Homing Device

Back when I travelled a lot and my marriage had ended I wondered, from time to time, where home was.  But my Fox Terrier, Henry, had stayed with me and I realized eventually: home is where your dog lives.

Maybe not meaningful to those poor souls who don't have a dog or cat or someone else who provides love (in the dog's case, unconditional; in the cat's, more measured) and whose daily life is generally geared to yours.  Maybe it can happen with something unconscious like a plant or inanimate like a house, but it never did for me.  What mattered, what still matters, is another thoughtful animal to whom I say goodbye when I leave and who greets me warmly on return.

Music Man

Even though each is different, in among listening and playing and composing there are threads of the same stuff, music stuff, a kind of mental perfume.  I don't know if it has to do with training, or exposure, because I've had a little of the former and a lot of the latter, and whether or not they matter this essential stuff is there, swirling around.  It's no more organized or logical than the smell of leather or nutmeg or a woman's hair.  Some other conception is at work.

I hang on to this even though I don't listen enough, or to the right things, and I spend way too many hours listening to talk on radio and podcasts, when I could be searching out and listening to, say, Alan Hovhaness, or Bobby Blue Bland.

I don't play enough, and I sure don't compose enough - mostly my solo sessions devolve into working on the perfect blues run or trying to conquer ragtime.  When it's with others, there's more progress, but nothing like it should be.

But the music stuff still floats around, and on a good day it knocks me off of my stupid stride.  I open my eyes, breathe in, there's a clear but non-logical reason to take the next step, with a slightly better course.

Decapitation as Policy

I'm becoming increasingly non-interventionist, even Fortress Americanist, except in one respect:  how to deal with the really bad guys.

I guess Bid Laden  - The Final Chapter was what tipped me over on this.  For a long time I bought into the notion that assassination - not to put too fine a point on it - was bad policy.  Not sure why, but I guess the reason was that we wouldn't want them to do it to us.

But how about we put the bar high.  We don't intervene, much less assassinate, if the leader refrains from genocide and from actively working to murder innocent American civilians.  But if he does do either of these, we go kill 'm.

Then we don't stick around to try to make his state into Belgium.  We just say to the locals, here's why we did it.  We hope for the best for you.  Don't elect or anoint or empower another one who flunks one of these two tests or we will be back.  Otherwise, we won't.

And what if they apply the same standard to us?  I'm OK with that.  If we have a leader who commits genocide or plans the murder of innocent civilians of another country, and we don't take him out ourselves, I can bend a little on sovereignty.  Come and get him.

Otnemem

This online journal business has a certain backwards quality to it, in that the standard narrative reads forward, you start at the beginning and end at the end.  But if you read these entries in the order in which they appear, they go back.

A little like a wonderful film called Memento.  It's a narrative - a mystery, and how - which is told going back in time, with each chapter followed by the preceding chapter.  The mystery is compounded by the fact that the protagonist has no medium or long term memory, and by the end of each chapter he has forgot the beginning predicate.  But it's not truly backward, it's really a series of loops, because each entry itself has to play forward in time.

Another way to say this is that as far as I know there is no way to duplicate verbally the visual presentation of a movie running backward.  Follow to hard too be would it...

Goody Goody

Meeting a colleague in a few minutes at Goody Goody, one of those institutions that are badges of honor to a particular place and time.  It's in a part of St. Louis, Goodfellow and Natural Bridge, that most (white) St. Louisans regard as totally off bounds, part industrial, part ghetto.

It is a clean, amiable restaurant, decades in St. Louis in the same place.  Diner food, a little southern, white ownership but mostly African American clientele and staff.  Also police and politicians.

I will be having mashed potatoes and gravy, among other things, which ever since my rounds with Mr. C has been a staple.  Without putting too dramatic a point on it, I think this is a place where they know about healing and redemption.

I don't think this is patronizing or slumming but I guess that's in the eye of the beholder.  I know it's good food, a welcoming place, and a revelation to most of my friends I take there.

This could be the world, damn it.

Calhoun County, Illinois

Looking towards St. Charles County, Missouri.  Between here and the horizon, down a bluff, is the Mississippi.  Jim and Huck rafted past here.

Homage forte

A quick detour into near-pedantry.


A peeve of mine, pet or no, has been the quasi-educated use of the term "homage" with a French accent.  Omazh, with the accent on the second syllable.


It's an English term, feudal origin, from Middle English, probably earlier from Old French, originally meaning the acknowledgement of fealty by a vassal to his lord.  It is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, and a hard "j" sound, not a "zh". With or without a silent "h".  It isn't, as far as I can tell, a French word -  I have two French dictionaries in the office and "homage" isn't in either one.


Anyway, it's an interesting animal - an English term that looks kind of Frenchy and therefore the semi-literates use a French accent.  Unique?


Non.  Take forte, which my father always insisted on pronouncing like the thing with a moat around it.  He was right.  Dad's forte  - his strong suit - was, indeed, the English language.


But time and the same predilections have caused the plebes to pronounce it for-tay, accent second syllable.   Which makes no sense.   It's a noun, for goodness' sake.  Why make it sound like it has an accent aigu?  (OK, it may not be misplaced French.  It may be Italian - the forte you see in music.  Where the "e" is, of course pronounced.  But I think not.  I think it's more wannabe Francophilia.)


Anyway, the sad part is that the dictionaries seem to have folded, and for-tay is now an OK second pronunciation.  As will probably happen with omazh.  Lordy, can the apocalypse be far behind?