How could you make these paragraphs more concise?

"We are getting inquiries about Employee summer pay notifications (SPN’s) that have been sent this week because they don’t include summer pay for the entire summer so I am sending this email to explain why SPNs are incomplete and when you can expect to get another SPN with your entire summer salary included in the document.

 

Ordinarily, our office and grant coordinators start entering faculty summer pay into a system called Summer Pay Notification (SPC) in early April. KU Payroll takes the information entered into the SPC system and enters it into our HR/Pay system which then generates the SPNs that get emailed to faculty detailing their summer pay for the entire summer.

 

The late union pay increase process required us to delay entering summer pay information into the SPC system. This has delayed the date that KU Payroll can key summer pay information into SPC so they are prioritizing entering summer pay that starts on 5/17/26 since that is the first payroll date for summer pay. This is then generating the SPNs but only for summer pay that begins early in the summer. In roughly two weeks, KU Payroll will begin entering summer pay into HR/Pay with later payroll dates. This will then generate another SPN that will be emailed to faculty with a full picture of their summer pay for payroll dates between 5/17/26-8/17/26 (8/18/26 is the first payroll date for Fall 2026).

 

I would appreciate it if you could forward this message to your faculty so they are aware of this delay to help minimize anxiety and questions.

 

Thank you for your patience as we work through a compressed summer pay collection process. Let me know if you have any questions." 

Dream of [not] conducting Beethoven's 9th

 I was supposed to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I had been invited to do this as an ancillary thing in relation to some professional conference I was going to. We showed up at the venue (I was with other, unidentifiable people.) There had been a scene before of trying to get served in a Chinese Restaurant. We kept moving tables in search of more comfortable seating and we were worried about the waiters finding us with our food that we had already ordered. 

Anyway, it was not clear to me where I had to go, there was a big party with a lot of people, and various rooms. I started to doubt whether it would really happen, since I am not a conductor [!] and of course had not even looked at the score. Would I just wave my arms around? Surely the orchestra knew the music anyway. I was in a room getting ready. I opened a door and found a piano, and started playing the melody to "Bemsha Swing." I could not see the keys because they were covered with velvet, but I could still play (though somehow the melody did not seem right.) 

I never did get to conduct, since I woke up after that. 

Clearly the dream is about retirement, which starts today (kind of). There is ambition, but also the idea of not being qualified or prepared. Beethoven's 9th showed up because my daughter has recently played in it, and also because it is a big, ambitious work that one woudn't want to conduct without the proper conditions.  

Dream of Nicole Kidman

 There was a Nicole Kidman meme going around. It consisted of a picture of her with some similarly looking young women dressed in white. The meme consisted of finding malevolent or simply uncharitable interpretations, like, "I bet they all hate one another," or "Soon those dresses will be soiled." There was a similar meme in a male version, with men dressed in black, who bad intentions were more evident.

I was in a store with some people. It was kind of a hip place and one of the guys I was with said "You know, this store is not part of the economy." I had a long argument with him and called him stupid to his face for not being able to come up with a definition of "the economy," which I understood to be goods and services exchanged for money. The conversation morphed into another discussion...  

Reading Murakami in Catalan

 Here's an anti-joke.

Why does Jonathan read Murakami in Catalan?  --Because he doesn't know Japanese. 

Ei, hola. ¿Com anem? Com que avui tinc el dia lliure, aquest matí m’he arribat al zoo de la ciutat a veure els cangurs. No és gaire gran però hi ha moltes espècies, des de goril·les fins a elefants. De totes maneres, si t’agraden els animals com ara les llames i els óssos formiguers és millor que no hi vagis, perquè no n’hi trobaràs. Tampoc no hi ha impales ni hienes. Ni tan sols lleopards.

Murakami, Haruki. L'elefant desapareix (EMPURIES NARRATIVA) (Catalan Edition) (p. 54). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Let's do the four methods of understanding.  Cognates. Well, I know Spanish so "hola" is "hola," Dia es día, etc.. There are cognate from French: mati is going to be matin in French.  Trobaras is cognate to trouver in French.  

Hello, how are we ???. Since ??? I have the day free, this morning I have arrived at the zoo of the city to see the ????.  It is not very? big but that are a lot of species, from gorillas to elephants.  Anyway, if you like animal like llamas? or ant bears? it's better if you don't go there, because you won't find them. There aren't impalas or hyenas either. Not even leopards. 

From context we can gather the avui means today. To get a cognate from a word that starts with ll, we can get rid of one of the l's, like lleopard.  Com anem means how are we doing (going.). I'm going to guess that cangurs are kangaroos. In Spanish it is canguro.  Ossos formiguers is probably going to be anteaters. If a word starts with h in Spanish it might start with f in another Romance language, like halcón and falcon, so hormiga in Spanish becomes formiga. Formiguer would be ant-er.  One who ants. Hi is a particle equivalent to y in French, meaning there.  

