Love Poem with Toast

Poem: "Love Poem with Toast"

by Miller Williams, from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.















The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

From the Writer's Almanac

2 More Nights at the Schnitzer to Hear This Concert

If you have an opening on your schedule try to get to the current concert at the Oregon Symphony.

Conducting is Gregory Vajda (charming, amusing and vivacious)

Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin (blood-stirring -- and with supertitles)

Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (soothing).

Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor with Argetnine pianist) Ingrid Fliter (beautiful and technically brilliant and evocative)

Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice (short and amusing)

Scott Simon interviews Daniel Pollack

Piano Pathways: Daniel Pollack, 50 Years Later

To listen to Scott Simon's interview with Daniel Pollack and hear some great music, Click Here.

January 12, 2008 - Fifty years ago, Daniel Pollack was a graduate student in piano studies at Vienna's prestigious Hochschule fur Musik. One day, he noticed a sign on the bulletin board about a piano competition in Moscow, and he decided to enter.

Daniel Pollack at the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where he won a prize with very little preparation.

It was the first annual Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, at the height of the Cold War, in an unthawed Moscow into which Americans rarely ventured.

Another American, Van Cliburn, won the top prize, helping to make both the award and himself famous. But the 23-year-old Pollack won a prize, too, and he was invited to tour all over the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. He also became the first American to record an album for the Soviet Melodya label.

Pollack nearly dropped out of the competition. On his first night in Moscow, dining with fellow contestants, he found out that he had prepared the wrong repertoire for the competition. His professor back in Vienna had misread the entry requirements.

Pollack felt he should withdraw.

"After a night of terror," Pollack says, "I went to Dmitri Shostakovich, then-chairman of the competition, and said I wished to resign. But he simply would not hear of it, citing that as an American, it would provoke an incident."

Pollack and Cliburn advanced through the rounds. Eventually, the finals of the very first Tchaikovsky Competition, held in the Soviet capital, seemed to be a battle between two Americans.

Cliburn came out on top. Pollack landed in eighth place.

"The competition made an immediate difference in my career," Pollack says. "Whereas Van came back to a ticker-tape parade in the U.S., I was invited to stay on in the Soviet Union for another three weeks of concerts and recordings. That was the beginning of a 40-year love affair with the Russian public."

Pollack's Soviet odyssey has come full circle. In 1986, he served as vice-chairman of the Tchaikovsky Competition, and as a pianist, he's returned to tour the Soviet Union and Russia 15 times.

Pollack's career is still going strong. He performs, records, and gives master classes. He is also professor of piano at the Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles.

Don't forget this

The Memory Loss of Normal Aging versus Alzheimer's Disease

After age 40, you may have noticed having greater difficulty remembering people's names or recent conversations or events. Have you wondered:

1. Is my forgetfulness just aging or am I getting Alzheimer's disease?
2. How do I tell the difference?

There are clear answers to these questions that help you understand normal and abnormal memory loss. Read on.

Question 1: Is my forgetfulness just aging or am I getting Alzheimer's disease or something similar?

With normal aging, your attention span, or working memory, declines. With Alzheimer's disease and many other conditions, a specific type of memory, called short-term memory declines early on. Following are definitions of three types of memory:

* Working memory is the scratch pad in your brain that allows you to follow a conversation, enjoy a movie, read a book, think through a thought, or finish a difficult task. If you have ever walked into a room and forgotten why you entered it, you have experienced the decline in working memory with normal aging. Working memory is controlled in the frontal part of your brain and declines with normal aging.

* Short-Term Memory stores recently learned information, such as an interesting comment you heard or an important idea you recently learned for your job. It is like a tape recorder that can replay recently learned information for about two weeks, then erases. Anything you remember for more than two weeks passes into long-term memory, which is controlled in a different brain area. Short-term memory is controlled in the temporal lobe on the side of your brain, and declines first in Alzheimer's disease and related disorders.

* Long-Term Memory can store your life's knowledge for as long as you live. People (and their doctors) often think that because they can remember detailed events in their past (more than two weeks ago), that they don't have Alzheimer's disease. However, Alzheimer's disease does not affect long-term memory until a much later stage of the disease.

Question 2: How do I tell the difference between memory decline due to normal aging and that due to Alzheimer's disease or something similar?

After age 50, regular memory checkups can help differentiate between normal memory loss and Alzheimer's disease or a related condition. Regular memory checkups can assure you that your memory changes are part of normal aging as well as detect problems early when they are most treatable.

Objective tests of mental abilities are used to confirm cognitive impairment as well as to help diagnose its cause. Of the cognitive functions impaired in Alzheimer's disease, short-term memory loss is one of the first. Therefore tests of short-term memory loss can identify Alzheimer's disease at its earliest stages. Your physician or a recommended neuropsychologist should also be able to conduct professional testing.

Want to buy some beachfront property?

From a friend:

"Thought you might be interested in pictures of the erosion in Neskowin this week The foundations of one million-dollar-plus beach front house just north of Pacific Sands were exposed after the ocean undercut their rip rap (which was originally laid many feet below the beach level) so it collapsed & washed out. The house apparently has been saved - thanks to really heroic 24-hour efforts by the contractors."

Click on above photo to enlarge. To see the source of these photos and more, explore the sight by clicking here.

Things That Make Life Easier...Or Not

To check out these interesting designs click here.

BACK TO THE FUTURE TO CURE MORTGAGE SCANDAL?

BACK TO THE FUTURE TO CURE MORTGAGE SCANDAL?

By Neal Peirce

Can it be as bad as some say -- 2 million home foreclosures in 2008, the worst housing slump since the Great Depression? Will there be heartbreak for so many more families, boarded-up windows and abandonment ravaging vulnerable neighborhoods coast to coast?

The prognosis is not favorable. Sub-prime lending -- high-interest rate mortgages with rates that suddenly escalate after a few years, forcing often naive and unprepared homeowners to default -- is taking a heavy toll. Houses vacated by foreclosures are deteriorating into eyesores, encouraging crime, depressing property values, costing localities revenues they need for schools, police, other vital services.

Some Northeastern cities -- Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh among them -- are said to be the hardest hit of all. Among the states. Florida, California and Indiana are registering the most foreclosures.

But the pain’s being felt nationwide. The U.S. Conference of Mayors projects the weak housing market and large inventory of unsold homes may reduce cumulative U.S. home values by $1.2 trillion this year.

Is there a villain in this story? Yes, and he’s hidden in plain sight: a heavily lobbied federal government that lost sight of ordinary Americans’ interests.

That’s the story told in The American Prospect magazine by John Atlas of the National Housing Institute and Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The problem, they say, is that Washington succumbed to pressure from Wall Street and other financial players and deregulated a once stable, smoothly-functioning American housing finance market. And that the only way out is a U-turn, back to circa 1970 in national regulation.

The history’s illuminating. The ravages of the Depression triggered a range of bank regulations and agencies to protect consumers, among them the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Home Loan Bank System, Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration. The savings-and-loan industry was highly regulated, its mission to take peoples’ deposits and use them exclusively for home mortgages. Washington also insured loans through the FDIC, created a secondary market to keep capital flowing, and required savings and loans to make predictable 30-year fixed-rate loans. Homeownership soared and there were few foreclosures.

But in the early 1980s, the politically powerful lending industry convinced Congress to eliminate interest-rate caps and loosen mortgage controls. The S&Ls got permission to compete with conventional banks, then began a decade-long orgy of real estate speculation. Banks and S&Ls started devouring each other and making loans for shopping malls, golf courses and condo projects with scant financial logic. Result: by the late ‘80s hundreds of banks and S&Ls went under and the federal government had to step in to bail out depositors.

In the aftermath, with stable S&Ls vanished and federal controls emasculated, a giant “financial services” industry of banks, insurance companies, credit card firms and other money lenders emerged. Mortgage brokers, Atlas and Dreier charge, become “the street hustlers of the lending world,” making a fee for each borrower they recruited and handed over to a mortgage lender -- often collecting an extra fee in return for negotiating an inflated interest rate.

Large mortgage finance companies began to make massive profits on sub-prime loans. Wall Street in recent years created special investment units to buy up those mortgages from the lenders, bundling them into mortgage-backed securities and selling them (at fat fees) to unsuspecting investors around the world.

But when thousands of the unregulated mortgages started to go south, the present collapse was triggered, with billion-dollar losses for Wall Street firms and dark clouds across all mortgage lending.

So how should we recover? President Bush’s so-called interest rate “freeze,” announced in November, is hardly the answer. It’s entirely voluntary and is projected to apply to only 12 percent of the mortgage holders that are likely to have severe difficulty making their monthly payments, including none of those already in default in 2007..

Some better ideas are before Congress, including a recently House-passed bill that requires lenders to verify all applicants’ income and document their creditworthiness. Mortgage companies and brokers would have to be licensed, like stockbrokers and insurance brokers.

But Dreier tells me he’d go further -- for example simply forbid adjustable-rate mortgages because they’re just as risky, he insists, as playing the stock market. And he’d strengthen non-profit lenders like the federally-chartered Neighborhood Housing Services of America. NHS has made thousands of loans to low-income borrowers with an enviable delinquency rate of just 3.34 percent -- mostly because it requires every borrower to take its strong mortgage education program before and after a loan is made.

“Daylighting” the lending process, putting tight rules on all mortgage lending? Would those moves be too restrictive, harm our free market? No way, I’d say. Strong regulations led post-World War II America toward world-leading homeownership rates and an expansive economy. Capitalism works best with clear rules. Let’s go back there.