the CYC’s video of “One voice” for proof. Besides, they can humble some of the rest of us.
Of course, if you start with these, you’ll quickly discover a host of great concerts and conductors as well. Beware.
‘Nine-to-five’ rarely fits what I saw
I used to be surprised by all the working-age adults on the street and in stores on weekdays, not just housewives, but now more likely the invisible off-hours employees on the job nights and weekends, especially at minimum wage in a 24/7 economy.
Not that I was that much on that schedule, either. I mean, I was working nights and weekends.
Think, too, of all those who work holidays – police, fire, nurses, ER personnel, toll-booth collectors, air traffic controllers, bus-train-plane-airport staffers, restaurants, convenience store, even grocery and pharmacy, plus journalists, entertainers, utility line, gas station attendants, theater crews.
The 9-to-5 bit starts to look spoiled. Besides, an 8 o’clock start was more likely, to allow for a lunch break.
Some related history books I’d like to see
Assuming they’re well written.
- A biography of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. He was the godfather of New England, after all, but failed to fulfill his dream.
- Ditto for father and son Alexander and Nicholas Shapleigh (especially the trials of being royalists as the Puritans and their commonwealth emerged).
- Especially a bio of Major Richard Waldron in all of his shenanigans. He made much of Dover a personal fiefdom and ignited decades of warfare that followed his death.
- How early colonial economics really worked. Start with the charter holders who “owned” the province but not the land.
- A clearer understanding of Puritans, Unitarians, and Baptists, especially as they evolved within New England.
- A closer examination of the Dover Meeting minutes, especially the Revolutionary War disciplinary actions as well as more on the recorded ministers and elders.
- Hampton Meeting and Salem Meeting … and a comprehensive history of New England Yearly Meeting and its Friends.
- Devonshire folkways and ways its Puritans may have deviated from those …
- How the four towns differed, then and now.
- Dover in its textile mill glory days.
For my own contributions to the field, see Quaking Dover. Order your copy at your favorite bookstore. Or request it at your public library.
Much more than a spring tonic
It was fairly common in the wild when I was growing up in the Midwest, and its red roots and polymorphic leaves of one, two, and three lobes all on one tree made it distinctive. But the tree is rather rare where I’m now living.
It does, however, play into my Quaking Dover story, as I’ll explain.
Here are ten things of note about sassafras.
- Found in the eastern North America and East Asia, the tree can grow to somewhere between 60 to 100 feet in height (the maximum keeps growing in the versions I’m encountering), though I associate it mostly with shrubs in the forest undergrowth. For others, it was seen as an aggressive plant quickly cluttering old fields.
- Traditionally, it was famed as spring tonic in the form of tea boiled from its dark red, aromatic roots, although the leaves and bark can also be used. More recent research cautions not taking it for more than a week, and it was pulled from commercial markets after experiments in 1960 found that safrole, a compound prominent in its volatile oils, caused liver cancer in rats and mice.
- Commercial oils used today in foods, cosmetics, and soaps are safrole-free and safe for consumption.
- Root beer, a popular soft drink, was traditionally made from sassafras roots, often cooked with molasses. Charles Elmer Hires, the first to successfully market the brew, was a teetotaler who wanted to call his extract “root tea” but found it sold better among Pennsylvania miners as “root beer.” And, for the record, it was long used to brew a backwoods beer.
- French Acadians relocating to Louisiana discovered its spice qualities from the Native Choctaws. Its dried lemony-scent leaves are ground to create filé powder, a green aromatic dust that thickens Cajun gumbos or is later sprinkled atop the dish.
- Its blue berries on red stems, forming early in the fall foliage season, provide a high-energy food for migratory birds on their long southward flight. The birds are attracted to the color.
- The tree’s leaves turn a spectacular variety of purple, orange, yellow, and red. That alone earns it consideration in landscape design.
- The straight-grained, durable wood was commonly used to make horse-drawn sleighs, though the runners were usually hickory, a harder substance. Sassafras has also been popular in making buckets, cabinets, cradles and other furnature, woodwork, and even utensils such as spoons.
- Native Americans valued sassafras in a range of medicinal uses, including a poultice for open wounds. Fascinated by the applications, Europeans soon attributed the exotic plant with supernatural qualities, including the retardation of age, making sassafras a rival to tobacco in importance as an export from America.
- How medicinal? It was the reason 23-year-old Captain Martin Pring, in 1603, became the first European to lead an exploration of the Piscataqua River. Sassafras was valued as a cure for the French pox, which you may recognize as the name the English and others called what we refer to as syphilis. (If only it had actually worked.) Failing to find many of the trees in today’s Dover and vicinity, he sailed on to encamp at Truro on Cape Cod, where he indeed harvested sassafras but was interrupted when his rude behavior greatly upset the Natives, making for one of the first sour episodes in English relations with the New World locals.
Add to this to our list of items made obsolescent in our lifetimes
Even before many folks switched to unlisted numbers, in part to evade obnoxious ding-a-ling solicitations, the annual telephone book began shrinking. The migration from landline to cell phones was apparently the final straw, along with Yellow Pages regulars who turned instead to website searches or FaceBook.
What was long a standard reference volume for local communities is now long gone.
When’s the last time you saw a phone book?
A few islands in comparison
Islands come in all shapes and sizes, and even that can change dramatically with the tides. Now that I’m living on one, I’m really beginning to appreciate their variety. Some you can drive to or from, while others require a ferry or even an airplane. The better-known ones seem to be vacation or travel destinations.
Here’s a sampling, starting with home.
- Eastport, Maine, including Moose, Treat, Carlow, Matthews, and a few more: 3.6 square miles (12.3 with water)
- Manhattan: 22.7 square miles
- Staten: 58.5 square miles
- Martha’s Vineyard: 96 square miles
- Nantucket: 48 square miles
- Grand Manan, New Brunswick: 55 square miles (198.4 with water), but one side is a 20-mile wall of tall bluffs – the same length as Martha’s Vineyard.
- Sanibel, Florida: 16.1 square miles
- Mount Desert, Maine (home of Acadia National Park): 108 square miles
- Santa Catalina, California: 75 square miles
- San Juan, Washington: 55 square miles
Care to tell us about others?
What’s off with Microsoft’s log-in algorithm?
You know, the changing photo that keeps appearing when you log in. The calculations have no idea, really, of what I like or don’t. My sensibilities are far more complicated than its simple “mountains” or “seashores” calculus.
In one photo, for instance, a single bright-colored backpack at the bottom of the scene threw off the entire wilderness message. It looked like trash. That sort of thing. I didn’t like the particular photo for that reason, but I loved the bigger landscape.
It’s like living with a painting and one day you finally observe something that becomes a flaw. You loved it up to that point. And then?
It’s a binary switch rather than a scale of one-to-ten.
For now, I’m finding some comfort in that, sensing they still aren’t outsmarting me.
Jnana's Red Barn 