It’s far too late to do a real post, so here’s another picture
from the Walk for Hunger:
![[Sunny, Ishmael, Laura, Paul, Anne]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk09-nostands.jpg)
The photographer was Ishmael Stefanov (left) by time delay.
One of the performers, who didn’t read any preliminary play
lists, and still didn’t really have his notebook in
order at the actual performance, told me yesterday that we should have done a
completely different kind of program.
This is probably why the great conductors never socialize with
the orchestra.
![[walk for hunger 2009]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk09.jpg)
We had good weather for what we were doing. There were a
couple of raindrops at about noon, and a few more at 2:30, when
the other group was playing, but the clouds made it easier to
see the music, and it was close to t-shirt weather. (I had warm
underwear under mine; otherwise I would have been wearing a
sweater.)
We were worried about whether the pieces with just vocals would
carry to where the walkers could hear them, and they certainly
didn’t carry as well as the recorders or the brass or string
instruments, but I checked while Ishmael and Anne were playing a
duet, and you could certainly hear that it was happening, so you
could go closer if you wanted to hear better.
Of course, the ipod generation doesn’t believe it’s music if
you have to move to hear it. We’ve been asked several times
playing at picnics why we couldn’t just amplify what we were
doing so they didn’t have to move.
I’ve looked into amplification, and my impression is that even
when I was younger and stronger, anything light enough for me to
carry sounds pretty tinny. And of course, for this application,
we’d need something that ran on batteries, which increases the
weight.
The serpent was a big hit, as was Paul Ukleja’s trumpet
rendition of Stardust Memories.
We needed to ask Paul to play some solos to give us breaks in
the morning, because the only group we could find couldn’t start
playing until 1 PM. They had 6 recorder players and a violinist,
and played very well out of an anthology of Elizabethan
music.
For breaks from the singing, Paul, Ishmael, and I played
Country Dance music, and found a few things that really worked
pretty well with fiddle, recorder, and serpent.
I decided to do all the performing standing up, so the serpent
was resting on a 24 inch stool, which seems to allow it to
vibrate more freely than when it’s supported on my legs. I
think I’ll make a point of performing that way in the future.
But I think I’ve said that in the past, too.
I posted the
previous installment when I needed a fast post, so I
didn’t do any research about what’s already been said about the subject.
Subsequent googling turns us this
article from
2000 about tuberculosis and Spanish influenza. This is much
later than my conversation with my friend, and includes an
argument for tuberculosis being a contributing factor that I
hadn’t remembered. Typical influenza deaths occur heavily in
infants and the elderly, but in 1918, there was also a spike in
20-30 year olds.
Very little of what I’ve read about the flu in Mexico addresses
this issue, but
this
piece from
the New York Times does point out that there were some deaths
among young adults, which was one of the factors that triggered the
concern on the part of the Mexican government.
This is usually my big performance of the year. I gave the
details in my Cantabile Band
post yesterday. For this one, I thought I’d dredge up
some pictures from previous Walks.
I’m certainly not going to have time to post tomorrow morning.
I may post to the spindle later today, or I may wait until I get
home with a picture and post that.
This was last year. The real performance was when we played
for Bonnie in her hospital room. This one was dampened by both
rain and Bonnie dying; one performer had done dropin rehearsals,
and another performer had another event to go to and dropped in
for the first set but had left before this set. The rain actually
stopped by noon, but I don’t think most of us remember it that
way. We did a lot of trios, some of which we’re repeating this
year; I hope it’s more cheerful to sing about walking over hills
an dales and birds singing.
![[walk08]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk08.jpg)
The year before may have been a high point of some sort. We
did a performance of a lot of the same repertoire at the Boston Recorder
Society Play the Recorder Day, and really knew things pretty
well. People had learned some things about how to secure music
and stands from the wind the previous year.
![[walk07]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/cantabile-walk07.jpg)
2006 was the year we played at the Jeremiah
Ingalls festival in Vermont, so we put a bunch of shape note
stuff on the program. I think it was an entertaining program if
you liked both listening to music and watching musicians run up
and down the riverbank chasing their music.
![[walk06]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk06.jpg)
2005 was another year it rained, although, again, it really
cleared up pretty well by the time we were playing. But the viol
player didn’t want to get her instrument out, and a less
experienced performer freaked out when I suggested switching some
parts so that I could play bass on the serpent. It wasn’t even
her part I wanted to switch — it was the person she was standing
next to. So now there’s language in the FAQ
about how in a dropin group you have to be prepared to be either
one-on-a-part or not one-on-a-part.
