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Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, through 2007.5.21

This is a running diary of an operation that gave me an artificial ear 
and of my relearning how to hear. What makes my case different is that 
I am a keen lover of classical music and am self-experimenting on 
struggling to relearn how to hear music speech and vice versa. Go down 
to PART ONE: INTRODUCTION at the end to get an overview. Excuse the 
typos. I'm writing all this in a file, and the spell checker insists on 
running through the whole document in a seemingly random fashion, which 
by now is quite time consuming. When I'm doing an e-mail it goes from 
top to bottom, which is very fast. "Don't ask me why. Go ask your pop," 
says Dr. Seuss in one of his books I have heard over and over again.

Sarah is my wife. Andrea Marlowe is my audiologist at Johns Hopkins. 
Greg Frane is a fellow graduate of the University of Virginia who comes 
up for ten minutes and helps me go through some exercises every day at 
work. It was my right ear that was operated on.

_______________

Sunday, 2007.5.21

Sunday (May 6): It seems that the hallucinating tunes that go along 
with music are dying down. I was able to hear the Hammerklavier sonata 
(in my meat ear, now) when out jogging pretty well, though not so well 
by the time the music rests for a measure in the fugue (4-5 minutes 
before the end) and starts the climb from darkness into light. So, 
back in the apartment, I got out the score. Not much luck. Though I 
know the music well, the score is hard to follow, esp. when there's a 
countertune going on! But, the countertune was somehow banished during 
the last five or ten emphatic notes. Strong bass notes don't trigger 
of countertunes so much. Or maybe my brain senses that this final 
triumph is the only thing in the universe that now matters.

On Monday and Tuesday I had no better luck, whether using the score or 
not during the final climb.

Wednesday (May 8): The final sonatas. I finished the first movement of 
the 32nd in the subway and decided to try as best as I could to hear 
the Arietta, since I was in a peak state of readiness to hear this 
reach beyond the human condition (something paralleled only by Cézanne 
and Nietzsche.) Thought the hallucinations continued from Sonata 30 to 
the end and so I wasn't really hearing the music, I was uplifted 
anyhow.

I've been listening to a 40-CD Brilliant Classics Dvorak cube (I got 
it from http://hmv.co.uk for $40, plus shipping). I can consciously 
hear the actual music hardly at all, but my default hallucination tune 
became slow and somber. On the way home, however, I finished up my 
cassette tape of Backhaus' great mono cycle of the Beethoven Sonatas 
(reissued, so far only in Europe: snap it up when it comes stateside!) 
with the beginning of his Diabelli Variations. I heard it pretty well, 
but the joyous default tune came back and the slow, somber Dvorak-like 
default tune was banished. Why for Beethoven, of all things, I do not 
know.

Thursday (May 10): Greg came up, for the first time in a couple of 
weeks. He had been floored by some kind of nasty bug. I am now getting 
80% of the thirty-two spondaic words (way down this diary) correct. 
However, I did not do very well with the first or second syllable of 
the words alone. I've been getting Sarah to toss off the names of 
states, and I do much better with her than with Greg. My worst stretch 
was the four days after I qualified, in just under 19 seconds of the 
qualifying times of three hours, for the Boston Marathon in 1977. I 
ran for twenty miles on energy. The second half of the marathon (26 
miles, 285 yards) is said to begin at 20 miles, not 13, since it is at 
this point that one's energy stores are depleted. So I was then 
running on faith. But, the faith gave out after 24 miles, and I was 
running on nothing. It was sheer agony the last two miles, and I was 
loudly groaning. I was slowing down, too. To run a marathon in three 
hours means piling up 26 6:52 miles right after one another. I think I 
ran the last two about 8:00/mile. But I finished, with 19 seconds to 
spare! It is the sole objective achievement in my life. The clock is 
merciless. In school or at work in a bureaucracy, you are never 
entirely sure you deserve what you get, since you know that anything 
written contains rumble-bumble of one sort or another. Sarah drove me 
to the second Marine Corps Reserve Marathon (later taken over by the 
marines as a whole) and I hitched a ride home with no problem. After I 
got back (fortunately for the driver), I had numerous diattheas and 
terrible headaches. I was out of work for four days, my longest 
absence.

(I've never told this to anyone before, but there were two places 
along the route when you were obliged to make a sharp turn (330 
degrees) going down an incline. I, and a majority of other runners, 
cheated by cutting across. Now these cheatings amounted in total to a 
savings of less than 10 seconds, so I still completed the course in 
under three hours. Had I gained 19 seconds by cheating, I'd never have 
gotten over it! I went on to run the Boston Marathon next year (1978) 
and took it easy, completing the course in 3:14. The infamous 
"Heartbreak Hill," so called because there is a rise toward the end of 
the race, where runners often slow down so much that they get broken 
hearts, did not phase me at all, since my normal running up 
Connecticut Avenue in the District on my way home has longer and 
steeper hills. Anyhow, I had the premonition that I'd never complete 
another Marathon. I did attempt one the following year, the Washington 
Birthday Marathon, which consists of three loops. I was irrationally 
tense--I wasn't going to come close to winning, just in the 
respectable top 10%--so tense that shortly after the second loop I 
defecated. So I just went back to my car and drove home. I signed up 
for the Marine Corps (no longer Reserve) Marathon in 1980. My tension 
continued, and I didn't show up for the race. I kept up running 40 
miles a week (it was 60 the two months before I qualified for Boston, 
and 101 miles one week, having run on my own 26.2 miles on both Sunday 
and Saturday) until 1987. My hips were just getting too sore. A 
gradual decline since. I demarcate a runner from a jogger at eight 
minutes per mile. I've been a jogger since 1990, somewhere around 
then. Now it's just 14 miles a week between 10 and 11 minutes a mile. 
I do not know if I am aging normally and haven't tried very hard to 
look it up.)

Friday (May 13): All My Children: Adam is in the hospital for a heart 
attack. His lawyer comes in and tells him he need not worry about any 
legal difficulties. But he laments he has no one to take him home, 
until one of his many daughters by many marriages come into the 
hospital room and offers to take him home. And some character had a 
most romantic wedding on his huge estate, where he took his 
bride-to-be on a horseback ride. But the police come in an arrest him 
for bigamy. Stay tuned. The Jim Lehrer New Hour: why do I completely 
forget what happened as I write this (May 20)?

Saturday (May 12): Adelaide (my daughtercame by, and I got the states 
much better with her than with Sarah. The default tune now moves from 
the melodious one to a new Dvorak-like one, slow but lyrical rather 
than somber. I discovered that I can hear string quartets rather well, 
using both ears. They don't trigger off the hallucinations.

Monday (May 14): I've decided to finish up the Dvorak cube and my 
cassettes of the Brahms chamber music and go silent with music for at 
least a week, to see (HEAR!) whether the hallucinations will die down. 
I can report that I did rather well listening to the Brahms string 
quintets and the second sextet.

Tuesday (May 15): Greg came by again, Not much to report, except that 
we tried names of U.S presidents. I did not do very well, but then 
most of them are obscure. Did you know that used book shops rarely 
contain any biographies between Jackson and Lincoln? Their times are 
called the "Pre-War Years" by historians, since there was absolutely 
nothing going on except waiting around for the War of Northern 
Aggression to start. (No, I am personally opposed to slavery, but 
respect a woman's right to choose. It's just that I am a particularist 
at heart, not a universalist.) Several times when I stop to chat with 
others in the hallways, I ask them to toss out names of states. Better 
than chance, to be sure, but not as well as with Sarah by a long shot. 
Sarah will also toss out names of composers, conductors, violinists, 
painters, poets, etc.

