I was in a restaurant and couldn't help overhearing a conversation

 One guy was an older man, a composer, and he was telling another slightly younger fellow: "I used to tell my students, when I write a score it is like writing a personal letter to each musician..."  The other guy, also a musician, was telling him that his [older man's'] scores were so carefully notated that the musicians just had to play the music as written and the music would be 90% right already (something like this).  

I still have it!

 I still have it.  (I still have "it.") I went to the library and just sat there writing and researching for 3 hours, from 9-12, yesterday and today. Retirement is freeing me up.  I can write as well as ever; the ideas flow. I have supreme confidence in what I am doing.  

Part of what I am doing is eliminating things. Students, colleagues, administrators, have no more demands on me.  I am unsubscribing from everything imaginable. I looked at my retirement privileges: I have full access to library, can park for less money, and even have a grave sit in the University Cemetery--hopefully not very soon. I have plenty of money.  

I am giving some books and cds away.  I might sell some books, not because I need the money, but because they are too valuable to simply donate to the library.  

While I am not technically retired, since I am doing the Barcelona program in July, I am living the lifestyle. The missing element seemed to be very simple: going to the library and working. Why the library? That is where the books are.  I simply sit down at a desk near the Lorca section, PQ6000 and whatever. I have my own books too to supplement the holdings of the library, a collections of books by and about Lorca that I have been collecting for 20 years.  

I plan to be more productive now, keeping a regular schedule, M-F from 9-12. I will go to the regular library and to the music library, depending on what project I am working on.  

Dreams are garbled fables

We talk about intention, what the author meant to say. When I have a dream, the process is involuntary. I might be exercising my will in the dream, trying to do something, but the construction of the narrative itself, and the meaning of the dream, are not the result of an act of volition. I can interpret the dream, but even having access to the author (myself) I cannot be sure I am right, or what even being right means. In retelling the dream I can give it shape, a contour that represents it. I never want to massage it until it is a perfect little fable, when in reality it is a garbled mess--as it should be.  

2 Dreams

 1. I had gone through some wilderness mash-up in which the parts of my body had been switched with one another or other objects, while I was lost for a long time. I was trying to make sense of the duration of the experience. What I thought was 3 hours could have been 3 years.  

2. There was a little girl, maybe 8, confined to a room in a zoo, though not close to other animals or in an animal habitat. It was in a basement of a building, though in the context of the dream I knew it to be the zoo.  

She asked for help from another person, then from me. She wanted to escape. I knew the people ostensibly responsible for her, for this situation, though not parents. I attempted to find their number in my phone to text them, and promised the girl I would resolve the problem. I stayed there a while, without entering the room, until she went to sleep. The only name I could think of was Bob Cranshaw or Crenshaw, the bass player who played with Sonny Rollins for years. (Sonny died yesterday!!), so I could not text the "Bob" in question.  

Now I was with the "Bob" that was responsible for the girl. We were doing something else together and I thought it was fortunate I had found him. I laid down the law to him, gravely but not with any anger, in a way he could not argue against. I said something about child protective services. I had resolved the situation.  

***

The dreams are about care of self and care of others. Bob is not Bob, but another version of myself. 

Poem I wrote awake in bed in the middle of the night

 

I want the least grief possible--

I said to myself, in my confusion, error, or stupidity.

Is it a gift I can refuse, a price to negotiate? 

With whom, exactly, would I make this deal?  

 

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.