OK, then, got some food in me and relocated to the other library, the one I said I didn’t want to go to anymore. As much noise is here as out on 36th Avenue, where jackhammers were punishing the street and the ears of any and all passers-by. I am in a particularly noise-sensitive mood this day. I will survive. I will endure and indeed prosper during these difficult, noisily arduous times.

Passing by the Big Griddle place again I noticed how weird their font was. It appears to be an attempt to emulate neon sign lights, where the letters are all connected, sort of cursive style. But for starters they do not connect all the letters. The B and G are standalone. But more obtuse is how the R looks like an N, appearing to name the place Big Gniddle.

Hey Diddle Diddle, touch my big gniddle.

Another oddity of the building was the third floor window, in which appeared a familiar poster of Obama and the word “HOPE”. How long has that been there? It’s a thing because I think it is illegal to put stuff like that, or much of anything really, in an apartment window. It’s considered advertising, I think, or even propaganda. But advertising is generally prohibited in residential areas, not that someone’s signs for a garage sale are going to get them ticketed.

I only know what I think I know of this from the payphone world, where they are not allowed to have phones with advertising on them in residential areas. The same applies to those asshole LinkNYC monsters. The zoning rules and designations must be pretty granular, or else unenforced, because there are ad-cloaked payphones in places that look solidly residential to me.

The Obama “HOPE” poster also happens to be across the street from the school where I vote. If that poster has been there continuously for the past 8 years then it would have violated rules of posting political advertisements near a polling place. I never noticed it until now but that might just go to prove that looking up isn’t something I do often enough. Looking back, too. You just don’t always see everything in your forward march through time. The wise Flaneur knows to take a look back every once in a while.

…

That Sibelius 1st Symphony is beautiful. Probably my favorite of his. Now I am on Miles Davis, Carnegie Hall, 1961. I have listened to so much Miles Davis over time yet I find I barely remember any of it. Aura was a favorite, one of his later experimental things. The harp and oboe moments were choice, as I recall, though it’s been a long while since I heard it.

Speaking of the harp I agreed to play with an orchestra for some concerts in March, in Copland’s Appalachian Spring and a chamber orchestra reduction of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. The Copland should be fun but the piano part for the Mahler looks boring as hell. It’s not really even a piano part. I’m playing the harp part on piano. For fun I should begin the first rehearsal plucking the strings of the piano, as one would a harp.

I guess most orchestra work is pretty boring. Well, obviously it depends on the repertoire. I remember a college professor joking that being third bassoon in an orchestra must be the worst job in the world. You play on cadences only. That professor seemed to think this bit of wit was Charlie Chaplin hilarious but I never saw it raise more than a conciliatory chuckle. The professor, I noticed, conspicuously waited for more laughter to wash away his mediocre joke.

Orchestra scores are a strange beast. You can’t help but look at some of them and think the composer is discriminating against or shamelessly favoring one class of musician over another. Some musicians would look at it that way, as did I when noting that the harp part (which I will play on piano) seems to be buried under everything else, chiming in with seemingly needless plucking of the strings on loud cadences and moments when it just looks like no one but the harpist’s mother would hear it. Maybe it’s designed that way to keep the musicians awake.

Other musicians would look at perfunctory orchestra parts for their instrument and think that it is easy and that makes it an opportunity for easy money should they be hired to play it.

The Fourth is my favorite Mahler. I don’t know how it took me this long to look at most of Mahler’s symphonies and realize how fucking pretentious they are. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, even the mighty and vaunted 9th has its constipated moments of conceit. I can’t seem to recall how the 6th and 7th symphonies sound right now. The first is probably my second favorite of Mahler’s symphonies. The 4th is practically a chamber symphony in its original version, and it is the lightest of his 9 completed symphonies. I made a piano transcription of the first movement years ago. No idea where I put my copy of that.