Friday (May 18): All My Children. The bigamist's wife showed up and 
said she didn't sign the final divorce papers, since she want him to 
come rescue her. He admits he never stopped loving her. I think the 
wife he thought he had married is better looking and nicer. And Erica 
still want to have some sort of post-divorce relationship with Jack. 
Adam made no appearance at all. I wondered whether on Monday, Tuesday, 
Wednesday, or Thursday he died. After all, he is old and death is a 
plausible way of removing a man from the show who no longer looks like 
he can attract cuties. But it is just not reasonable to think that the 
death and funeral but, more so, all the quarrelling and litigation 
that must necessarily ensue would be over with in a mere week of a 
soap opera. There's enough for things to drag on for at least a month. 
So I checked the Wikipedia article, as the fans of this show will 
certainly keep him up to date. Yes, he's still there.

Sarah disdains this program no end, but friends at the office defend 
it, not because they have high regards for it (absolutely everyone 
seems to know what it is all about. I would not have had it not been 
for my friend Roy's late wife being an addict. Roy disdained it, too, 
so I had to go watch it for myself), but because it is well-situated to 
give me a good exercise to train my ears. I admit that I find it hard 
to pay attention. The stuff on the Jim Lehrer News Hour was only 
marginally more interesting, just the usual foreign policy gasbags. Now 
why foreign news is more "serious" than domestic news, I do not know. 
Mr. Mencken thought the United States had the most amusing government 
on this sorry ball of wax, and that might explain it.

Saturday (May 19): Cristina, my Argentine fellow Beethoven fan, asked 
me to copy the Loewentguth Middle and Late Quartets I have praised so 
highly and put into my "Essential in Stereo" collection. I had to 
revamp the one containing the first and second Razumovsky, since I had 
left out the last movement of the eighth. So I made a bit-to-bit copy 
of the 7th quartet and the first three movements of the 8th and got 
out the disc for the 8:4 and added it. (I'm having a Devil of a time 
using Roxio to copy CDs on my computer. Is there any way to clean 
optical drives that anyone can tell me about. Blank CD-Rs cost me from 
8¢ to 20¢ each. I got a fresh supply of have some 80 minute MUSIC 
CD-RWs--each word counts here--and so use them on my Sony stereo music 
burner and playback deck. If I bungle things, I don't have to start 
all over. Music CD-Rs and CD-RWs are slightly different, as the Sony 
won't recognize data-only discs.) I took advantage of the opportunity 
to listen to the 7th, the one one of the Budapest Quartet members, in 
its final configuration, said was the one they loved to play the most, 
even if they revered the 14th. (I now think more of the 13th, with die 
groß Fuge, for its supremely enigmatic qualities, while the 14th is 
"merely" transcendent. Try the 28th sonata in this regard, and while 
you are at it Schubert's 15th quartet and Mozart's 39th symphony.) 
This is highly significant to me, since I may not properly hear in 
stereo again, even if the hallucinations die down and I hear notes as 
they should sound in scale, because the frequency response in my cyber 
ear is so much better than in my meat ear. And so it was when I 
listened to it. Now the cello in this recording is far to the left in 
the very great stereo separation which makes the Loewenguth quartet 
version much my favorite. I wondered whether I was really hearing it 
that way but with the violins coming in my cyber ear only because the 
frequencies were higher. So, I switched the output to mono. (I have a 
bunch of switch boxes to do this, since monaural records often sound 
better when the channels are joined. The back of my stereo equipment 
is a veritable rat trap of wires that would horrify an incompetent 
safety inspector who did not realize that they contain very little 
wattage. I'll tell you about one sometime.) The cello did sound 
softer, exactly what I expected.

Listening to the Brahms quartets was a disappointment, as the 
hallucinations came back.

Wayne, Kevin, and his wife Mary came over for dinner, before they all 
and Sarah headed over to Strathmore Hall to hear Günther Herbig 
conduct the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in the Bruckner 7th. There 
was no point at all in my going and, besides, my narcolepsy precludes 
activities that extend long into the evening. When they were here, I 
disobeyed Andrea's instructions not to wear a hearing aid in my meat 
ear. I also used a directional microphone for my cyber ear. I heard 
everyone awfully well, better than I would have before the operation, 
except (oddly) for Sarah. She is at the ready with some illuminating 
story to tell that is highly relevant to our discussions, no matter 
what the subject. She compliments me wonderfully, as my thinking is 
quite abstract. But it was too rapid, too rapid.

Sunday (May 20): I went out for a final jogg with the second to last 
of the Brahms chamber music, namely the first sextet in Bb, Op. 18, in 
the Casals version (it was so striking that Tom Dixon, a local 
collector and Episcopalian priest--a vastly disproportionate number of 
good music lovers are men of the cloth--excitedly called me about it. 
I already had it an confirmed my highest regard for the playing. Look 
for the CD reissue that also has the revised first piano trio.) It 
started off well--this is my meat ear--but a hallucination, of just 
four notes, crept in.

I listened to my own favorite recording of the Bruckner 7th, Hermann 
Abendroth and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, live in 
1956.2.16-17, issued on Tahra TAH 114-5 (with the 8th). I came to sort 
of dislike the piece for being too nice. Abendroth is the supreme 
Bruckner conductor (Wayne pick Eugen Jochum, who is too 
middle-of-the-road for me). When I first heard his Bruckner (the 4th), 
I thought I was intruding on something very private, very German, 
meant to Germans only. If Furtwängler be Germany to the world, 
Abendroth is Germany to the Germans. (Reger, Pfitzner, Hindemith, and 
more so Distler) are Germans for Germans, and they can keep him. 
Richard Strauss, too. I have sincerely tried to like Strauss, as 
conductors I admire admire Strauss. Collecting these conductors has 
certainly exposed me to him. It's not Mengelberg, my favorite 
conductor, that makes the best case for Strauss, but Abendroth, which 
fits in with his being Germany to the Germans. If Tahra no longer 
stocks the Abendroth Strauss disc and you can't get it from Berkshire, 
e-mail me for a dub.

I hit the scores of several pieces for the first time in a while:

Tocatta, adagio, and fugue: Cyber ear only. For the toccata, I could 
at least follow the score and tell when the pedal comes on. For the 
adagio not much. For the fugue, I could tell when the thema fugata 
came in successively. With both ears, I could follow the score pretty 
well, though I didn't go through the whole piece. A huge success will 
be marked when I am able to start following the treble line in the 
score. Of course, the treble line usually contains the principle 
melody. Now before my operation, I would do this and would note that 
when an instrument went above my ability to hear, I would often note 
the music duplicated what a tune that had already been played and so 
might think I was actually hearing it, or at least resolving a poor 
signal into a better one. We all do this, imagine what we hear what we 
expect to hear. But for now the higher frequencies in my cyber ear are 
cockeyed. I forgot to mention that I got out a keyboard (the music 
kind) and struggled with a few note of two pieces I used to play 
(badly), the Mozart Sonata 16 (old no. 15) and the first of the 
Well-Tempered Clavier. The notes came out terrible in my cyber ear, 
though they came out as usual in my meat ear when I put on the 
forbidden hearing aid to check up. I was astonished at how miserable 
my playing has become. It's a part of aging. I did not persist and 
have removed it from an awkward spot in the living room back above a 
bookcase in the bedroom until I start listening to music again. Well, 
I'm listening to the Bach in both ears now as I tape this and am 
enjoying it enormously. I took a break to have a pipe and listened to 
the work again, this time with my cyber ear only. Not as enjoyable! 
Now I have no real scientific standards to compare my experience of 
March 24, the last time I reported listening to these pieces. So it's 
hard to say just how much better I have progressed over the last 
couple of months.

