Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”
Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.
One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.
Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:
Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college
In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.
After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.
Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.
“Morning Has Broken” (from Wikipedia)
is a Christian hymn first published in 1931. It has words by English author Eleanor Farjeon and was inspired by the village of Alfriston in East Sussex, then set to a traditional Scottish Gaelic tune, “Bunessan”.
English pop musician and folk singer Cat Stevens included a version on his album Teaser and the Firecat (1971). The song became identified with Stevens due to the popularity of this recording.
Morning A: The Brahms (from Wikipedia):
The Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8 [in 4 movements], by Johannes Brahms was completed in January 1854, when the composer was only twenty years old, published in November 1854 and premiered on 13 October 1855 in Danzig.
The trio exists in two versions; the second is now almost always the one played. But you can listen to and watch Istomin / Stern / Rose perform the original version on YouTube here. (I meant to play just the beginning for myself, while I was writing this posting, but then it seized me, and I wept with joy and the delight of hearing this old friend once again, all the way through.)
Morning B: Michael Newman and I kvetch on 6/1. You will need to know that MN is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders at Queens College of the City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center, and (to put him in context) that he is 68 years old, a New Yorker, gay, Jewish, connected in spirit with the region of Catalonia, and a Black Lives Matter advocate.
Then on Facebook (somewhat edited down):
— MN: Kvetch warning:
I’m a department chair, so I’m required to do the gender-based violence training annually. It’s a series of videos of a woman in what looks like a law office explaining things, intermingled with a couple of scenes depicting gender-based violence with content warnings. It lasted an hour. There wasn’t anything new or that I didn’t know from paying attention to people except some stats on the prevalence of forms of gender-based violence and the repercussions. There was also the dubious claim that pornography and direct sex work (referred to as ‘prostitution’) was included in gender-based violence. You don’t have to like or approve of either one, but to lump them in with violence makes me wonder about the reliability of all the statistics.
The whole thing seems less a way for people in supervisory positions to understand how these issues as it affects the people we work with than an effort to take a stance, what the right wing calls ‘virtue signaling.’ Obviously, making me sit through this every year isn’t going to alienate me enough to NOT respond appropriately if I encounter the issues raised (as I’ve had to do a couple of times before). However, wouldn’t it be more efficient and effective to ask us a series of relevant questions and when we missed one, put in an explainer? No one likes to be lectured to with the implication that if you don’t play along you’re somewhat lacking on the ethical front. And also avoid nonsense about porn and other forms of sex work.
— AZ > MN: Sigh. This is the sort of thing that has given DEI (as a set of moral and ethical stances) a bad rap in some quarters — the baleful consequence of handing moral education in societal values to HR departments and middle managers who see their task as promulgating procedures. It’s shameful that you have to do this training both as faculty member and as department chair.
You and I have both been poster boys for DEI for many years — as exemplars, advocates, and agents of change, so it’s especially galling to see a work of moral urgency reduced to soulless pettifogging proceduralism. (I have to do a training session every year to maintain my status as an adjunct at Stanford — a status that is neither faculty nor staff. Grrr.)
This training, to be administered by university HR departments, was required by federal regulation. This was the crap, enforced in the name of DEI, that many rational and humane people (deeply committed to actual diversity, equality, and inclusion) rightly objected to. But now our overlords are bound on rooting out anything that smacks of DEI. No doubt we will now have mandatory training exercises in white Christian warrior nationalism.
As for MN, I will have much more to say about him in a separate posting, where (among other things) the Catalonia connection will be explained.
Morning C: Ankush Khardori performs. Another impressive interview, so I dug out more about the man. On the Politico site, by Victor Davis Hanson (edited a bit by me):
Ankush Khardori is a senior writer at Politico Magazine and the author of “Rules of Law”, a column that examines the intersection of politics and the law.
He is an attorney and former federal prosecutor who uses his knowledge and experience to illuminate and analyze important and complex national legal issues. He often writes about the Justice Department — including coverage of the prosecutions of Donald Tr**p — and the Supreme Court. He strives to provide rigorous, thoughtful and accessible coverage for the general public.
Before entering the media industry in 2020, He spent three and a half years as a federal prosecutor in the Justice Department specializing in financial fraud and white-collar crime. Before that, he worked at a law firm in New York City, where he focused on complex commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. He clerked for a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and graduated from Columbia University with a BA and a law degree.
AK was born in 1982 in New York City to Indian Kashmiri parents and grew up in Springfield IL. He is pointedly unrevealing about his private life.
Now something of a surprise, the one photo he’s chosen for his webpage:
(#1) Presented as a really clean, simultaneously tough and approachable, regular guy off the street (in sparkly white t-shirt and jeans)
Not what you were expecting in a legal scourge of financial fraud and white-collar crime. But the photo is a wonderful character study; and since I am famously a guy with a queer eye for the sexy guy, he’s a pleasure.
Morning D: Le Bob: Édition Spéciale Française. It started with tennis, and that took Bob Eckstein (the cartoonist and advocate of cartoonists, also the chronicler of snowmen, cat names, independent bookstores, amazing museums, and more) to Paris, so that his 6/6 newsletter brought us this delicious dish, escargot en beret:
(#2) Traveling, I assume, on a slow boat to Le Havre (cartoon from American Bystander)
Then the world rushed in.
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