…

A woman at this library is urgently job hunting, it seems. Working her phone, revising her resumé, looking very focused. She might be about my age. I saw her rummaging through the trash can in search of something she (I assume) tossed there. No way to know who or what she is calling but she does not seem to be talking to anybody, only taking notes from whatever source she is calling.

People like to think otherwise but there are a lot of people out here who do not have computers and/or printers at home. Near Ravenswood a while back I saw a mobile Internet truck, intended for use by people with no computers or Internet access at home. The truck parks outside housing projects according to a published schedule, and people line up to use the computers.

I think it is convenient for some people to assume that such scenarios do not exist, or that they are inconsequential. Tech trolls would make the case, self-serving as it might be, that those scenarios are statistically inconsequential.

I turned off my computer today for the first time in weeks. It felt like a relief, but I turned it right back on before I left.

…

From tawdry romance fiction randomly pulled from the last library’s shelf to Maison Ikkoki, a graphic novel by Rumiko Takahashi, picked again at random from a different library shelf. It is in English but the book opens from left to right and the pages are read from right side to left, opposite of most books published here. Hah, it is not a sexually explicit volume as was the previous find, but it does commence with a guy saying he got a girl pregnant, and that he will (of course) marry her. It looks like the story of the book is how these two agree to stay together and see if they can actually fall in love.

Page 23 shows a woman talking on a payphone. Yay! What a great, great book this is.

Maison Ikkoki looks a little thin to me. A notable quantity of voice balloons with nothing but ellipses. I see now that the back cover has instructions for how to read this. I knew how it worked before seeing this little guide. The instructions say “You’re Reading in the Wrong Direction!” This book is stamped as having arrived here May 29, 2007.

On another shelf I see a few books called “Book of Majors.” That would be college majors, I assume, not a list of everyone who reached the rank of General in the military. I know someone who went to Indiana University, where students could invent their own major. It was considered innovative back in the 70s but I think that has become more common since then. Most famously Will Shortz, who is now puzzlemaster for the NY Times, majored in Enigmatology, which is the study of puzzles. I seem to remember non-standard majors where I went to college, but foggy memories have a way of making past anecdotes fit into memory grids how I would like them to.

A high school friend aspired to be a linguist, and a cunning one at that. He went to the University of Florida, where he was said to have been only the 2nd or 3rd student in the school’s history to major in Polish. He studied a variety of languages, and some of his classes had only one or two other students in attendance. I don’t think he maintained the Polish major for long. He is the only person I’ve ever known who could speak gibberish in multiple languages. He could spew utter nonsense that sounded like Japanese or Swedish or other tongues to any who did not speak them. He claimed in some cases he was able to fool native speakers of some languages that he was speaking their language but that they simply did not understand his vocabulary. I think I can believe that. I have heard English speaking people spewing phonemes and morphemes and allophones that sounded like words but meant nothing. These people, I think, were mostly insane or under a substance influence or two. But it can be tempting to take that kind of verbal sewage seriously, wading through the chaff to find the wheat. I remember being with a woman at a bar once, spewing gibberish. The longer I did it the more that woman’s face lit up.

FIELDS OF WHEAT

It was once presented as a joke where I grew up that out west there were schools where you could get scholarships in Rodeo. That seemed strange to us who did not know how popular the sport was in other parts of the country. Somehow the reality that there were rodeo scholarships to be had led some of us to assume that you could major in Rodeo. 30+ years later I revisit this belief and conclude, without any research, that it is probably not true. I don’t think you can major in rodeo any more than you can major in football.

Speaking of Florida I am presently listening to Delius’ “Florida Suite”. When I was a kid this was played now and again on classical radio down in Tampa, I guess to inspire a little home state pride. That main theme of the first movement really is something, Brahmsian but minus the Brahmsian bloat.

Nothing is wrong with a little Brahmsian bloat, by the way.

OK, I have been writing for almost a solid hour. Time to walk around and get more food and beverage.