Unaccompanied Bach: Still with my pipe, I listened to the first 
movement of the second partita with my cyber ear alone and then moved 
on to the great Chaconne (Szigeti again, of course). No hallucinations 
this time! I now think I could get great pleasure from the Chaconne, 
which I know very well, even with the notes badly distorted! I wonder 
about the experiences of those who are pre-linugally deaf getting a 
cochlear implant have in coming to love music. Do they ever progess to 
Bach. Do they hear the notes as normal, in some sense. I can sharply 
distinguish the notes I am used to hearing in my meat ear from those 
that come in to my cyber ear. But--music is much more complex than 
speech, and so someone with an implant may not be able to learn its 
complexities. Mike Chorost had a terrific article in _Wired_ about he 
gradually came to re-hear Bolero, with his difficulties in picking out 
the clarinets, for example, when they came into the score, 
difficulties that decreased over time. He described his situation as 
having just sixteen wires in the electrode that runs from his speech 
processor, while there are 88 keys on the piano. He describes using 
some software that somehow multiplexes (I don't recall that he used 
that word) music down to 16 channels. Other implant wearers don't seem 
to have this problem. I hereby make myself available as a guinea pig!

To the scores now. I could follow the allemande that opens the second 
partita and finished with the score up to the repeat. Surprisingly, I 
finished with the score (waiting, to be sure to hear some passage I 
could see in the score) in the preludio that opens the third partita. 
But Szigeti, true artist that he is, plays it slowly and probingly, 
not showing off his virtuosity like most violinists by rushing through 
the movement. I fared less well with the chaconne and quickly gave up.

Now to the first two Preludes and Fugues in the WTC (Gould, of 
course). Following the score would seem to be a snap, except that I 
miscounted and wound up two measures too fast. My disappointment is 
that I didn't hear the modulations of the bottom notes of each half 
measure as being distinct. This will come, I hope. I did less well 
with the first fugue and second prelude. The second fugue I know the 
best: it was the exemplar of a fugue Mr. Kitson played for us in the 
ninth grade (that, and the little fugue in g for organ, which he 
played for us on a record, though I payed no attention to the 
performer). I didn't follow the score very well but I certainly 
enjoyed the snap of the thema fugatum, many of whose instances rang in 
well. I have loved Gould's recording that this would be a delight to 
hear, in my cyber ear alone, as I walk from the subway to home. (Alas, 
I misplaced my cassette.)

Next the allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh. I may have been getting 
worse, as far as music goes, which would make it a most unwanted side 
effect of my greatly improving ability to hear speech, but I couldn't 
detect when the countermelodies came on, even when listening with both 
ears. I made a little, little bit of the modulations and thought, if I 
tried WTC I Prelude again, I'd do better. I tried both with my eyes 
shut, forgetting about the score. Not much luck. But I rely on my 
memory alone of what it was like two months ago.

Then I tried Robert Silverman's recording of Mozart's Sonata 16 (old 
no. 15). I followed the score well in the first and third movements, 
better than before. The second movement was still a stumbling block. 
It may simply be too early to try a new performance, but I know it is 
a most worthy one from listening to it between operation and 
activation, out of the left ear alone. But how worthy it is, I just 
can't tell, not yet.

Finally, I listened again to Debussy's The Wind in the Snow, the piece 
whose modulations I discovered when listening to Reine Gianoli's 
recording of it when walking home. This is the Cortot again (since I'd 
have to wind a cassette or drag out the LP--but Gianoli was a Cortot 
pupil. It didn't take.

To make and end of listening while I stop for at least a week, I 
played the last of the Brahms chamber music I hadn't played. (I listen 
to my cassettes twice a year.) This was the clarinet quintet, Leopold 
Wlach, Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet. The original Westminster WL issue 
can go for $200 and would be worth it, except that the XWN and W 
reissues sell for more like $50 and $20. The first electric, Claude 
Draper and the Lener Quartet, has better string playing, being the 
only recording I know that capture the restlessness just below the 
surface. (Frederick Thurston, Spencer Dyke SQ, on National Gramophonic 
Society SS, TT, UU, VV, WW-side 1, was a disappointment. I have a 
cassette of it, but without the last side, furnished by a collector 
who was so excited by my "Acoustic Chamber Music Sets Discography" 
that he drove 90 miles to a library that took the Journal for Recorded 
Sound Collections so he could copy it. My greatest collecting is to 
get dubs of all the 166 records of NGS, a forerunner of the Musical 
Heritage Society and founded by Compton McKensie, who also started The 
Gramophone, to make recordings available that the larger ones wouldn't 
handle. Their recordings, though only some of them are real worthies, 
document the earliest performances. That, and hearing more acoustic 
chamber music.

Wlach captures the element of anguish in Brahms and is my favorite 
clarinetist. He died iirc in 1956 and recorded mostly for Westminster. 
I call the Brahms clarinet quintet the swan song for Western 
civilization, though Brahms did compose a few lesser pieces later. I 
mark the death of the West on 1897 April 4, when he died. It's my idea 
that Western civilization, based on continuous change and determinism, 
has been replaced by Darwinian civilization, based on random processes 
and change. Calculus has been replaced with topology as our underlying 
mathematic, just as geometry was for the Greeks. Three separate 
civilization for the Occident: Classical, Western, and Darwinian, 
which began on 1859.11.25 with the publication (sold out the first 
day) of The Origin of Species. With the new civilization will come a 
new morality and a new Christianity. This has happened before, as 
documented in James C. Russell, _The Germanization of Early Medieval 
Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation_ 
(Oxford UP, 1994).

Or Christianity may give way to a new religion or maybe even 
secularism, with something going under the name of Darwinian morality.

Wlach's performance is devasting but also and, I think, because of it, 
exalalting. (This exaltation is something that Jerry Dubins, the major 
_Fanfare_ reviewer of Brahms, for his insights into Brahms generally 
does not appreciate. I listened with both ears and decided not to work 
with the score, but just close my eyes and listen. This finale, though 
it be just for a week or so, is for me.

And for you, you are getting, it seems, a diary of my life as well as 
the specifics of my adapting to a cochlear implant. I'm an unusual 
person--though the world badly needs more people like me, of 
course--and so this diary is also unusual.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, though I certainly understand 
that a good deal of what I have been writing will not be of interest 
to everyone.

--------------

Saturday, 2007 May 5.

I have not added to my diary for a couple of weeks. This may mean 
frustration that the rate of improvement is slowing down. Writing from 
memory, I have missed some details, but don't worry about it. I've 
decided to resume my listening of the Brahms chamber music after I 
finish the Backhaus recordings of the Beethoven. After that I may take 
a break from music altogether in hopes that the hallucinations will die 
down. I am still waiting for three possible sources of funding the 
"Sound and Beyond" software that seems quite promising, that is, from 
the U.S. Department of Education (for "reasonable accomodation" not 
rehabilitation), from the Maryland State Department of Education 
(rehabilitation this time), and Kaiser Permanente, which shelled out 
$50,000 for the operation. No, I am no better unable to untangle 
medical invoices than anyone else. Economists disagree who the 
"residual claimant" of health regulation (read: who gets the ultimate 
rake-off) is. Some say physicians, but it costs so much to go to 
medical school and takes such great talent in the first place, that it 
is not clear whether physicians earn more than comparably able folks 
elsewhere would earn, once the costs of school and foregone earnings 
are factored out. In general, economists expect rackets to die down 
with only dead-weight losses to everyone, The real gainers are the 
first generation of physicians who got themselves regulated. See Paul 
Starr's The Transformation of American Medicine for a fine history. 
Others (I'm relying on Charles Phelps's much used textbook, Health 
Economics, which most of you can understand) say it's the hospitals, 
hospital administators, even nurses. There are even economists who say 
it's the patients! (They are not being naive but mount good but not 
conclusive arugments.) Maybe it's the medical malpractice lawyers.