![[walk05]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk05.jpg)
2004 was the year of the best professional coperformers.
It was really hot and two very good recorder players came and
played duets and lots of people stopped to listen to them.
![[walk04]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk04.jpg)
This was a big band performance. I think I made everybody come
to at least one rehearsal, but not necessarily enough rehearsals
for them to have learned the music. And it was a big enough crowd
that it was hard to hear. I think it wasthe year we started having
other groups to help us out, but I got several groups, only some
of whom showed up when and where they were supposed to.
![[walk03]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/wfh03.jpg)
This was a big band where not everybody came to a rehearsal,
and nobody could hear anything from the other end of the group.
It might have been the first year we had the whole day to cover,
and I pretended we could do it with solos, and people had the idea
they should be able to walk to the bathroom (a mile or so away)
between sets. I opened my big mouth at dinner afterwards about
how to run a recorder society, and
that’s how I got stuck doing it for a while.
![[walk02]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/walk/walk02.jpg)
2001 was the year I founded the Cantabile Renaissance Band.
For two or three years previous to that, I had a fairly good
recorder trio, and we just bought some of the books of recorder
arrangements we knew pretty well and played. I think we were only
covering two hours, and we met regularly anyway without random
people dropping in. The biggest problem I remember was that if
the wind came up and you were facing the wrong direction, the
sound didn’t come out of the tenor recorder. A recorder group
that meets regularly really makes more sense in this context than
the crazy stuff we do now, but I don’t have one of those, and I
don’t know many people who do.
The last two company dishes I’ve made have been lots nicer
because I bought an 8-ounce package of dried trumpet mushrooms from Earthy
Delights.
It was recommended on the New York Times Bitten
Blog, with some very flowery language about the texture of
the mushrooms after reconstitution being very similar to fresh
mushrooms.
That isn’t my experience — they seem as slimy and rubbery in
texture as other dried mushrooms I’ve reconstituted. But if you
buy in bulk they are cheaper, and if you chop them up fine
enough you don’t mind the texture.
And you get the reconstituting liquid to cook with. These seem
to have less sand in them than some, although you still watch
the tail end of the liquid when you’re adding it to
anything.
My favorite thing to do with the liquid so far was to use it to
cook kasha. The kasha is already an earthy taste, and having
the mushroom soaking liquid makes it even better.
I watched the last episode of the television adaptation on
Sunday, and finished rereading the book yesterday.
It’s a good adaptation, and the plot of the book is convoluted
enough that seeing the adaptation helps in reading the book, even
if you’re used to the
the convoluted plots of nineteenth century novels and soap
operas.
Of course, an eight hour TV show has to leave out a lot of
stuff from a 900 page book. I was especially sorry to lose the
impoverished music publisher. (He’s Mrs. Plornish’s father, who
at the beginning of the book is living in the Workhouse so as
not to take food out of the mouths of the Plornish
children.)
I think even the experienced adaptors who did this one chafed
at the restrictions, because the end seemed unusually
compressed, leaving us with no idea of what happens to several
characters who have been fairly carefully described (most
notably Minnie Meagles and her husband).
Of course, Dickens’ treatment of the business tycoon who steals
from one fund to pay off the investors in other funds and finally
loses money for all the main characters seems especially
contemporary.
The subplot where Miss Wade convinces Tattycorum (Harriet) to
leave her employment with the Meagles and live with her is a
little harder to translate to the twentyfirst century. One
reviewer suggested this was because of the hint of a lesbian
affair, but actually Dickens does hint at that. Mr. Meagles says
to Miss Wade:
‘If it should
happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted
delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough
to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against
yourself.’
The problem is
that we are initially inclined to sympathize with Harriet for
feeling oppressed and ignored, where Dickens really believes she
should be grateful and submissive to such excellent people who are
being so kind to her.
Here are a few notes on things I picked up on on this reading
that you might not have noticed.
‘I am spending the evening with the rest of ’em,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve
been singing. I’ve been taking a part in White sand and grey sand.
I don’t know anything about it. Never mind. I’ll take any part in
anything. It’s all the same, if you’re loud enough.’
It’s actually a round — the person who taught it to me thought
it was Ravenscroft, but I don’t find it there.
![[music]](https://i0.wp.com/www.laymusic.org/pictures/sand.jpg)
“Hold your tongue!” cried Jo, covering her ears. “‘Prunes
and prisms’ are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to
it. I came here to moralize, not to hear things that make me
skip to think of.”
If I’d thought of it, I would have known it was a quotation, and would
have probably guessed it was Dickens, but I wouldn’t have
guessed anything as good as what Mrs. General tells Amy Dorrit
when explaining why it’s more genteel and feminine to say “Papa”
than “Father”.