I guess a 5th reading strategy would be phonetic / orthographical conventions.  Like a piazza in Italian would be a plaza in Spanish, in the same way that piano corresponds to plano or piazzere to placer. If I see an Italian word that starts with pi, I think pl in Spanish. If the word in Italian is gh, I think of gu in Spanish. Italian doesn't use x so espresso will be "express."

"I  also discovered how important rereading was. It was a rule from the very beginning that I couldn’t simply skip over a sentence and go on, but had to work on it until I either understood or saw that I could not. So, unless I did understand it right away, which happened more often as I continued to read the book, I would have to reread the sentence.'

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 451). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Four methods for vocab

I teach my student four methods of figuring out words they don't know.  

Cognates:  amenazar is menace (threaten).  English has lexicon from French and Latin, so it has a lot of Romance language cognates. 

Morphology: breaking the word down into its parts. Destejer is unweave. Desagradablemente is des agrada ble mente.  Un pleas ant ly.  The word will have a root, a core meaning, and prefixes and suffixes. You can understand amenzar better if you take away the a- prefix.  Like amanecer is related to mañana.   

Context. You guess the word from its surrounding words, or just ignore a word you don't know and go on.  

The 4th way?  Repetition.  You find the word over and over again and eventually figure it out. That doesn't work for seeing the word once in a very short text.   

 

Lydia Davis method

 There's a method of learning to read a language. Lydia Davis has an essay in which she explains how she studied Spanish.  She took a translation of Twain (Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer) and read it in Spanish. She wouldn't look up words in the dictionary, but would guess at the meaning of words and learn new words eventually from context. She would keep a notebook in which she wrote down new words she learned. She could essentially understand most of the vocabulary using cognates in French (she is a Proust translator) and context. 

I had a year (possibly more?) of college German years ago and I am trying this.  I picked up a German novel called Der Junge Beethoven for 5 bucks at a used bookstore. Obviously it is about Beethoven's young days!

For the first few pages I wrote down words I already know. Frau, Mann. Kind. Fenster. Haus, Vater, Mutter, Sohn, Tochter, Gott, Himmel, Nacht, heute, and wrote down others that I thought I knew or could easily guess.  Lippen.  Musiker. I can recognize articles, some numbers. Nouns are capitalized and verbs can be identified.  I understand the syntactic structure very well.  

I wrote down some complete sentences or brief phrases that were transparent for me, of the "Ich liebe dich" or "Wo bist du?" type.  

They live in Bonn. There is some reference to a Hinterhaus. The father is a Kapellmeister of some kind. He is happy to have a son because he can form him into a musician. He gives thanks that Gott in Himmel has answered his prayers.  

I probably have 100 words written down.  I went back to the first page and it was easier to read than on the first try. You want to get to where the most common 2 or 3 thousand words are understood effortlessly. 

Not using the dictionary is key, because the dictionary slows you down (not that I am going fast!) and also shuts down the effort of guessing, which is key. I have used something similar to this method (without the notebook) with Italian and gotten pretty far.  I can read most Romance languages fairly well but German should be a different kind of challenge.  

I picked up a pop German novel (translated from English probably) on a trip to Cuba years ago, which someone had left behind in a hotel room. I could kind of follow the plot.  

***

Here is Lydia's explanation of not using a dictionary, from another essay about learning Norwegian:

"I did not want to use a dictionary. First, it was more comfortable not to be constantly picking up a dictionary, or sitting in front of a computer. Since, at first, there would be a quantity of words on any given page that I would not know, I would have been looking up many, many words, and this would have been a cumbersome chore. I wanted to sit with this heavy book in a comfortable chair, with nothing more, besides the book, than a sharp pencil and piece of paper.

Second, though, and more important, the work of trying to figure out what the words meant was stimulating and completely absorbing. I realized, after a while, that using my brain for something as difficult as this made thinking a very physical act, much more so than the easier, almost unconscious use we make of our brains most of the time."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 430). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Another reason I did not want to use a dictionary or ask anyone for the answer was that, almost right away, this experiment interested me qua experiment, and I wanted to keep it quite pure. I was trying to learn a language the way we learn our own native language from babyhood on up. Words are repeated in certain contexts, some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (pp. 432-433). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Think of One

 "Think of One" is an another Monk tune based on the ostinato as motif.  

Cambridge and Oxford

 One person asked me to write an essay for the Cambridge Companion to Spanish modernism. A little while later, another asked me to write an essay on translations of Lorca for the Oxford Companion to Federico Garcia Lorca. I was searching in vain in my email for the invitation to Cambridge, because I thought that both invitations were from Oxford, in my shaky memory. From the Yankee perspective all of Oxbridge is pretty much the same.   