I added a conjectural note on the recording in my "Essential in Stereo" 
collection about the Soviet recording of Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav that 
replaced the Russian national anthem. Go down to it if you are 
interested in how discographers make conjectures.

Thursday (April 19): I went through the Dr. Seuss books for the first 
time since April 3. I am pleased to report that I heard them very, very 
well. Even when I got distracted and lost my place, I had little 
difficulty finding my place again. I would even cover over the text and 
guess what was being said. By no means were my guesses always correct 
but I did get them right a surprising number of times. I'm ready to 
move up a notch and try to guess a lot more, which will be quite a 
useful training exercise. I learn from my mistakes, which frustrate 
Sarah when she goes over the spondaic words, sometimes both syllables 
but now more and more often just on of the syllables. Greg has been 
doing this, too, but I succeed rather more often with Sarah on the one 
syllable words.

Friday (April 20): I went out jogging determined to hear the music (I'm 
listening to the Brahms chamber music now) over the hallucinations. 
It's music that I know extremely well, for I play it all twice a year 
on my jogs. I can't say I heard all that much, but much to my surprise 
when I got back and listened to music (crawling through the Brilliant 
Classics 182-CD "complete" Mozart Edition) the irriating tune was much 
softer. It had been so loud that I couldn't ever hear that I was 
listening to vocal music! (Most of what Mozart wrote is rather minor 
stuff, as it wasn't until almost his last year that he really composed 
for himself alone.) This morning I could, and that's a very good thing. 
I need to do these acts of concentration a lot.

All My Children: The voices came in pretty clearly. I listened with 
both ears a little and discovered that Zoe had a male voice. He dresses 
likes a she and wants to become one, but hasn't gone through the 
operation. The Wikipedia article says Zoe will be departing on the 
26th, so I'll miss it, since it's on a Thursday, and won't know if he 
has made a successful transition. The man who married the 
woman after she made up such a charming story to her child is going to 
get de-sterilized so they can have lots of kids. I was able to follow 
the other dramas.

The Jim Lehrer News Hour: On both shows the high consonants are coming 
on much stronger, as though my brain is emphasizing them. I went back 
and forth between my left meat-ear and my right cyber-ear and think I 
heard about equally well. I reported earlier that I thought I was 
hearing better out of my cyber ear but that when I conducted an actual 
test, this wasn't so. What I have learned to do is to concentrate 
better. Remember, though, that I think that in some ways my right meat 
ear is better, not on pure tone tests, but in discriminating words, 
provided the volume is up high enough. (Andrea's tests showed that I 
got zero words correct in both ears, but this only shows that such 
tests don't distinguish among the higher levels of deafness any more 
than IQ tests distinguish among higher levels of giftedness, which is 
no surprise since they were designed only to tell which French children 
should go on to high school. Everyone above a certain point essentially 
gets all the IQ test questions right, the difference lying in making 
mistakes. And those who have "perfect" hearing on pure tone tests. I'm 
pleased to report that my second-year college roommate (and best man at 
my wedding), Sterling Phipps found the infamous radio we ridiculed as a 
white-noise generator. Sterling would sometimes try to pick up radio 
broadcasts of sports contests in places like St. Louis. This was in 
Charlottesvile, where we lived in a dorm at the University of Virginia. 
Looking up "clear channel" in ever-faithrul Wikipedia, this must have 
been KMOX at 1120 KHz. These channels get exclusive right to broadcast 
on a given frequency, sometimes sharing with one other station. MMOX is 
all alone and uses 50,000 watts of power, something like ten times as 
much as stations sharing the same frequency that might interfere with 
one another. Well, the sound from even such powerful as station as KMOX 
was extremely faint. Sterling alone could discern how the game was 
going, so the rest of us who could not said it was a white-noise 
generator. I doubt that the radio itself is esp. good. I don't know how 
well he could discern conversations in a multitude, but one of our 
suitemates, Richard, could pick out conversations several seats down in 
a railroad car, but he couldn't hear the White Noise Generator either.

Back then I had a digital clock, meaning one with three four wheels, 
for seconds, minutes, ten minutes, and hours. When the seconds wheel 
reached 60, the minute wheel would move a notch. When it moved from 9 
to 0, the ten-minute wheel would move, and so on. It sounded pretty 
quiet to me, even when I had my hearing aid right up to it, but 
Sterling would shut it off the night before a test. He would notice 
that another ten minutes passed, then another, ..., then an hour, and 
despaired of ever getting to sleep. Finally, we moved it to the 
bookcase in the living room of our suite (five bedrooms, living room, 
and bathroom). Richard McClintock, already an excellent calligrapher, 
made a sign for it, horus silentissimus mundi, my memory of his Latin 
translation of World's Most Quiet Clock. I do not know what happened to 
it. By current count, I have nine ways of getting an atomic signal, 
including a wrist watch that updates itself overnight. During my first 
year at U.Va. I went to a movie with my roommate at the time, Alan 
Lacy, called "David and Lisa," about two psychiatric patients. David 
had an obsession with time and dreamed of a receiver connection to a 
central timekeeping device. He said that it would be too big for a 
wristwatch. My memory is that he specifically wanted a wristwatch but 
that's not what the book, "Lisa and David [sic]," upon which the movie 
was based said. (I didn't rewatch the movie.) David should have known 
that ham radio receivers could already get these signals. I had one.

Sunday (April 22). I decided that I just wasn't getting the Brahms 
chamber music very well and would switch to the Beethoven piano 
sonatas. I chose the a tapes I made of the recent recording of Robert 
Silverman.

Tuesday (April 24). I then switched to my standby, the sonatas played 
by Wilhelm Backhaus. These I am much more familiar with. So it's not 
just the music I know so well but a specific performance, too. Also, 
the bass notes come in more loudly than other performances, and bass 
notes don't trigger off the halucinations so much.

Friday (April 27). All My Children: Someone got shot and someone else 
got accused of murder. No Lehrer, for we went to a celebration of the 
80th birthday and retirement of Betty Tillman, the long time secretary 
of Jim Buchanan. Much more than that, her gracious Southern ways and 
organizational skills was responsible for keeping the Virginia School 
together. There were a hundred or so there to honor Betty. I suggested 
to the MC that he ask for a show of hands of those who knew her back at 
the University of Virginia. I says volumes how much we love and 
appreciate Betty that, though she left U.Va. in 1968, there were at 
least ten (like Sarah and me) who came. We knew Betty before we got 
married, and she blessed our prospects. This was the longest gathering 
I have been to since activiation. I did quite a bit better and was even 
able to hear snippets from the many speakers when I was positioned 
close enough up, I don't think quite as well as I did before but I'm 
improving. Apart from old friends, we made the acquaintance of some new 
folks, Alan Merten, the new President of George Mason, and Colleen 
Berndt, who was about to defend an economics dissertation on spiritual 
capital. (She passed.) This is fantastic idea, to write about spiritual 
capital along with economic and social capital. I look forward to 
reading it and expect tons of insights, all of which will of course be 
retrospectively obvious. Orwell said that it's takes a constant 
struggle to see what is in front of your nose.

