From the Alwinac: Introducing my new online Alwin Schroeder biography

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

I recently uploaded the first installment of my expanded Alwin Schroeder biography. This first part covers Alwin’s ancestry and early childhood (1855-1868), with details on the musical activities of his father and older brothers in Alwin’s native Neuhaldensleben. Read it here.

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (69) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Sunday,
July 18, 1920,
7:00 AM

The Citizens Bank of Tampa was considered Tampa’s first high-rise building of any kind. It was built in 1913 at 701 North Dale Mabry Boulevard, with ten stories, and was one hundred and twenty feet tall. That in itself had not been terribly interesting to Joe Ashley. The fact that Eli Witt, the founder of Have-A-Tampa Cigars, deposited his receipts into Citizen’s Bank on a regular and predictable basis was, however, very interesting.

From the Alwinac: Schroeder Student Spotlight: Ernest Lachmund (1865-1954)

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Among the Oscar Cobb opera houses highlighted in my previous post was one that existed briefly in Duluth, Minnesota. In a surprise Schroeder connection, one of the musicians who made his studio in the Temple Opera Building before it succumbed to fire in 1895 was Ernest Lachmund, a cellist, pianist, and composer who counted Alwin Schroeder among his teachers. I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the Duluth concert organization Matinee Musicale (founded in 1900) in unearthing a cello piece by Lachmund that hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. Cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing’s subsequent performance of Lachmund’s rediscovered Waltz-Serenade for Matinee Musicale can be heard here.
    Ernest Lachmund’s father Gustav Otto Lachmund had fled Germany following the failed 1848 revolution, going first to Missouri, where Ernest’s older brother Carl was born in 1853, then to Clinton, Iowa, where Ernest was born in 1865. Carl and Ernest both studied music in Germany. Carl attended the Cologne conservatory as a piano and violin student from 1867 to 1871, and Ernest followed in his footsteps, arriving in Cologne as a 13-year-old in 1878. Two years later Ernest was at the Royal Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, studying chamber music with Joachim Quartet members Joseph Joachim, Emanuel Wirth, and Robert Hausmann, and cello with Anton Hekking. In Berlin Ernest attended the first local performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle and heard Brahms as a pianist. Meanwhile Carl had become an ardent follower and piano student of Franz Liszt in Weimar, and Ernest himself observed Liszt’s classes during the summer of 1884....
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Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Goines On: “Jesus Christ!”

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Goines had just sat down in the barber’s chair. The barber was a young Hispanic woman who introduced herself as Hermina. Goines asked Hermina how she was doing. 

    She said, “Very well, thank God!”
    Goines thought, What the heck? and said it too: “Indeed, thank God.”
    And then he couldn’t help himself; he asked, “And which god do you thank?”

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (68) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
September 3,
1922

Ma Middleton had been cooking since before dawn. Red had helped cart wood for the stove and been rewarded with extra coffee and biscuits, with ham and redeye gravy.
    Ramon had come back from Wauchula with his family on Monday, the third of September, two days after the attack. He brought his family to retrieve the body of their brother, son and cousin, Luis Xian Alejandro Alvarez y Gomez.

From “The Scratching Post”: Bye-bye, Betsy

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, September 24, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

My feelings about the late queen are complicated. They’re vaguely tranquil with an admixture of fatigue. I struggle to think of anyone who’s made a similar impression on me, and only a few are close.
    One was Frida, a cashier at the cafeteria of a place where I once worked. She took our money with robotic speed. No matter that her queue was the longest; it was always served fastest. As her hands flew, she nevertheless took time for a “How are you today?” I always replied with something like, “Two ticks from suicidal.” She would invariably break stride and commiserate until I showed my readiness to move on. She loved an opportunity for small talk, and it was always good-hearted small talk.
    Queen Betsy also had a good heart, or so I believe. She cared deeply about her family, especially if they were blood relatives. She loved animals. If you were a dog or a horse, you were treated with special regard. She was very engaging with titled people and heads of state. I can’t recall a single misstep, even with impossible boors like Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. But she assiduously avoided any conversation that touched on policy and never revealed a point of view on any issue of consequence. Her raison d’etre was to preserve the notion that the Royal Family was the rock upon which the greatness and goodness of British civilization rested.
    Given all that, let’s fantasize by appropriating a well-worn Hollywood concept .... Suppose, as the result of some cosmic burp, Frida and Betsy undergo a personality swap....
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[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

All Over the Place: Defining a Soul

By Michael H. Brownstein

You are the rhyme in beauty,

the great half smile of first quarter moonlight,

the radiance of sunrise over Lake Michigan.

Story Challenge #6

Featuring
a disturbing setting

By Moristotle

Thanks to Michael H. Bernstein for another challenging beginning, which he submitted modestly as “potential.”

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (67) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Friday,
September 1, 1922,
concluded

He came up to the north side of the culvert and saw Jueve down in the canal, holding Jumper above the black water in the culvert pipe. The truck they had shot up was still tilted over the canal with the left front wheel hanging over the edge. Blood was dripping heavily from the front seat, puddling on the roadway and trickling into the canal.
    Damn, Red thought, that’ll bring the ’gators for sure and for certain.

While you’re busy making other plans

Renewed from December 15, 2009

By Moristotle

Was John Lennon quoting Schopenhauer when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.¹

​In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

Renewed from November 1, 2009

By Moristotle

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone’s ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (66) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Friday,
September 1, 1922,
continued

From up here, he could see the road north for maybe a quarter mile, before the lakeside trees and bushes obscured it. The land between the road and the lake was about a quarter-mile wide, so what Red saw out the north door was pretty much a square, with the road on his left side and the lake shore on his right.

Animated spirits remembered

13 Years Ago Today

By Moristotle

[Published originally on October 3, 2009.]

Having found Poet’s Walk gentle and fairly level last Saturday, I took my wife there today—and Siegfried, who was thrilled by the “new book” (as my wife phrased it) of all the unfamiliar scents he could put his quivering nose to. He and I had to walk ahead so that he wouldn’t in his eagerness continually run into her. But once, when we got far enough ahead (only ten or fifteen yards) for him to feel some disquiet apparently, he stopped and sat to wait for her, and in so doing reminded me of Wally’s doing the same on an autumn walk in Duke Forest two or three years ago. (I thought I’d blogged about this, but if I did I couldn’t find the post, unless it was “In the woods,” but the incident isn’t mentioned. I remember now, and mention here, Wally’s animating spirit.)

All Over the Place: A Death to a Student

By Michael H. Brownstein

[My student was rushed to the hospital when he had a problem breathing. Shortly thereafter, he passed away. It destroyed all of us—except for a seedy preacher who wanted to garner more money from the grieving.
    Another student decided to hold up someone with a gun she found. He took it from her and shot her twice in the chest. She died instantly.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 7)

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all published parts

“But back to Peggy. You’ve given the facts, but what’s the real story? I don’t see the woman. Did she sleep with the new president?”
    “She must have. I don’t know. She had his ear, and what secrets did he reveal? Secrets of state.”