‘Papa is a preferable mode of address,’ observed Mrs General. ‘Father is
rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to
the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it
serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
yourself in company–on entering a room, for instance–Papa, potatoes,
poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.’
The third party, which had ascended from the valley
on the Italian side of the Pass, and had arrived first, were four in
number: a plethoric, hungry, and silent German tutor in spectacles, on
a tour with three young men, his pupils, all plethoric, hungry, and
silent, and all in spectacles.
The derivation is from plethora, implying that the face is red because
of a plethora of blood.
With the coverage of the swine flu, I’ve been thinking about an
arcane fact I was told once about the epidemic of 1918.
A friend I went to college with went on to study demography in
graduate school. At that time (early 1970’s), the way you got a PhD in
demography was to study the “demographic transition” (when people
get prosperous enough to consider children an expense instead of
an asset) somewhere. We lived in Rhode Island, so he studied it
in Rhode Island.
This meant that he looked at essentially all the death
certificates issued in the first few decades of the
twentieth century. And one of the things he and other
demographers noticed about the spike in deaths from Spanish
Influenza in 1918 was that it
led to a decline in deaths from tuberculosis over the next decade
or so.
So the theory at that point was that the people who died from
the flu tended to be people who already had low-grade
tuberculosis.
So if the current flu coming out of Mexico is anything like the
1918 flu, and if the theory based on death
certificates in the twentieth century has any validity, then we
might be in better shape than some people are worried about. I’d
be very surprised if the level of low-grade tuberculosis, at least in developed countries, isn’t a
lot lower now than in 1918.
Of
course, further research may well have invalidated the theory
about the 1918 deaths, and there may be very little resemblance
between the viruses in 2009 and the ones in 1918.
I said I was looking forward to doing it
based on how well the new version worked on the laptop. I’m
pretty well done, and I’m not really looking backwards with
fondness, but upgrading is really a lot easier than it used to
be in the bad old days.
To begin with, when I first tried it yesterday via the standard
network upgrade, it downloaded a
few packages and then hung. When I tried it again, it downloaded
a few more and hung.
This didn’t happen when I upgraded the laptop, but that’s
probably because I didn’t do that the day after the release was
official.
So I read the instructions, and found a way
to use a bittorrent to get the CD and upgrade from the CD
images. This was quite fast, and I had the upgrade completed in
only 3 or 4 hours. I didn’t have much time between then and when
my dinner guests arrived to check things out, but there wasn’t
anything obviously wrong.
As I mentioned, I use the desktop for a lot more different
things than I do the laptop, so it’s only to be expected that
there will be more problems.
First, the good news — I can use the -# option to the lpr
command again. This is going to make Tuesdays, when I print new
music for the Cantabile
Band, much less irritating.
Now for the (relatively) bad news:
On the possibly good news but not yet verified front — firefox
may be leaking less memory.
I posted previously about
the complete misdiagnosis when she first went to the doctor
complaining about being out of breath.
Once she got to the hospital, and they were running all the
tests they could think of all the time, things proceded much more
efficiently. She had scans during her time in December in the
Salem Hospital which indicated some kind of tumors in the
abdominal cavity.
She wrote my sister, who has a large Christmas party every year, on December 30:
As you probably know, I’m just out of the hospital after a stay of 3
1/2 weeks. Laura kindly bailed me out on Friday. I was hoping
against hope that I would feel well enough to come to your concert and
party today, but, with the long drive and all, it just wouldn’t be
prudent. Though I have short bursts of feeling fairly energetic, I
seem to need lots of bed rest and naps. I’m sorry to have to miss it.
Unfortunately the future won’t be clear sailing for me. Though the
underlying cause of the blood clots hasn’t been definitely diagnosed
yet, most likely I’ll be undergoing some type of chemotherapy at Lahey
Peabody, where my regular doctor is located. I’m trying to keep a
positive attitude, but everything feels very uncertain. So, please
think of me when you sing “Let memory keep us all”.
We thought of her not only when we sang Let memory keep
us all, but also during the singing of
Messiah, where she had for several years been the
reliable person on the top line.
It must have been shortly after this that I asked her directly
if she had a diagnosis yet, and she said, “Yes. Cancer.”
I replied, “That’s not a diagnosis — a diagnosis is something
like Stage II Pancreatic Cancer, or Stage IV Liver Cancer.
Once you have that, then you can go on the internet and look
up the possible treatments and the 5-year survival rates.”
She said she thought she was scheduled for more tests that
might be to produce something like that.