President Merten is looking for ideas on what next to start up at 
George Mason. He doesn't want to try to compete with the nearby 
University of Maryland in being good in everything, just to be 
excellent in a few fields. This has already been achieved in Public 
Choice economics and in the Law School. Lots of people have asked my 
advice on where to go after graduatings. I say George Mason. It doesn't 
have the prestige yet that older schools do but you'll be able to see 
the world (esp. that part of it that is right in front of your nose) 
afresh and from many different angles. My proposal is for a Department 
of Darwin Studies. I have already been collecting books like Darwinian 
Medicine, Darwinian Politics, Darwin's Cathedral, and Darwinian 
Conservatism. I want to write him a letter that gets my thoughts across 
in a brief but well-written and partly humorous way. Galbraith said, 
"It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of 
spontaneity for which I am known." True of me, too. The letter is 
proving to be a lot of work.

Monday (April 30): Art Museum: I heard more this time when a volunteer 
docent was talking, but there's too much variation to amount to a 
trand.

Thursday (May 3): I got this Brilliant Classics cube of 40 CDs (for $40 
at http://hmv.co.uk) of the music of Johannes Brahms. None of the 
instrumental recordings will come close to my favorites. What's 
fabulous about the set is seven CDs of songs with Michael Reichhausen, 
piano, made during WW II in Germany with lots of different singers. In 
general, I don't like lieder. This set may change my mind. IF my 
hearing gets to the point where I can hear as well as I did before the 
operation. Now I hear little over my hallucinations. Well, I put on the 
German Requiem and was enormously moved by it, bursting (mildly) into 
tears (in the quiet of my office). The bursting usually doesn't come on 
until the counterpoint "Herr, Du bist würdig zu nehmen Preis und Erde 
und Kraft," when I have reached runner's high after an hour on a 
ten-mile run each year around September or October when I start using 
most of my vacation time. I think what happened today is that my brain 
remembers what I'm not consciously hearing over the--I was about to say 
infernal--hallucinations, but which are really quite pleasant. My 
hallucinations often track the music I'm listening to.

So I was in some sense able to get spiritual uplift still, and this is 
what is so important. The loss is that it will be impossible for me to 
learn other music.

Friday (May 4): All My Children. The show moved on and what happened to 
the victim of the shooting I missed. Tad handcuffed himself to Adam, 
who got a heart attack or at least called in the rescue squad. Tad 
later released the handcuffs. I did not cheat and missed too many 
sentences to understand what was going on. Jack, a strikingly masculine 
character who is several notches above the other, neared his final 
divorce degree from Erica. Erica wanted to have some post-divorce 
relationship with him. This is the modern way. He agreed but exactly to 
what I don't know. I did cheat and watched the captions on this one.

Jim Lehrer: Oh, what was it? Less than a day later, I've forgotten. Oh, 
yes, ten Republican candidates in a debate where none gets more than 
sixty seconds to respond and Brooks's and Shields's analysis of same. I 
can hear politicians very well. Those who don't speak clearly are the 
subject of an adverse Darwinian selection. (See! Darwinism gots invoked 
everywhere, though C. Bob himself applied it only to the survival of 
biological organisms.) We once had an Under Secretary or Deputy 
Secretary (it is hugely important to know who is what, for one of these 
ranks above the other) named Madeline Kunin, a former governor of 
Vermont. She came to the United States from Austrian at the age of 
seven, well after she had become a mono-lingual German. At a fire 
drill, I congratulated her on speaking with only the slightest of 
traces of a foreign accent and asked her how she did it. She didn't 
know. Invoking a selection process doesn't explain how either. Still, 
it often useful to ask whether there is a selection mechanism going on.


Thursday, 2007 April 19

I posted an earlier version of my diary on the Usenet and got this 
answer:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim at verizon.net> at http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical,rec.music.classical.recordings

On Apr 11, 9:59 pm, Premise Checker <chec... at panix.com> wrote:
> Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, through 2007.4.11
>
> ANNOUNCEMENT: Come see a real cyborg at Georgetown University library
> on Saturday the 14th. More below.
>
> This is a running diary

Unfortunately, it isn't. I would actually have been interested in the
story of his implant, but I was not about to wade through a 40-year
tour of his sex life to get to it.

Would someone care to post just the relevant excerpts?

[My reply to Peter: Alas, I wish you had read on. Not only did I say 
nothing about my sex life (I did talk about my love for Sarah, but 
that's not the same thing), I went into great detail about my (and I 
hope Peter's) first love, classical music, and about my efforts to 
regain and indeed improve upon my ability to hear music. I hope you and 
the others will persist in reading these parts. I can hardly say that 
my sex life is of no interest to me and might be of some interest to 
others, but the Usenet music groups are no place for it. Of course, I 
go into a lot of things besides classical music, and indeed about 
hearing itself. Just read what you find of interest. I don't begrudge 
you for getting the wrong impression. Sex is vastly overrespresented on 
the Usenet, but in this case you made that rare mistake of judging too 
quickly. Now others complain that I wrote too *much* about music! Alas, 
I don't have the software to produce separate editions to fit 
individual interests. Persist, please, Peter, and then let us know what 
you found enlightening.]


I got this letter from my cyber-friend Carolyn. Since we've talked on 
the Fone, I guess she's my cyber-aural friend. But since I have a cyber 
ear, you might think a cyber friend is a chip inside my brain, too. Of 
course, I meant someone I know only through the Internet. There were 
postal friends before that. What I mean is that she and I have never 
met in meat space. Here's the letter, which she said I can share. It's 
about my hallucinations.

Oh, no! You've got MY disease now!

The most important thing is avoidance, particularly certain kinds of 
music at certain times of day. When I am tired, I can't listen to 
anything simple or it will play in my head all night. It's best to 
listen to some Bach fugue or partita or sonata or other meandering 
music, rather than something with a "catchy" tune. For me, Mozart 
qualifies as simple and catchy, as does just about anything after J.S. 
Bach.

I also avoid Other People's Music late in the evening. I have a very 
sweet friend who, as the evening gets later and she gets tireder, she 
spontaneously sings some tune. The more tired she gets, the more she 
sings it. And the more tired I am, the more I absorb it. I remind her 
that I have trouble with this, and she does try to control herself, but 
after all her problem is the complement of mine! This can be 
inconvenient when she comes to parties at my house; by the end of the 
night I am ready to strangle her. I don't have a tv anymore, but I 
wouldn't watch it late at night if I did.

There are several solutions that I use, if avoidance fails and the 
music is now stuck. One is to play a piece of very complicated music, 
either on a piece of equipment or in my head. Another is to read. 
Sometimes I have to do both at once, and this is especially helpful 
right before falling asleep, when I am most likely to be attacked by 
music.

Admittedly, singing a piece in your head over top of one that is 
playing is difficult and takes concentration. Therefore it generally 
only works when I am NOT tired. After all, it's no good trying to focus 
enough to play a complex piece when you are trying to relax and go to 
sleep! So that method can only be used during more alert hours when you 
don't have to focus on something else.

Weirdly, the repetitive and catchy music played in my gym classes 
doesn't get stuck in my head. I think it is because I am concentrating 
so hard on the instructor's cues and on not tripping over my step that 
the music can't worm its way into my brain.

end of letter.

