Sitar

And speaking of Ravi Shankar, which I was yesterday, we come to the sitar, an instrument made world-famous by this musician.

Sitar photo left from Pakrashi Harmonium.

The sitar is believed to have developed in the 1700s when the Mughal (Moghul) Empire was collapsing. According to Yellow Bell Music, it has Persian and South Indian influences, and uses the resonant bridge of an instrument called the Tampura.

Zither

This West African raft zither, made around 1935, has ten strings. It is located in the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota. Various African raft zithers, often accompanied by voice, can be heard here.

The zither is widely played in eastern Europe: Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Germany and Austria. This complex concert zither played by Lotte Landl has 38 strings, of which she uses only 28. It also has two possible tunings. In this video, Ms. Landl explains the tuning options and how her instrument is played.

There are also Chinese and Korean zithers, and of course, the Indian one played by Ravi Shankar.

Traditional Irish Harp

Trinity College harp photo from website of Alison Vardy 

The Irish harp is a lovely and ancient instrument. According to Susanna Duffy, the Irish harp, with its history parallel to that of the Irish people, was the "dispenser of sorrow, gladness, and rest."

These early small Celtic harps were made of bog wood in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The one in the photo may be seen at Trinity College Dublin, and it's close Scottish relative, the Queen Mary harp, is kept in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Aeolian Lute

Photo by Tim Manning

An Aeolian lute is a stringed instrument. Played by the wind, it is referred to in The Odyssey by the ancient Greek poet Homer.

The Aeolian lute or lyre was also a symbol favoured by the Romantic poets, in particular Samuel T. Coleridge, who refers to it in a poem called "Dejection: an Ode."

Retirements, music and soul

Irish style pub in Saratoga Springs, New York

In contemporary society, we witness the attenuation of meaningful rituals, and one of these is raising our voices together in song. Having grown up in the sixties, when we carried our guitars and sang everywhere, I miss that.

Loss requires ritual, and so does a change of state. After long years of service, retirees need and deserve to be ritually helped forward into their next stage of life. People love to be sung to, and they love to sing along. This personal kind of music lubricates the passage through change.

The retirement celebration I attended on Friday night was for four colleagues with whom I worked for over twenty years. We've been a tight group of baby boomers in our workplace, and it was sad for those who have not yet retired to think we would not see these work friends in our hallways again.

Strangely, as one moves between phases of life, loss brings its own blessings. In this case, the loss of four dear and familiar afforded us the satisfaction of planning and carrying out a ritual celebration to mark the border between the working state and the retired one.

A fellow wordsmith and I took it upon ourselves to create songs -- familiar tunes, altered lyrics -- to recall some of the remarkable history we shared with these departing colleagues. In the afternoon before the dinner, we practiced and prepared for our performance.

Only to discover that the "room" that had been booked for the party at the back of a noisy and boisterous restaurant was little more than an alcove. At first we feared it would be impossible for the lyrics over which we had laboured would be largely inaudible.

But we wanted to deliver our personal songs to the people we wrote them for, and we found a way. Seating our departing colleagues directly in front of us on chairs while the others gathered round behind them meant all could enjoy our invented lyrics and our a capella singing. We began with a ballad, addressing each of them in turn with memories that spanned many long years.

After our songs, others gave limericks they had created, as well as spontaneous memories and tributes. We then closed with a traditional Irish song. The Parting Glass is a benediction that follows the last drink of an evening. Our version was altered (always allowed with folk songs) and a bit lighter than that of the famous slow, sad version of the Clancy Brothers.

And so my dear colleagues, Mary Jane, Herbert, Dave and Jack, you have been ritually celebrated and sung into your next stage.

"Good night and joy be with you all."

Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

Cover photo The Telegraph

Our protagonist runs along the streets of New York and worries: about his bills, his unfulfilled potential, his family responsibilities. He crosses the Brooklyn Bridge and we follow, down one street and up the next, as with him, we experience poverty and human suffering in graphic and smelly detail.

With striking parallels to author Michael Thomas, our narrator is of mixed race, black, native American and white (Irish). He's a brilliant scholar, a construction labourer, a former college athlete, a Harvard dropout, a former teacher of freshman English, a dry alcoholic, a father of three.

As we run with him, we see through his eyes another jogger, a car accident, a woman outside a liquor store, desperate for a beer. When our man breaks his last ten to buy one we hold our breath. Don't drink that! Sigh with relief when he gives it to her.

This narrator has enough on his mind, trying to earn money for urgent bills, looking for a home so his wife and kids can come back from staying with her mother, so he can have a home again, instead of staying in the summer-vacated room of a wealthy friend's kid.

Then there's 911 to add to the growing burden of his thoughts. Why, he wonders, do people reductively dichotomize, why do "the leaders call to the dead...say the dead call out for retribution...Genocide wrapped in some rationalization that someone is owed something. The continued body count, millenia old and miles long."

He also reflects on growing up post-King, remembering misfit childhood friends who have gone off the rails and recalling the "disastrous" attempt at bussing. In a beautiful and elegiac tone, he meditates on his life, "It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment, especially when...the visionaries are all gone. No more DuBois. Nor more Locke. No more Gandhi. No more King." He doesn't blame the liberals. But he can't reach them, nor they him.

In the world inhabited by this complex and tragic man, we are told, talent and potential are irrelevant in the end, and the only thing that matters is winning big. No doubt this view is influenced by his combined sense of responsibility and failure, of being middle-aged and not living up to some standard he had set for himself. And we grieve with him for his father, who "groans from the crypt of memory."

Our man feels helpless to meet the needs of his children, or to bridge the gap of history and experience between himself and his white patrician wife. Unlike her husband, he tells us, Claire is not vexed by the presence of other people, "even those she dislikes...she has the ability to make them feel good--when she smiles at them, gives them her approval with all that Anglican highness."

This powerful book has huge vision, beautifully drawn characters, profound human tragedy, even flashes of humour, as when the girl at Starbuck's slides over his large black "with six ice cubes dropped in on top to take the coffee out of the lawsuit temperature range."

It was published by Grove/Atlantic Press in 2007 in their Black Cat imprint, and named as one of the year's ten best by the New York Times Book Review. In 2009 it won the Impac Dublin Literary Award.

According to Larry Rochter's interview at the time that prize was announced, Thomas had other books planned. I for one can hardly wait to read more of his work.

Miraculous avocado materialization

Avocado picture from Health.com

The other day I went to the grocery store and bought avocados. "If you want use your points," the cashier told me, "you'll get one avocado free."

"Okay," I said. But when I got home, only one avocado came out of the grocery bag. Thinking it must've rolled out into the trunk of the car, I went to check, but it wasn't there. So I went back to the store and explained that they'd taken my points, but I hadn't got my free avocado. They gave me one.

Three days later, I was watering the garden when an avocado rolled across the sidewalk and hopped over the hose. I scratched my head. If it had been there earlier, I would definitely have seen it. Only one explanation: a miraculous avocado materialization.