The Reticulator

At the close of our church service today, I stuck around in the pews instead of going downstairs for coffee, not wanting to let the postlude go to waste. It was a Bach piece, I don’t remember what, played by Roxanne, our substitute organist for today and our onetime regular organist. I wasn’t the only one who stayed behind just to listen.

Later when told her how much I enjoyed it, I joked that it was like Paul Manz coming back. Then she informed me. Paul Manz had died just a few days ago. If I could listen to it again, I could probably explain what parts of the Bach had reminded me of Manz. Roxanne said she had played a Manz piece for the offertory, as a tribute. Usually I notice things like that, but I had stepped out for a few minutes and missed it.

Paul Manz was at Concordia College, St. Paul, when I was a student there. We all knew we had a great one among us. I got to see and hear him play just a few times, but it was always a treat even to hear one of his students play. If I hadn’t skipped chapel so much of the time, I would have heard even more. But this was when the Vietnam war was heating up. The school was dropping requirements and standards left and right, as was happening at most colleges. So I skipped morning and evening chapel more often than not. But there were also the times when one could wander into Graebner Memorial Chapel late in the evening and listen to students practice. I knew already then that the sounds and sights would be the source of future nostalgia.

When I was a new freshman I had to take piano, as did all students in the teacher education program. My father had made some attempts to teach me when I was younger, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with a keyboard. The professor (a man named Brauer, perhaps?) said I had a nice touch on the keyboard. At one of my lessons he said, “John, you could still be an organist. It’s not too late!” But I wasn’t interested in working that hard. If I was going to work at anything, it would be history and science. When the piano requirement was dropped, I dropped it.

There was a pecking order among those who were going to be teachers. Those with usable musical ability were higher than those who had none, who were at the bottom of the heap. Those who were organists were higher than the others, and could write their own tickets, so to speak. And at the top were the elite ones who studied under Dr. Manz. (Things like history, literature, and science were not factors in establishing one’s status.)

A roomate-to-be had come to Concordia expecting to be one of Paul Manz’s students. He had already served as a frequent organist at one of the downtown Detroit churches, and had an ability to improvise that was way beyond my understanding. He auditioned, and then was crushed to learn that Dr. Manz would not accept him as once of his students. If Roy ever sees this, maybe he can tell the story himself, as he did many times back then to entertain us. But none of what happened changed the fact that we were in awe of Dr. Manz.

Today I listened to the tribute that Michael Barone has done at pipedreams.org. (As far as I know, none of the local public radio stations carries Pipedreams. I occasionally get to listen to it when we’re traveling.) Tonight I listened to the hour-and-a-half program — twice — and came away with an even greater appreciation for the range of what he has done.

I tried to explain Paul Manz to a friend who had joined the conversation with Roxanne this morning. I pointed out that when you hear organ preludes that remind you of a steam calliope at a circus, that’s Paul Manz’s music. Roxanne’s way of explaining it was better: His music is joyful. (You can hear the steam calliope effect in some of the pieces on Pipedreams, but there is a lot more than that.)

The Pipedreams program was recorded in 1981 2001, and features interview segments with Dr. Manz. In one of them he describes how he and Herman Schlicker designed the Schlicker organ at Mt Olive Lutheran Church. He explained that he wanted an organ that was big enough to lead the congregation in song, but not so big as to overwhelm and frustrate them. That is a characteristic of a lot of Manz’s organ preludes. To put it crudely, they are right-sized. And they are joyful. (I’m now listening to the Michael Barone program a 3rd time.)

I posted the below as a comment in response to a Conor Friedersdorf article about birtherism at The American Scene:

I recall a time in the early 90s on a political e-mail list when I must have said something nice about Bill Clinton or something nasty about Republican positions or something along those lines. The most rabid Clinton supporter on the list said something like, “John, you don’t seem to be like other conservatives I know.”

I was somewhat taken aback. I recognized it as an early warning sign that I was about to go down a road where others had gone. I had seen it happen to too many other conservatives.

So I announced that I would fix it so he would never say anything like that about me again. And he never did.

I don’t mind being different than other conservatives, but I don’t want any leftists to think they’re going to pull any of that on me.

This was the comment I posted in response to the WSJ article, “Boomers to This Year’s Grads: We Are Really, Really Sorry“

So Mitch Daniels (who is my age) goes to a 2009 commencement and spends much of his time talking, not about the class of 2009, but about his own generation. And he notes that the baby boomers are self-absorbed. Yup.

Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things.

The subheadline of this blog is “Place. Limits. Liberty.” Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The “About” page has this paragraph to explain itself:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

I was tempted to highlight the words and phrases in that paragraph that push all the right buttons for me, but that would be most of them. I especially like that it links social and political issues to “Place.” That emphasis tempted me to rave about it over at The Spokesrider instead of here.

The only name I recognize in the list of contributing editors and editors-at-large is Rod Dreher — and that’s not someone I’ve paid much attention to.

An article by James Matthew Wilson titled, “Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats,” suggests that maybe somebody besides myself has actually read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address. I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to pope-talk, but I’ve read that speech in translation, and have since been amazed at all of the pope’s supporters and enemies who talk as though they’ve read it or heard it but have not. They may have read about it in the newspapers, but they haven’t read what he had to say.

According to this article, the pope has gotten a lot better reception in Africa than on Facebook.

Well, there are probably a lot of other blogs where I can read about pope-things. But this blog ties all these issues to place. If it continues to do that, it’s going to be a keeper.

I will be spending some time in a hospital waiting room tomorrow, so I went to the web site to find out what the policy is on computers and cell phones. For example, I can go to the University of Michigan Health System site to learn that cell phone use is restricted, but wireless access is available for computers.

So I went to bchealth.com, hoping to learn whether the policies and facilities are the same at our local hospital. There is no link on the main page for Visitor Information, but there is one for Patient Info. I clicked on that and found no information, but there are two (2) links.

• Patient Grievance Process Brochure
• Patient Grievance Form

and over on the sidebar:

• Questions or Comments.

That last one is a place where one can e-mail questions. It’s a little late for that now, but I tried using the search function to look up pages about wireless. No help there, either.

Oh, well. I don’t think our local hospital has as much money to spend on web design as the U of Michigan hospital does, but this gave me an idea on how companies that sell electronic products could save a ton of money on their web sites. Under “Support,” instead of providing links to FAQs, manuals, and downloads, they could just provide a link to lawyers who will handle class-action lawsuits. Not only would it eliminate the need to employ a lot of geeky web types, but it would instill confidence in the products — the kind of confidence that comes from knowing that the products require no explanation.