These hallucinations are now all but completely ruining my ability to 
listen to music. Whenever the sound is above a certain volume, on 
either side, I start getting repititious music, different music 
depending on the side. I don't do any listening to speech in my meat 
ear (the better to concentrate on habilitating my cyber ear), but the 
hallucinations come on when I'm anywhere that's noisy and do interfere 
with my hearing speech, but not as badly.

Earlier (since my last update) I was in much despair but I am noticing 
that these musical hallucinations are becoming somewhat softer. It's 
good training to concentrate on trying to hear past the racket, whether 
I'm listening to speech or music.

Friday: All My Children. A fierce woman, Zoe, towers over Bianica. I am 
quite confused. It seems that Zoe is a man who wants to become a 
lesbian, which Bianica already is. Bianica is divided about whether to 
support the operation. If there's anyone on this list who follows this 
program, maybe you can set me straight (that pun really was 
inadvertent). We had better get used to these things, since shortly 
parents will be able to chose genes so that their children will glow in 
the dark. There is already a debate going on about whether deaf parents 
should be allowed to engineer their children to be deaf, so as to 
participate in deaf culture. I am not sure what "deaf culture" is and 
await reading a chapter about it in a book in reading about cochlear 
implants. I strongly suspect that deaf Americans share more in common 
with other Americans than deaf Japanese. One of the major differences 
everyone knows about is that Americans are far more individualistic. 
Americans also habitually look for an active, responsible agent 
(meaning who to praise or blame) than Japanese do. I'll have to reread 
the deepest book I've ever seen on this subject, Edward C. Stewart and 
Milton J. Bennett, _American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural 
Perspective_. Revised edition. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991, 
192 pp.

Since I *am* a cyborg and take the whole thing casually (no, I do a lot 
of work and writing about it), in that I don't think that the most 
advanced modification of a human being so far in any way affects my 
identity, I don't want to be rejected as inhuman or un-human and so 
look benignly on those whose hormones are messed up and want to get 
their sex changes or to continue cross-dressing or engage in same-sex 
activities. The reason for the hosility is understandable. For one, it 
is a waste of parental investment to raise a child who is likely to 
leave few genes of theirs. (The good uncle effect, namely that 
homosexuals leave their genes by raising nephews and nieces, is simply 
too weak to matter. Indeed, the grandmother hypothesis, that 
grandmothers get to live as long as they do to help out raise 
grandchildren is another theory obvious on its face but one 
whose effectiveness is surprsingly difficult to 
document as being greater than the statistical noise that accompanies 
all attempts at measurement. In this case, the general rule is that 
those with genes that confer health during reproductive years but don't 
in later years will leave more descendants than those with the reverse. 
The grandmother hypothesis considers an exception to the general rule.

Why not grandfathers, someone asked me. I couldn't say. My guess now is 
that getting fathers to behave is difficult enough. I mean here not 
that evolution is pursuing this purpose, but it is the case that men 
make a far smaller parental investment than women do. It might seem 
that evolution's job is to turn cads into dads and that's why 
pair-bonding and love exist. Except that evolution is opportunistic and 
not driven toward an end. (That's the dogma.) Rather, this needs to be 
rewritten into saying that by Darwin's other process, sexual selection, 
men who seemed to be the best at being dads, rather than cads, got 
picked by the women more often. (I just sent out something to my 
general list about how a woman having a high IQ is becoming a fitness 
signal, something I started spotting in 2001, when I wrote a little 
piece, "The Feminists Have Won." Ask, and I shall send it to you. Ask, 
and I shall put you on my list, which many of you are on already. Be 
prepared to have your Premises Checked. If you can help me Check mine, 
that's all I ask.)

Now here's a further complication: in human societies, socialization 
(indoctrination) compounds or even counteracts our biology. We are 
lazy: we are told to work hard, from ancient times and not just with 
the rise of Protestantism. The Protestant twist was, that since keeping 
out of Hell was a matter of arbitrary grace from god and not of your 
own actions, those worried looked for signs that they were chosen. They 
could only try to lead good lives and this included making money 
honestly. Those who worried a great deal worked much harder than other 
societies encouraged them to. In other societies, people would work up 
to a point and then loaf. No loafing to a worried Protestant. Luther 
and Calvin did not like this twist, but there it was. Max Weber, who 
developed the idea in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 
(1904/5) spent the rest of his life until he died looking for prots 
elsewhere but couldn't find any. There seems to be a similar looking 
for passages in the Koran to justify worldly ambition going on today. 
Those undergoing great personal change, such as those moving from a 
closed society to the open one of the free market, want to make the 
transition religiously secure. This is why it is engineering and 
medical students in the Islamic world, not illiterate rural dwellers, 
who make up the fundamentalists over there. We believe in the Koran 
literally, esp. those passages that allow for money making. This is 
easy to do, since the order of books in the Koran by increasing length, 
not by their revelation from Gabriel to Mahomet. Anyone can decree 
that, when the Koran says different things, the prefered one overrode 
the later one. Thus, one verse says not to eat pork, but another says 
not to eat unclean things. Pork, no longer being unclean, is now okay 
to eat, if you claim (without any facts standing in the way) that the 
verse you like came in Medina and the other one in Mecca. For 
Christians, there is the same contradition, but there is no dispute 
that Jesus came after Moses. Christians must be altogether more 
creative in bringing Scripture into line with desire.

Until technology really takes off, dads will be needed. Any dilution of 
marriage that gets away from the job of turning cads into dads is not 
something I would encourage. One strike, and a big one, against 
homosexual marriage. Whether this is counterbalanced by an enthusiasm 
for technology that will make things like homosexuals, transsexuals 
(there's an acronym for them) tame (whence we should get used to the 
rather small deviations from the norm), I don't know.

This is getting removed from a diary about my hearing, except that what 
it means to be a cyborg is not at all removed. It's just not a report 
on my progress, regress, or stalling. Yes, I think I heard All My 
Children a little better. Ditto with the Jim Lehrer News Hour.

Saturday: I invited people from six continents. No one in my address 
book is from Antartica. Sarah assured that no one is *from* Antartica. 
I said human nature will have its way even though there may be no 
obstetricians there and a policy against it. Here's the first rattle 
out of the Google box for <"births in antarctica">, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk_archive/Humanities/2006_September_13

Rules on Human Births in Antarctica

I know that 3 or 4 human babies have been born in Antarctica, but I 
understand there is a Rule prohibiting this. I'm searching for the 
actual Rule. It may come from the International Antarctic Treaty, but I 
can't find it. It may just be specific to the Australian National 
Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE). Can you find the rule for me 
please? 60.225.12.254 02:12, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

     If there is a rule, it's probably something along the lines of not 
giving them an Antarctican "citizenship", thus complicating land claims 
and such. I hardly think they're going to establish a rule that states 
you "can't have babies or sex in Antarctica", unless there's a 
semi-formal policy among the researchers and visitors not to bring 
along pregnant passengers.  freshofftheufoG???  05:53, 13 September 
2006 (UTC)

Thanks, but it's not a question about having sex in Antarctica - of 
course that's a favourite passtime on most scientific bases! Its a 
question about a woman giving birth there. I gather most western 
countries anyway, will send a woman home if she gets pregnant while 
working on a scientific base. (In fact they now send the bloke home 
too, so that it's not just her career that's interrupted). It's not to 
do with citizenship, but to do with the dangers involved. I'm still 
looking for the rule that says this. I think it's Australian.

