Housebound

Like much of this country and like Europe, this part of Kansas has been cold and snowy for three weeks now. Tonight and tomorrow will be our lowest temperatures, approximately -6. It isn't often that the cold weather remains here for longer than a few days.

There is something to be said for having a constant temperature of, say, 75 degrees, from one day to another. That certainty eliminates having to alter one's plans when going outside. I'm not ready to move to Texas or Florida or southern California, however.

I’ve been housebound for four days now. The idea of cabin fever seemed like a strange concept when I first heard the term. When I was young, I actually idealized secluding myself away from the world with a woman, much like Yuri and Lara at Varykino in Doctor Zhivago, not realizing how difficult it would have been finding drinking water and food, without making the trip in the brutal cold to Yuriatin. Since my wife and I are not yet teaching during the coming semester, we didn’t have to commute the past few days. We were lucky. Judging from what I saw on the television, the traffic on the freeways in Kansas City was often reduced to one lane, making it necessary for those commuters to leave the house much earlier in the morning. After these four days of remaining inside, I am looking forward to getting out of the house on Saturday to do more than shovel the driveway. I just wish it were possible to take a walk without risking frostbite.

A Selection of Jazz From 2009

While I admit having heard only a limited number of the Jazz CD's that were released in 2009, my selections for the best releases appear below.

Eberhard Weber's reissue is particularly important because it brings together those recordings when Weber was involved with the group named Colours. This reissue contains three titles, Yellow Fields (1975), Silent Feet(1977), and Little Movements (1980). If you didn't purchase these albums when they were first released or weren't alive when they were released, I recommend getting them now. These albums are all essential recordings. Prior to this reissue, Yellow Fields was particularly hard to find on CD in this country. I ended up having to order my copy a few years ago directly from Europe.

Like the bassist Eberhard Weber, Jan Garbarek, who plays tenor and soprano saxophone, is another jazz artist who is considered a virtuoso of his instrument and a major contributor to jazz during the past thirty-five years or so; some of his albums are considered essential recordings for anyone who wishes to assemble a jazz library. A previous post of mine goes into more depth about Jan Garbarek.

Vassilis Tsabropoulos is a Greek pianist who trained to play classical music and who has made the crossover to jazz. The Promise is his solo recording.

Anouar Brahem is considered a master of the oud. I have mentioned his album Le Pas du Chat Noir in a previous post. The Astounding Eyes of Rita is less contemplative and less melancholy than that album.

Lars Danielsson, the Swedist bassist, has been gaining more critical attention since the release of Pasodoble in 2007. A thorough sampling of his work can be found at YouTube.

Diego Barber is a young guitarist who has only recorded this one CD as a leader. This CD also features the members of Fly, that is, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, and Jeff Ballard. Both Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard make up the new Brad Mehldau trio.

One way to test the validity of my selections is to compare them with the other best of lists that will be appearing at other websites like Jazz Breakfast , AllAboutJazz , and JazzAfterHours .

Review of Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America

Susan J. Marks’ Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America certainly addresses an important topic, one that has been receiving attention in the Great Plains for at least the past fifteen to twenty years and one that has recently been receiving attention nationwide. The book itself presents the information about this dwindling resource but largely seems to be a compendium of what can be found on the Internet about the topic. One thing the book lacks is a strong narrative. It isn’t necessary to include anecdotes from the author’s experience, but as a reader I would like to see the author relating her impressions and observations as she travels to those various locations that are representative of the water crisis in this country. The inclusion of bulleted information quickly becomes tiring and frustrating. In including quotations from various authorities, Marks gives the impression of having interviewed people like “Bill Waldrop, a Tennessee-based hydrologist who has been studying water and environmental quality issues since the early 1970’s” or “Hugh Hurlow, senior geologist for the Utah Geological Survey.” The Chapter Notes, however, don’t reference these interviews and are simply a list of Internet sites, which causes one to believe that Marks has pulled these quotes from those links without having picked up the phone or having made a trip away from her computer. I have to wonder, too, what audience Marks is addressing. Early in the book, she defines words like aquifer as “underground water supplies,” peninsula, “meaning that it is surrounded on three sides by water,” and brackish, “salty,” but doesn’t define a word like desalination, which I suspect needs to be defined if the intended audience isn’t familiar with a word as common as peninsula. Perhaps Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America is meant only for libraries so that someone needing the research can pull information from one or two chapters to satisfy a school assignment.

Insomnia

Is insomnia unique to each person? For me, when suffering from insomnia, I cannot relax enough to fall asleep in my bed. Just the thought of going to bed makes me anxious. Having the weight of the blankets on my feet or experiencing labored breathing from my asthma causes me to climb out of bed as I have to stand up and move my limbs. Once I calm down, I am able to sit on the edge of the bed but cannot actually lie back and relax. Sometimes when sitting on the edge of the bed, I am able to fall asleep while practicing creative visualization. One morning I woke up and found myself stretched out in the bed. That was a great feeling. More often, I end up getting a few hours of sleep sitting up in front of the television or in my office chair. My office is that place of last resort because once I shut the door and recline in my chair, I am usually able to sleep for a couple of hours. I have thought of getting the equivalent of a hospital bed so that I can sleep while sitting up, but finding the money for such a purchase isn’t easy.

I had thought that I recently overcame the bout of insomnia described in my previous post. My insomnia has returned for some reason, and I don’t know why. It’s not like that I have any serious worries. I have a job and, with my wife’s income, we are able to survive from one month to another. Some people are far worse off than we are. Everyone in my family is relatively healthy. Some students of mine from last semester were dissatisfied with their grades because of problems that they created for themselves. Other students expressed how much they enjoyed my class and how much they learned over the course of the semester. I can’t say that worrying about my students is keeping me awake. There isn’t anything that I can do about those unhappy students because of winter break.

Although I usually don’t drink, I have tried drinking wine to get sleepy. I have also tried taking a melatonin. Even these things don’t work. Sometimes it’s the simplest of things—like sleeping—that create the most problems.