What’s new?

I love how my last post was titled “I miss blogging,” then I went over half a year before blogging again.

Anyway,  life is pretty good, if I spend a minimum amount of time looking at the news. After one too many communication kerfuffles with my former primary care doctor, I have switched to a completely different medical practice. This could be the start of a beautiful doctor-patient relationship. I just finished a tough new project at work, and in the middle of that yet more layoffs were announced–not me, but some close and long-time colleagues.  That was unsettling and won’t be fixed soon.

After the really bad week of poor doctoring and job cuts, I’m somehow regaining interest in hobbies, almost as if I’m not as depressed as I was. I’m acquiring CDs and reacquainting myself with performers such as Elton John, Gerry Rafferty, and the Moody Blues, as well as grabbing new releases by Blitzen Trapper, Iron and Wine, and The Decemberists. I’m also considering creating a nice listening den in my house, a challenge given how full of stuff every room in the house is.

I’m paying more attention to birds this year, and I’ve set a target of seeing 100 species, which might be optimistic. I’m just under 30 now, so I have to get out there more. I’ve been birding  since 1972, so it’s not as if I don’t know where to look.

Playing music? Well… that’s been hard to do. Did you know that if you haven’t played much in four years, your fingers forget how to be accurate and smooth? And they lose their calluses? Boy, if I knew then what I know now … but that’s a topic for its own blog post sometime. I have a music project I’d like to work on, and it might result in a short recording and maybe even new songs. All I have to do is pick up a guitar more often than once a month.

I could keep writing, but I’ll save some things for later. I hope readers are doing well and happy. I’ll write more soon. Promise.

I miss blogging.

I miss a lot of things I used to regularly do, of course. The turmoil in the former Twitter and the resulting dislocations just makes me remember when my blog was where I met up with anyone who was following me and my thoughts, such as they are. It was all a lot more consistent and a lot less flightty in blogland.

I’ve had two Twitter accounts, one “normal” and one a kind of “after-dark” (for naughty things, I must admit) for years. My replacement for the normal account is on the big Mastodon instance mastodon.social. I’ve managed to reconnect with a few regulars from Twitter, but not many. As with LiveJournal’s several exoduses, people have landed in several disparate places or even stopped Tweeting, er, short-blogging. The shake-out is still in progress. Maybe regular blogging will come back? A-ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway.

I miss reading blogs, too. WordPress facilitates this by having a sort of aggregator called a reading list, and I follow a number of blogs from friends near and far (and friendly sorts). I tend to only get to it once every couple of weeks or so, unfortunately. This accounts for occasions where I read something that inspires me to comment, but it’s several days “late.” Oops. Let me pull you back in time to this thing you may have forgotten.

The worst part of the social media turmoil is, we have been waiting for Twitter to die since November 2022, and it just won’t lie down and die. I did not think I’d still be checking Twitter several times a day in August 2023. There are still posts, because, at least until this month, there were still a lot of people on Twitter with no clear option for a new platorm, and they relied on the reach they still had on Twitter. That may finally be changing; whether it’s from Twitter’s infrastructure collapsing further, or the critical mass finally migrating somewhere, or fatigue, I can’t say.

I will not promise anything, but I’d like to be here more. What’ll I say? Who knows. We’ll see.

If you’re curious, my Mastodon page is https://mastodon.social/@songdogmi. It’s not terribly active, if that matters one way or another.

The 2022 book report

My want-to-read shelf as of today (photo by me)

In February 2021, I joined Goodreads. (“Didn’t know it was part of Amazon,” he grumbles.) It seemed like a fun site, and I wanted to get back into reading. I went so far as to set a reading goal of 12 books for 2021. That seemed reasonable, right? One book a month? I could do that. Well, no, I couldn’t. I only read two books and part of another. In 2022, I set my sights on a more realistic goal of six … and only managed one. A book of poetry of but 100 pages, at that – Matthew Olzmann’s Constellation Route, a fine collection of some new and previously published new poems. (He used to live in Detroit, back in the Gotham City Cafe heyday.)