     I don't see how any such rule could be policed. We hear all the 
time about women giving birth who weren't even aware they were 
pregnant. It might not suit the administrative convenience of certain 
organisations to have births occurring down there where there may be 
little in the way of medical resources to deal with such an event, so I 
could see why they might have a policy of strongly discouraging heavily 
pregnant women from being there, in the interests of the women and 
their babies. But to discriminate in the way you seem to be suggesting 
would probably be illegal under Australian law, certainly in Australian 
Antarctic Territory. JackofOz 09:24, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

So there! I was right and she were wrong, a rare event!

One person from the other six continents showed up, Elizabeth, whom we 
had not seen since the 1970s. Her life is a hugely unfilfilled one. She 
is quite gifted. She was listening to her uncle and his friend (who 
reported this to me) who were talking about engineering Venus flytraps 
to eat their enemies. She went to fetch an encyclopedia and brought 
back the "C" volume. I forget who smiled at her patronizingly, where 
upon she said she was looking for "carniverous." She must have been 
about seven years old when she this happened. A life without husband, 
children, or even a permanent job, though she does have a college 
degree. Just temporary jobs, substitute teaching, and the like. She did 
have a permanent job with the Navy as a secretary but couldn't stand 
it. We didn't discuss her life much. Rather Sarah spilled out with 
ideas on a vast variety of subjects as she always does. (I could hear 
very little of the conversation and should have brought my external 
microphone.) Bad luck in the earlier years, but you soon get typed as a 
risk. In a world of bureaucracies, the boss wants someone that can do 
the job but no more than that. Someone with Elizabeth's work history 
might not work out. So hire someone else much less gifted who won't 
make problems. Now I'd have hired her, but I know her. Bureaucratics 
rules forbid such favoritism, though I can sense that she would 
defintely do the work. She's not flaky. And the gifted are ignored in 
favor of lifting up idiots to become imbeciles, imbeciles to become 
morons, morons to become dull normals. This is passing away and as 
global competition continues its rise there will be national programs 
to exploit the gifted in order to "remain competitive."

Monday and Tuesday. Just to report that I listened to my half-speed 
tape of Glenn Gould playing the Mozart Sonata 16 (old no. 15) in C, K. 
545 on the way back from work. It's getting better and better 
gradually. The tape continued with his own composition, "So You Want to 
Write a Fugue?", a humorous fugue for four voices and string quartet. I 
did pretty well this that, too.

Wednesday. Art museum. I again wandered into a talk, this given to 
about ten grade school children in front of two paintings, the second 
by El Greco, of whom I am not esp. fond. I could hear a few syllables, 
better than last time. I turned up the pot beyond the 12 O'Clock 
position and heard my squeaky shoes. We were required to attend chapel 
for half an hour at 5:00 on Sunday evening in prep school, Fountain 
Valley School of Colorado Springs. (Yes, I am overpriviliged, as my 
father was a physician. Visit http://www.fvs.edu to read about one of 
the most innovative high schools in the country.) I would set my watch 
by the school's own clocks (no David and Lisa watch that hooks into a 
time signal then, though I did have a ham radio and pick up WWV to get 
the time every five minutes. I do not remember how far off FVS and WWV 
time got. Everyone else was already there, and my shoes squeaked quite 
loudly as I walked down the aisle. I was told to arrive earlier. I said 
I set my watch. This did not work. There were three hymns, a Bible 
reading by one of the seniors, and a sermon. There were three hymnals, 
but by the time I got to be a senior, I knew by heart all the ones that 
we ever sung. I was passed over to do a Bible reading. I became an 
atheist in the ninth grade when my roommate asked me whether I believed 
in God. Yes. Why? I couldn't answer and suspended by belief until I got 
the relevant evidence. Haven't found it yet. Too bad I got passed over. 
I'd have read Deuteronomy 28:15-end. Here it is:

15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the 
voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and 
his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall 
come upon thee, and overtake thee:

16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city,
and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body,
and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine,
and the flocks of thy sheep.

19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in,
and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

20 The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, 
in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be 
destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of 
thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.

21 The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he 
have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it.

22 The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, 
and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the 
sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee 
until thou perish.

23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the 
earth that is under thee shall be iron.

24 The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from 
heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

25 The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: 
thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before 
them; and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

26 And thy carcass shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and 
unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away.

27 The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the 
emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not 
be healed.

28 The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and 
astonishment of heart:

29 and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in 
darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be 
only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: 
thou shalt build a house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt 
plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.

31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not 
eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy 
face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto 
thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, 
and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day 
long: and there shall be no might in thine hand.

33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labors, shall a nation which 
thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed 
alway:

34 so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which 
thou shalt see.

35 The LORD shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a 
sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the 
top of thy head.

36 The LORD shall bring thee, and thy king which thou shalt set 
over thee, unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known; 
and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone.

37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, 
among all nations whither the LORD shall lead thee.

38 Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather 
but little in; for the locust shall consume it.

39 Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither 
drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.

40 Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou 
shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his 
fruit.

41 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy 
them; for they shall go into captivity.

42 All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.

43 The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very 
high; and thou shalt come down very low.

44 He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall 
be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall 
pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou 
hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his 
commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee.

46 And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and 
upon thy seed for ever.

47 Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, 
and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;

48 therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies, which the LORD shall 
send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in 
want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, 
until he have destroyed thee.

49 The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the 
end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue 
thou shalt not understand;

50 a nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the 
person of the old, nor show favor to the young:

51 and he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy 
land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either 
corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy 
sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and 
fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy 
land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy 
land, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of 
thy sons and of thy daughters, which the LORD thy God hath given thee, 
in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall 
distress thee:

54 so that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, 
his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his 
bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave:

55 so that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his 
children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the 
siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress 
thee in all thy gates.

56 The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not 
adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness 
and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, 
and toward her son, and toward her daughter,

57 and toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, 
and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them 2 
Kgs. 6.28, 29 · 4.10 for want of all things secretly in the siege and 
straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.

58 If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that 
are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and 
fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD;

59 then the LORD will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues 
of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore 
sicknesses, and of long continuance.

60 Moreover, he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, 
which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee.

61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in 
the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou be 
destroyed.

62 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the 
stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice 
of the LORD thy God.

63 And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you 
to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you 
to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked 
from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

64 And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one 
end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other 
gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and 
stone.

65 And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall 
the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a 
trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind:

66 and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt 
fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life:

67 in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at 
even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine 
heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which 
thou shalt see.

68 And the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by 
the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and 
there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and 
no man shall buy you.

The problem is that the Lord issued so many commandments that one or 
another of them was bound to be broken. You'd think God would repeal 
his agreement (the first 14 versions of Deuternonomy 28 speak of the 
good things that will happen if ever last commandment is obeyed) and 
put in a more realistic one. God never did and eventually decided to 
end Heaven and Earth completely, but not Hell. He provided a way to 
escape Hell, it is true, but it was He who set up the rules in the 
first place.

So my squeaky shoes, which I heard again. These are just running shoes. 
The ones I wore to chapel were real squeakers, ripple sole shoes.

My cord fell apart yesterday. I tried to fix it. I seems that one of 
the three wires is at fault, not just a soldering that came undone. I 
gave up and jogged this morning without being able to hear any music. 
So I used my processor instead and listened to the traffic. Again, 
hallucinations. I can control them to some extent by singing and even 
just imagining something I am very familiar with, like the chorus of 
the Beethoven Ninth, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Count Your Blessings" 
(which I belt out in a deep Perry Como (or is it Bing Crosby voice) to 
Sarah's fury but to my children's delight, delight in her fury no 
doubt), "White Christmas" (ditto). I would sing these when my processor 
got turned on. At first I sang them way off, though I hoped my internal 
memory would drive them. So I can change the tune, but the default tune 
has now become some morph of the opening of Beethoven's first piano 
concerto. Now I actually WANTED to hear the traffic, esp. as a vehicle 
moves over one of the many metal plates on the street to provide 
temporary cover over something that is being repaired. I also wanted to 
hear how different vehicles sound to my cyber-ear. But the 
hallucinations were loud. When I concentrated on hearing the traffic, 
the default morph of the Beethoven came back.