When I asked her later, probably very near the surgery that
ended her life as a vocal conversationalist, she said it was a
cancer of the reproductive system. We assumed that this meant
ovarian, as that would be the scariest kind, and didn’t press
her.
I assume they had a diagnosis on paper, because there was one
course of chemotherapy in early February.
After the surgery on February 15 (see timeline), the
doctor reported on there being a lot of cancer, but not on any
specific diagnosis. It was only after this, when I became her
health care proxy, that I was talking to the doctors
directly. The first lengthy conversation with an opportunity
to ask questions not related directly to particular treatments
was on March 12. The doctor we spoke to (Phyllis, who was the
alternate for the health care proxy, and her husband were
there, too) definitely told us it was uterine cancer. I have
checked with Phyllis, and she remembers it that way, too. He also
said that the chemotherapists had agreed that there was no
benefit to further chemotherapy. So I didn’t press him for a
stage or anything, because it didn’t seem likely that there
was any treatment to consider. His prognosis, which was that
she had a small number of months, did turn out to be correct.
Here’s something that’s different from the TV shows — when I
actually started seeing pieces of paper with the diagnosis on
it, it was always ovarian cancer. There was an application
the Rehab hospital filled out for MassHealth (her insurance
was hitting limits on numbers of days in various kinds of
care, after only three months of this), and the admission to
the hospice, and finally the death certificate, and they all
said ovarian cancer. So I assume the doctor just had it wrong
(he was a respiratory specialist, because at that point the
major aim of her treatment was to wean her off the ventilator
she’d been on since the surgery). I can’t imagine why at that
point he’d think there was any point in misleading us. Or
maybe earlier tests had suggested a different primary site for
the cancer, and he hadn’t read all the later material.
When I was talking to people immediately after Bonnie died, I
said I’d like to write something about the experience, and
particularly about the ways in which it wasn’t our health care
system’s finest hour. One of the things the social worker at
the hospice suggested was that I might want to get a copy of
the medical record to do that with. It probably would have
been a good idea, and certainly might have shed some light on
this particular conundrum. But I haven’t done it.
A friend who’s going to England soon and doesn’t want to carry
his Macbook, but wants to be able to check email, bought a
used netbook with Linux on it. He’s used Unix at work quite a
lot, so he wasn’t expecting to have much difficulty with
Linux.
I don’t know that it was especially difficult, but he was
complaining about how time-consuming it was while he figured out
the package management system and found the names of all the
programs he needed to load.
I have a lot to do this morning, so I thought posting this
correspondence might be useful and quick.
At one point, he wrote me:
Spent far too much time figuring out the netbook. Have better
understanding of the Package Manager now. Installed emacs, ed,
lynx, audacity, ghostview and some other stuff. Still need
ssh and scp. Still need codecs for audio and video — probably
a big list, including h.264 and AAC/FLAC for sure. And MIDI —
Acer’s version of mplayer won’t play midi files!
Any suggestions for codecs, utilities?
and I replied:
I use timidity for playing MIDI.
In ubuntu there’s a package called something like nonfree-extras that
has all the codecs you generally need. It will install it if you try to
play something it doesn’t have the codecs for.
If you don’t have xpdf, you need it. The default in ubuntu [evince] has some
bugs that make the lilypond output look bad.
If you run into audio problems, gnome-alsa-mixer can usually fix them.
It has more knobs and buttons than the other mixers. Their names don’t
make sense, but if you twiddle them for long enough, the audio starts
working.
If you want to read books, get FBReader. The latest version will go out
to the web and get anything out-of-copyright for you.
For system monitoring, I use something called gkrellm, which has a bunch
of little programs (called krells) that will tell you the weather and
the phases of the moon and how busy your cpus and disk drives are.
ssh is probably called openssh, and you probably need both server and
client.
I don’t know what you use for graphics, but getting imagemagick is
probably a good idea. Gimp is overkill unless you really want to do
high-powered stuff, but being able to convert between formats is good.
I find gnumeric less bloated for spreadsheets than openoffice. And you
can read Word documents with just the wv package.
Hope this helps.
Later, in a message titled
Yahoo! Acer runs stuff!, he wrote:
I saw more of the useful ssh stuff in Add/Remove today,
Oh is there stuff. Pages and pages of stuff, most of which
I’ll never need nor want to put on here.
and I replied:
I forget what the command line search for rpm’s is [rpmfind], but I never use the
GUI for exactly that reason. On ubuntu, I would say something like
“apt-cache search openssh”, and pipe it through grep if it gave me too
much stuff to read.
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