Mind, I acquired 23 books in 2022, one of which was Olzmann’s. Love buying books, love love love. Reading them, that’s harder. (Don’t even ask about shelving them.)

I’m a bit disappointed. I own lots of books I think I would enjoy. I just don’t make time for them, I guess. Part of that is perhaps due to my day job: I’m still composing and correcting large-type books for my longtime employer. My colleagues and I handle something like 1200 books a year in many genres. I don’t have to read any of them cover-to-cover, but I see and grasp a lot out of them as I lay them out and fix typos in the course of a day. It’s different from savoring the author’s artistry with prose and ideas over time, of course. And it requires me to work on books I would never read myself – though I subscribe to reader’s advisory librarian Betty Rosenberg’s Law, “Never apologize for your taste in reading.”

Oh, did I mention that way back when I was an editor/project manager, I coordinated a series of readers advisory references? Yeah. That might’ve been the most fun editing project I have had. Anyway. Books are kind of my life, but not in the way that you’d think if I actually said that at a party.

Recently I remembered that when I was a child, most of what I borrowed from libraries was nonfiction, mostly how-tos, science, history, radio, birds, and other things related to hobby interests. I also read some science fiction, though more adventurish and less thinky (of course, back then, sci-fi wasn’t quite as deep or diverse as it is today). I read a lot of short stories, too. Now, I think I should read novels, when in my past I didn’t really read many. Perhaps I need to cut myself a little slack.

In 2023, I don’t plan to set any targets in Goodreads. I still want to read more than I have been. I’ll try to read the sorts of things I used to read more, though. This Christmas, one of the books I was given was Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60, by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert. That should be right up my alley. After that, well, I definitely have a lot of other choices.

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My Goodreads profile
My LibraryThing profile

Banished words – Not the GOAT

An inflection point for GOATs: Please quiet quit these ‘banished words’ moving forward

Remember when every December 31st, I blogged the Lake Superior State University list of banished words for the year? Here is the 2022 list.

2022 Albums

I acquired a lot of CDs this year, most of them filling gaps in my collection from long ago. Here are the recordings I managed to snag the same year they were released this year:

Death Cab for Cutie – Asphalt Meadows
Dan Mangan – Being Somewhere
Lyle Lovett – 12th of June
Arcade Fire – We
Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma: Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5
Emma Guzman – Something Less Than Alone

Emma Guzman is a local artist, and she released her second full-length album this year. I bought it on Bandcamp. The others should be easily found with an Internet search.

My goal for 2023 is to build the CD shelf I bought in 2022, so I can buy more CDs and have a place to put them. How’s that for ambitious?

Social Media Will Break Your Heart

I know that I’ve been a wafer a while (that’s a joke, ha ha), but I thought I’d come back with something I posted on my Mastodon account. Oh, yeah, I’m on Mastodon now, because Twitter … well, you know.

I’ve been here before.

I was on LiveJournal for years. (Yes, it’s still around.) It was my first group of social media friends in addition to my first real blog. People left due to first one controversial act by the owners, then due to another. I stuck it out, though, because I didn’t see any single viable place where exiles landed. Finally, enough people left, and the new owners were just too untrustworthy. I had to make peace with a piecemeal approach. Even then, I lost people.

I replaced the blog with my current WordPress (that I don’t update, shame on me). I replaced the social part with Twitter. Now Twitter is what it is, and I’m back in the spot where I’m faced with moving on and possibly losing track of people who’ve been important to my last few years of online life. Maybe I went a little parasocial on them, I don’t know. All I know is, along with my shaking-fist-at-sky over Birdsite, I’m a bit anxious with the threat of loss.

Maybe I need to go touch grass (or snow, if we get some). Look at some birds, walk around more, visit other people in meatspace. The online upheaval, real as it is (trust me on this), is stressful.