Justicia

 As a specialist on a gay writer killed in the Civil War, I won't be a homophobic Franco supporter. Not only because of that, of course, but that would be major contradiction. 

But thinking that humanities research and teaching should be mainly about promoting issues of social justice also seems wrong to me.  We are often adjacent to such concerns, but if we put them front and center as the main justification and raison d'être of everything we do, then something odd happens. Since a lot of what we do is not directly about that, then our work on a daily basis makes only a trivial contribution to any social justice movement. Most of the research questions that might be interesting will be tangential or adjacent to activist goals, at best (at worst).  

So the social relevance of the humanities is related to only a small part of what we do, and to make that the whole enchilada risks destroying the humanities completely, making most research questions seem trivial. 

A related problem is that we are after nuance and complexity, and the goals of woke movements can be expressed  in  3 or 4 word slogans.  

My vocalists (female)

 This is one of deepest categories. 

Sarah Vaughan is the best of all, especially in her first period. She had bad periods, when she was singing inferior songs or gave into her mannerisms. At her best, she was sublime. 

Billie Holiday is incomparable in emotional impact.  Sarah learned from Billie. 

Ella has probably the most consistent career. She is as good as the other two I have named before her.  The song-book albums are classic. 

After them come Dinahs Washington. What a pure sonority and blues feeling. And Nancy Wilson, with marvelous diction and ability to put across the lyrics.   

Carmen McRae and Betty Carter... They are ok, but I almost always feel they aren't as good as my big 5.  I'd rather be listening to someone else, like Eva Cassidy or Anita O'Day.  All these are good as well, though not as well known.  

***

Singers I don't like: Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln.  They sing off tune, rather than altering the melody in PRECISE ways like Sarah or Billie.  Blossom Dearie... She is good, but doesn't have a good-sounding voice. Diana Krall. Not my favorite either.  Dianne Reeves is much better. 

For some reason some variant of the "Diane" name is ascent among female vocalists of the 20th century, like Diana Ross or Diane Schurr, Dinah Shore, etc...  

My Vocalists (male)

 #1 is Ray Charles.  Yes, I know he not strictly a jazz vocalist, but he is probably the best jazz vocalist in spite of this. He is also the best country and the best soul singer. 

Louis Armstrong got the whole thing going.  His singing is incomparable.  

A personal favorite is Chuck Baker, for an arbitrary reason: his voice is kind of similar to mine in timbre and range. I like the fact he doesn't have to have a rich, Johnny Hartman type of voice. 

But I also like Johnny Hartman!

Sinatra? Well, yes.  I have many good Sinatra associations, but I am not crazy about his mannerisms.  The same with Tony Bennet. 

Nat King Cole is one of my favorites as well.  He has impeccable jazz phrasing, and also a beautiful voice. I hate, though, the lazy hazy days of summer. That is as painful as Satchmo's "It's a wonderful world." 

The depth of the male vocalists is not the same as with the women.  

 

Kindness

 I got a message from someone who couldn't attend my retirement party, who had been interim (outside of the department) chair of my department, and is now an associate dean. Anyway, she also highlighted my kindness. Obviously, this is the highest possible compliment, because it can only come from outside the self. We can't measure our own kindness, because that can only be judged by those on the receiving end of it. 

Remember that Ellen DeGeneres created a whole brand around kindness, but was abusive to her own staff. Literally, her brand of skin care products is called "Kind Science." Once someone sets themselves up as being kind, be careful!  But I'm fine with other people saying it.  

Music and cognitive complexity

 I was listening to an interview with drummer Steve Gadd. It struck me that to know about music involves multiple cognitive, emotional, and kinetic factors. The entire body and mind are involved. 

The little I know about jazz drumming, is probably very little in comparison to what I know in general, but it is is fairly intricate knowledge (as far as it goes; I am not a great drummer), about the kind of cymbal sound that might be preferred, the size of the bass drum, implication of drum tunings, particular rhythmic patterns, like displaced quarter note triplets. Subtlety of the ride cymbal pattern.  A little bit about the history and evolution of playing drums, the interaction between drums and bass and piano. I've spent years of active listening, not just having music on in the background.  

Yet when I was hearing a podcast or video with some musicians taking apart a Ray Charles album, I was amazed by the level of insight they had. (The great bassist Christian McBride was part of this conversation). I never realized that Roy Haynes was on this album, playing "I got news for you," etc... Obviously the level of insight here was higher than mine by several degrees of magnitude. 

It's not humility to say this, it's simply a recognition of reality.  There is a granular knowledge there that I can learn from, even without sharing it.  

And I have that kind of knowledge in my own field, as well.  And the things I know about music are part of the total package of what I know, as a scholar of word and music. 

