Oddments of High Unimportance

Dear Ones, it’s beautifully simple. Surrender. Go with the flow. Spend time doing what brings you joy. Focus on what you want more of. Love. Practice gratitude. Humans love to make things more complicated than they need to be. If you simply focus on those basic aspects, you will be living the life of your dreams in record time. ~Archangel Gabriel

This is why the potential is always there for me to get nothing done. Here are some of the top links that caught my eye from today's Arts & Letters Daily and Marginal Revolution sites. I could have spent a happy hour reading all of them, but I decided to confine them to my Readability queue instead. I may actually get around to reading these items in the next few months. We'll see if they're as interesting  to me then as they are today.

• Literary self-publishing. An indie band that releases its own CD or album gets street cred. Not so for those who publish outside the mainstream press.
• New books on fairy tales. What makes these archetypes so durable? Why do books on a theme come in threes?
• "The fantastic pervades the world’s literatures of every time and place; our much vaunted realism is the sport, the mutant." Gore Vidal often derided the grey American naturalistic prose style of the '50s (his early novels were written in that style).
• Simon Schama on the writers who inspired him.
• Gladwell on Jerry Sandusky and how child molesters get away with it.

Map of Rain Hitting Water by Mara Gibson

Treat your ears right. Listen to this hypnotic piece from composer Mara Gibson.

In the late ’90s, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons. By chance, a flyer at the Regulator Bookshop let me know about Mara Gibson, a Duke PhD student in composing, who taught piano on the side. I worked with her, I think, for about 2 years before she left Durham to finish her PhD. A few memories I have from that period:

• Those big dogs!
• Chatting about art, the art instinct, the artist’s life, etc.
• I found that when I practiced every day, even if just for 15 minutes, my playing got better. Weird.

Mara held an annual recital for her students at the back of Boyce Piano Emporium on 15-501. Her students all sat up at the front of the room, with the invited audience sitting behind us.

I didn’t realize up till then that she mostly taught kids from elementary age up through high school, with only seven or eight adult students. Mara had sequenced us so that I sat next to a junior high kid, I think, who was playing before me. He said, “That seat is for Mara’s students” and I said, yes, I know, I’m one of her students.

The younger students started by playing their recital pieces. After the last little person played their song, Mara called my name and I could hear the titters and amused murmurs from the audience as I lumbered up to the piano to announce my recital piece. You could hear them thinking, who the hell is this?

“Hi,” I said, “my name is Mike Brown and I started taking lessons with Mara about eight months ago. I’ll be playing three short pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky. And,” I paused, looking around the room at the kids and parents, “I believe I’m the first person playing today who is over 6 feet tall.” That got a nice laugh and Liz said later it definitely broke the tension.

I think it was on the first or second piece, I burbled something and got a bit lost. So I stopped, smiled, excused myself, took a breath, and started in on it again. The pieces took less than 2 or 3 minutes to play, and it all went fine.

Many parents came up afterward to congratulate me and expressed their wonder and admiration at my performing a recital piece in front of a room full of people. I thanked them and then waved my hand at the kids – who had just done the same thing that I did. The parents seemed to think that performing was something children naturally did, whereas an adult putting himself in a position where one could fail (or succeed!) publicly was something they couldn’t conceive of doing.

Mara eventually left Duke to finish her PhD. Since 2004, she has been on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and is now at Louisiana State University. She leads the life of a busy artist, academic, and mother, and I’m so happy to see her making so many big contributions to her art and her community.

Mara has also started selling some of her compositions digitally on Bandcamp. You can listen to the full pieces and then purchase and download them to your computer. It is so cool to have a Mara Gibson playlist on my iPhone.

Updated on 2026-02-25

[O Fortune, changing and unstable, your tribunal and judges are also unstable.
You prepare huge gifts for him who you would tickle with favors as he arrives at the top of your wheel.
But your gifts are unsure, and finally everything is reversed:
you raise up a poor man from his filth and the insufferable bullshitter then becomes a consul.]”

(via Chamber Music Today: medieval)