Maybe I also need to write my blog again, since I’m posting kind-of-threads on Mastodon.

https://mastodon.social/@songdogmi/109526204590978464 [accessed 27 Dec 2022]

It has been a couple of weeks. I’m not out of Twitter yet; many of those I follow are still there posting, and the only negative effects for me have been little glitches in the software now and then. Twitter is not the future for me, that’s for sure.

Author Catherynne Valenti wrote this summary of things social media, and she’s a bit put out, and she’s right to be: Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media (substack.com)

Memoriam list

Charles Bruce (Bruce Charles) Montney
Judy Cloutier Montney
Gertrude Strachan
Peter Cooper
Vern Davis
Rosemary Gilbert
Cindy Lucas
Charles Sanderson
(David) Blair
Sean Fitzgerald
Heather Price
Anna Dougan
Owen Fite (Owain Phyfe)
Bill McGettigan
Donald Cloutier
Shirley Cloutier Karns
Delores Hill
Hellen Lewandowski Jones
Tina Lewandowski
Daniel Majewski
Dennis Hull
Robert C. Thomas
Wilhelm Heine
Ernest R. “Butch” Cloutier, Jr.
Charlotte Cloutier Lewandowski
Steven Miskoci
Dennis Putnam
Urso Chappell
Bill Pulliam
Mark Irons

This should’ve been posted a couple of days ago. I hope I will be forgiven.

Acknowledgment

Well, NaBloPoMo didn’t go well. Only missed eleven days in a row, huh? Still more posts in a month than I’ve written in years, though. No, I am not going to write 2.5 posts per day through the end of the month.

I don’t have any bad news to report that might’ve gotten in my way. David came, and we ate a lot. Chinese, pizza, Indian, Chicken Shack, Mexican, and burgers was the rotation this time. It was all good. There were no concerts, because there wasn’t anything to hear that was worth sitting in a concert hall wearing masks. It’s easier to put on a CD of something during dinner: Thelonius Monk, say, or Elgar, or Yo-Yo Ma & Edgar Meyer & Mark O’Connor fusing American old-timey into classical. The weather was typical Detroit; when it was nice, it was very nice; when it rained, one slept a lot and tried to not get too glum.

All else was work. I had my most challenging project over the last month, which causes me to rend my garments and gnash my teeth until it’s finally done.

See, you haven’t missed much. I still have a couple of topics I’d like to write about. Maybe this month, maybe after that. I’m trying to not be too hung-up about things. Be kind to all, especially oneself.

Graeme Edge, 1941–2021

Graeme Edge, drummer and founding member of the Moody Blues, passed away today, aged 80. Along with drumming and composing some of the songs the band performed, he composed much of the poetry on the albums. “The Balance” is one he cowrote with Ray Thomas. I’m remembering being totally swept away listening to it with the Ott Lake Rambler way back in college. It still sweeps me away all these years later. (Mike Pinder speaks the words here.)

Book burning in 2021?

There have been several news stories and reports on Twitter about local school boards reviewing books in libraries, threatening to ban books with themes that the boards do not approve of. Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, maybe more. Some of the targeted books have long been held to be classics, or are famous from previous censorship campaigns. Some are new and and have even won awards. The board in the Virginia district had a member who said these books should be burned. Most of my readers are going to hear echoes of the original German statement of that from the early 1930s.

It’s not just old white dudes (or ladies) with these attitudes, but it is Republican-affiliated people. The Republican party has been targeting local politics all along. It’s how they built their power, along with manipulation of laws, gerrymandering, and outright lies and bullying. Start local, build up through states into national politics. They’re still building the local base, and it’s getting more and more baldly reactionary.

We can’t do this. We can’t go down this road. “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings” (Heinrich Heine)*

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* Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), as translated in True Religion (2003) by Graham Ward, p. 142 (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine [accessed 10 Nov 2021])