Some Things that Don't Suck

Or, life beyond the Scamdemic

Lest I give the impression that it’s all doom and gloom in my brain, here are few of my favorite things — things that give me joy on a regular basis.

Music

I used to play the C minor Nocturne shown in #2. At the time it was the hardest piece I’d ever played. I consider it the greatest of the Nocturnes. The final section is very difficult, with the left hand having to play many big chords in rapid succession while jumping all over the place.

Now I’m working on the Barcarolle, which is much harder. In the piu mosso section of the Barcarolle, the left hand is kept busy, much like the C minor Nocturne, but it is much more difficult. It’s pretty obvious I’ll never actually play this up to tempo, but it sure is a good exercise. The Barcarolle also has a lovely coloratura section, mentioned in #16; this is probably the easiest part of the piece. That coloratura section ends with a brief phrase in which the right hand is split in the manner shown in #15: the upper fingers are playing a trill, while the thumb is playing a little melody. The idea is simple but the execution is not.

I also used to play the E flat Nocturne shown in #4, but that was a very long time ago. Nowadays I don’t find it nearly as interesting as the much later E flat Nocturne, the Op. 55 #2, which I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. But the earlier Nocturne is very popular, partly because it’s one of the easier ones.

I also used to play the D flat Nocturne shown in #5. This is a great piece, but I’m not working on it now. It has some very difficult rapid passages (strings of “little notes”, or coloratura) for the right hand (see #16).

I also used to play the B flat minor Nocturne shown in #9. This is the first published Nocturne by Chopin, and is also very popular because it’s not too hard. I don’t find it very interesting, but as the video shows, it has a good example of a complicated rhythm (11 against 6).

Mountain Lakes

Here is one of the lakes I’ve visited in my recent explorations of the nearby Grouse Lakes region of the Sierra Nevada. I missed the Sierra lakes when I was living in Vermont. There are very few lakes in the Green Mountains, and there was only one I visited that was anything like a granite-bound Sierra lake (Lake Pleiad near Middlebury Gap).

Trees

On my first Sierra Nevada backpack trip, when I was 12 years old, I fell in love with the quaking aspen. The way it shimmers in the wind is enchanting. Here is a little one in a grove of much larger trees.

Books

In my wasted youth, I read a ton of science fiction and fantasy. I have kept very few of these books in my greatly reduced collection (the reduction was forced by downsizing from a 2000 square foot house in Vermont to a 320 square foot cabin in the Sierra Nevada). Here’s one of them:

This book has far more staying power than most fantasies, probably because it’s not a traditional fantasy in any sense. I try to reread it every few years; it never gets old.

These days, I’m reading some old classics that I somehow managed to avoid all these years (most recently some Tolstoy and Faulkner), along with gigantic Russian novels like this one: