Béla Bartók is an imp.
I lack the vocabulary and leisure to write much about the cracklingly alive music of the great 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, seven hours of whose greatest music can be found in this playlist. But what I can tell you is that he comes across to me as an intensely focused über-Puck, as ingenious as he is impish. He alternately grins maniacally and aches with grief as he employs chromaticism, weird harmonies, percussive pianism, asymmetric meters, novel bowings and pluckings (including one named after him), oddly located sforzandos and other displaced accents, and a dozen other tricks from his rather large bag to make all kinds of unexpected musical turns. He hides peasant tunes in music that pushes tonality just shy of its breaking point. He makes life fiendishly difficult for violinists and pianists.
To some, like my friend Travis, who has been a great sport to listen all the way through Bartók’s repertoire with me, all the above is in service to nothing more than making mischief on the human ear. To me, in its own, arch and difficult way, Bartók’s music captures the joy and sorrow of living.
Carla, the lovely, lateral thinker that she is, having heard some snippets, compares Bartók to free jazzmen. It’s an apt comparison—except that they’re improvising, and he wrote all his mischief down. I’m not sure which is more impressive.
“I’m actually not that funny. I’m just misunderstood.”
— Carla
She could be hiding
And you wouldn’t know it
Smiling widely
Refusing to show it ✏️ 🎤 🎵
“I mean, you can’t just be a wimp and call yourself a pacifist.”
— Carla
Carla, man.
That’s a scan of a pen-and-watercolor cartoon she is sending to the captain of the sailboat she and her dad piloted this past summer from Bermuda to Connecticut.
Carla: Oof, Sully’s YouTube video made me nauseated. Is that a thing? Can a YouTube video make you nauseated?
Scott: Carla, anything can make you nauseated.
“I just don’t picture myself as a secretary.”
— Carla, substitutes and budget secretary at Delta, to Heather, other secretary at Delta, standing in the Delta office considering a recent College Township job opening for a secretary
You bring the fog
In the fall a soft fog
And I follow a call
Saying, “Come” ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Mother Nature’s little sister
Taught me everything I know ✏️ 🎤 🎵
It’s fine, Babe
It’s fine.
I do it all the time, Babe.
Except I never know what to tell you when I’m done. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
🎨 I’m dithering writing to myself about Paul McCartney while wife is making this:
Carla: There’s a book I wanna read.
Éa: Me, too. But I finished it.
If something matters to Carla, then it matters to me.
Éa: You’re very good at putting buns in. But you’re not very good at sleeping in them.
Carla: Build me up and tear me down! Build me up and tear me down!
Éa: At least you’re even!
Family walks are the best.
Scott: You can’t touch my face. I’m in quarantine.
Carla: Well, I can punch your face!
Carla: [Saint] Paul totally bonked. He was a-bonkin!
Scott: Paul wasn’t bonking.
Carla: C’mon. You know he was bonking!
Scott: You are the strangest Christian wife I could have acquired.
My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!
— Carla, to Frank
Today I am grateful for the following:
- the self-control Éa is demonstrating as she practices her first riff on her new Washburn Maverick electric guitar (“Smoke On The Water,” of course)—let’s hope she has the self-control enough to power through the rut of learning your first riff and never moving past it because it’s the only thing you’ve mastered;
- the goodness of setting aside time to walk, read, engage in hobbies, and journal. May my good friend learn it, too;
- the faithfulness of Carla, my wife of coming on fifteen years next year. Whoa.
Éa: What’s a placenta?
Sullivan: What!? You don’t know what a placenta is? Mom, we have failed.
Carla: Why can’t I be a ten-year-old boy? I’ve always wanted to dress like a ten-year-old boy!
Scott: You often do.
[overheard while Sullivan and Éa build a precarious fort]:
Éa: Sully, did you just swear!?
Sullivan: What!? No!
Éa: No really, Sully, did you say the S word?
Sullivan: No! Only Mom does that!
And then I wrapped my ankle brace around my uterus.
— Carla
