Fiddling While Rome Burns

I have been away from the blog for a while.  All my creative energies have been put into the violin, I have had little bandwidth even to listen to audio books while walking, let alone write or research anything outside of the week's performance. I also teach approximately full time and have full time children...

I have little bits of drafts that I started and left.  I shall leave them here in vestigial form for your amusement...

Sometime last autumn I was starting to get a raunchy sound on my E string, and it went away after I changed to fresh strings. In January, the E got raunchy again, and changing strings, adjusting my technique, sanding my calluses, and two trips to the Violin Whisperer did not solve it.  I have a new wolf on my fiddle on Bb5.  Bother...

...thoughts about why some folks don't like The Violin Whisperer.   I have heard whispering around town suggesting that a certain subset of professionals don't like him and avoid his shop at all costs.  I have not inquired into why this is, but on my last visit, I decided to bend my mind to see him with the eyes of others.  What I noticed is that he does not modulate his voice or expressions to change from when he meets a stranger to an old friend.  He seems just slightly separate and analytical.  No buddy-buddy.  No slaps on the back.  No inside jokes.  No off topic banter.  I think that the same things that drive those qualities for him also drive his incredible intuition in the wood and his amazing attention to detail.  I had never noticed that he was not socially chummy until I was looking for it, and it had never bothered me.  I have read that some people who tend to have a flatter social aspect often have their facial expressions of pain or confusion or other "negative" emotions misinterpreted by a certain slight majority as things like anger or aggression.  Pain is read as danger or dislike.  Lots of food for thought.  I wouldn't change the Violin Whisperer for anything.  He is magic with those instruments, and fascinating to watch.

Jane Eyre & world population in the 1840s...

I finished Jane Eyre for the third time.  I love Emily Bronte's insight into the human mind.  I have recently finished her sister Charlotte's book Wuthering Heights.  I liked it as well, and despite many similar themes and settings, the sense of what's inside was a little less so.  I had some really deep thoughts when reading Jane about population density then and now and how that affected people's situations and world views.  I also played a symphony by a female composer from the same decade, which added more to the thought-engines.  World population at the time of that writing is estimated to be between 800,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 souls - approximately 1/10 of today's number.  That is a vast change in under 200 years.  So many fewer people meant such rural and quiet lives for the author and her characters.  Such small towns and frankly much acceptance for the quirks of fellow humans.  And so much silence and time.  The density of humans now leads to faster changes, more opportunities, so many more connections, and more chance to be lost in the shuffle unseen.