Monk's Motif

 A lot of Monk's songs are blues.  He also liked the 32 AABA form, and some oddly shaped forms that don't fall into those categories. He liked contrafacta.  

The motifs are angular and difficult, but also catchy and melodic. Think of the central motif of "Straight no Chaser," or "Misterioso," or "Blue Monk,"  Think of Andrew Hill. I like him a lot, and he is also a piano player known for original songs, somewhat in the Monk mode, but I can't hum a single melody to an Andrew Hill composition, despite my having listened to them many times. Ornette is a much more talented melodist than Hill is.  

What interests me about the motif is how small it can be.  The technical definition is the shortest possible musical idea. Bernstein in his concert for young people points out that the motif is not a tune, and longer melodies are not as useful as building blocks than these very, very short ideas are. Not that I don't like what LB is calling "tunes," but I also like motivic development. Sometimes, I guess, there is a lot of motivic development that might be be intelligent composition, but that I don't feel as super interesting. You can have to best of both worlds if the original motif is distinctive and catchy rather than bland.  

 

Dream of Mozart

 I am singing Mozart's Requiem today with the faculty / staff choir. In anticipation of this, I dreamt that I left my music in the car. Some colleagues (who are not in the choir) had shown up as well to sing. I was a little miffed at that, since they hadn't been to rehearsals all semester.  One had a solo, and he was practicing it in a very trained voice. (In reality I don't think he sings at all.) This solo had no relation to Mozart at all.   

I went outside to get my music from the car, but I couldn't find that car. I kept clicking with the key fob so the car would beep at me.  

I woke up relieved that I knew where my car is, and I had not lost it.  

Wrong notes

 Victor Wooten says you are never more than a half step away from a right note. Monk says none of the 88 notes on the keyboard are wrong notes. The worst possible note is probably the fourth played against the maj 7. So play CEGB in the left hand and F in the right.  That sounds pretty terrible. But against a 7 chord (Bb) it sounds ok. 

You can play every note in the scale and except for the fourth and the seventh, and you have a pentatonic scale. Think of the beginning of "Someone to watch over me."  You can pretty much improvise over the blues with six of seven notes. 

All the notes that aren't in the key are chromatic leading tones or chord alterations. So a wrong note can be corrected by playing a right note right after it.  

Improvisation is easy then.  The caveat is that there is no guarantee that the ideas you play will be any good. Here other factors come into play. You have to play with rhythmic dynamism.  The improvisation cannot be too random, or too predictable. You have to have enough technical ability to play what you want. 

The best thing is to find that you have played something that you liked.  Then you can use your own taste as the guide. 

My sax players

The sax is really the core instrument of jazz, and when it supplants the clarinet as the reed instrument the music develops in a different way. 

Two giants stand at the head. First, Coleman Hawkins. A deep, throaty sound and endlessly confident arpeggios, locked into the beat. He not only inaugurates the sax, but also can hold his own in the bebop era.  

Secondly, Lester Young, who invents coolness itself. (only a slight exaggeration). His lines float over the beat in an uncanny way.  He also has a way of improvising that is telling a story, as he liked to say, rather than using arpeggios and scales.  Lester paves the way for Bird, the greatest jazz musician of all time.  Bird makes time feel almost infinitely elastic, in the way that Cortázar wrote about in his short novel about him.  

Two swing era alto saxes, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter, are also favorites of mine. 

Rollins and Coltrane define the post bop sax.  Rollins develops motifs, whereas Coltrane offers sheets of sound, and develops a different kind of rhythmic approach beyond the swung eighth note feel.  

Coltrane and Ornette define avant-garde jazz.  Bird, Coltrane, Ornette, are major jazz composers like Monk or Ellington/Strayhorn.  

Yet there is also a wealth of players in hard bop and cool jazz. Lee Konitz is probably one of the best, but there are many others. Paul Desmond? Mulligan?  

Friday 13

 I was getting obsessed with Monk's tune "Friday the 13th." It has four chords repeated over and over (the Andalusian cadence!) and a melody that consists of motif, repeated 3 times.  After being obsessed for a few day, I turn on the jazz station this morning, and there is French pianist explaining the tune to an audience, and having them whistle the tune. 

Then he starts playing "Ruby, my Dear," a completely different Monk tune with a far more complex harmony and structure. 

His name is Laurent de Wilde. I discover now that he is the author of a book about Monk. He is a pretty bad ass player.  Unfortunately I missed the first part of this show, but now they are having a clip of a Dizzy big band playing in Copenhagen.  

Extreme simplicity and extreme complexity. They aren't even opposites, they are complementary. The same way a Jobim tune can have a super convoluted musical structure and sound like a relaxing pop song at the same time.  

"Desafinado" is one I've also been obsessed with in the past. The title means "Out of tune," and the melody has an odd shape, as though it were out of tune, though it is really not.