Another song I know very well from childhood is The Hearse Song. My 
memory is that begins, "Did you ever think when a hearse rolls by/ That 
some fair day you are going to die." Googling for the exact works, I 
came across the Official Hearse Song Page, 
http://www.mamalisa.com/blog/?p=57. Mama Lisa had collected lots of 
versions but not that exact one. Now this song is a prime example for 
me of the minor key. When I got it going through my head, it came out 
in the major key!

These amusements keep me going, though I continue to fear that my 
operation may not work well with speech and leave me deprived of music. 
A risk I quite willingly undertook. If my fears prove right, it will be 
one more example of myself shutting down as I get older.



Wednesday, 2007 April 12

ANNOUNCEMENT: Sarah and I will be at the Georgetown University library 
on Saturday. We usually sit in the southeast corner of the second 
floor, where the periodicals are kept. We'll probably head out for 
lunch about 12:30. We are celebrating our meeting for the first time on 
a blind date exactly forty years ago! It seems that Peter Graham, who 
knew us both, decided I need to date more girls. When he was visiting 
Mary Washington College (at the time, the sister college to U.Va.) 
asked several of them in a dormitory entrance hall who would like to 
date a mathematical genius. A certain Miss Sarah Banks said she was 
willing. Her previous experiences with fraternity boys had not been 
good. Peter told me about how I would have her for a BEEG weekend, that 
is, Friday about 6 p.m. till Sunday about that time. A bus would carry 
her back and forth. I wrote her and told her about myself and that I 
would be carrying a copy of Mahler's Second Symphony (it was the Bruno 
Walter recording) so she could identify me when she alighted from the 
bus in front of the Rotunda. She did so, carrying a book about Pop Art 
and enthusiastically talking about it as we walked across the Lawn and 
hospital and down Brandon Avenue to my apartment. She spotted a bumper 
sticker on my car, which read simply "Bumper Sticker" and told me she 
had nothing to teach me about Pop Art. I did not think about violating 
any University rules against women in a man's apartment. Neither did 
she have any fears. Mary Wash did have rules, though. She had to spend 
the night in a room rented for $4 or $5 for such purposes, into which 
men may not enter. We talked and talked and talked. I simply informed 
her that I would be seeing her the following weekend. We did, and on 
that date I had decided I could easily spend the rest of my life with 
that creature. Somehow, she and some other Mary Wash girls figured that 
staying in the house Peter Graham and maybe three others were renting 
would be supervision enough, so I no longer had to shell out to an old 
lady to watch after Sarah's morals. (Whether Mary Wash checked up on 
all this, I am not sure.) We kept on dating every week, till I drove 
her out to Colorado to meet my parents. We were separated only when I 
went out there alone for Christmas. We married on February 2 the next 
year, about nine months after the first date.

On the first date, amidst the conversation and visiting several of my 
own friends, we went to an Escher exhibit and to the magnificent 
library. To celebrate our going to a library on our first date, we are 
doing so again on Saturday.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that it was love at the 
first sight. It was love *before* the first sight. Here's the letter I 
got back from her, two days before we met. I was enchanted.

Dear Frank,

   Tho' an exhaustive description is
requested, physical I presume, let me say
only that I probably won't come as a shock,
being in appearance just another Mary
Washington lady, prudish of background and
foul of mind. Please do find enclosed,
however, a piece of said mind: cluttered,
eclectic, and probably repressed, the obvious
result of spending part of my childhood in
English fog, listening to the BBC.
   Despite my gothic tendencies, I'm really
harmless. The impression I give has been
compared to a white rabbit in a daisy field,
an owl in a dusty attic, and a mouse in a
haunted haystack. This is not to imply that I
am either cute or sweet, & certainly not shy.
By life style, I am a hopeless, scatter-
footed dabbler, constantly acquiring new
weaknesses. I will stick my nose into
anything, particularly if I know little or
nothing about it (like economics, likewise
Colorado.)
   Let me guess at your artistic....
tendencies? While sleuthing on my own, you
were described to me as "a one-man happening.
*all* the time." Sounds like a man with a
taste for the *High Camp*. And if you
believe, with me & Marshall MacLuhan, that
Today, *Art* is anything is anything you can
get away with, the Bless Pete! we may yet do
well by each other. My ideal weekend is full
of noise, elbow warfare, & good conversation.
   Hope you weren't expecting a letter that
comes to the point. Actually, I wouldn't
dream of giving you fair warning. One helpful
hint: *Never* take me seriously.

                        Exit,

                          Sarah

I now correct her for the first time on her letter. It was Andy Warhol, 
not Marshall MacLuhan, who said art is anything you can get away with.

What does this have to do with my hearing. Well, you can meet a cyborg, 
if you haven't already and happen to be in the area. Also, I can find 
out how noisy this library, which we've gone to many times, is, and 
maybe such eatery we may repair to.

On a somber note between the Thursday of the fortieth anniversary of my 
falling in love and the Saturday of my meeting my love, falls the ninth 
month since the older daughter of an awfully happy married died. Her 
name was Alice. I had insisted as an absolute qualification for our 
marrying that we'd name our first daughter Alice. Both of us having 
copies of _The Annotated Alice_, Sarah agreed to this condition 
instantly. Our Alice, for those here who don't know about it, developed 
bipolar disorder. She was fiddling with medications just before she 
died, but she had a tragic flaw (in the Greek sense) in her 
personality, which led her to associate with bullying or exploitive 
men, the last one such a disaster that she killed herself with a 
shotgun she bought for him. My therapy in all this has been to write 
about the situtation and my own feelings. Except for our at last 
recovering some private diaries she kept in her youth, nothing much has 
changed since, say, four or five months after she died, so I have 
nothing to add. By analysing the breakdown problems in all the machines 
at Mead WestVaco, she accomplished as an engineer more in her short 
life of thirty years than most engineers do in a lifetime. She was more 
often than not a pleasure to have around, mixed with bouts of brain 
problems, which we did not understand. I especially loved the way she 
interacted with her two-years younger sister, Adelaide. It was fun 
watching gene recombination in action. Little things: Alice and I would 
pick the same brand of toothpaste, Adelaide and I the same soap. Alice 
was not very talkative with me and didn't like to get into disputations 
like Adelaide and Sarah do. Alice didn't seem to understand the spirit 
in which we engaged our arguing. So ours was a quiet friendship. She'd 
come home and lie on the couch watching teevee, while I sat in a chair 
facing away from it. We'd exchange remarks about the absurdity of the 
human condition. She'd go back to the show, I to my book. Then we'd 
make another remark. Back to whatever we were doing. And so on. A quiet 
friendship. How it would have deeped, I'll never know. And what she 
might have achieved, I'll never find out either. This is the hole in my 
life that can't be repaired. The same is true of my father, who died at 
the age of 51 of a blood clot that worked its way from his leg to his 
heart and which could be readily cured today. I was 24. The shock and 
grief are gone. The regrets that Alice might still be alive had I done 
something differently in raising her are gone. The emptiness remains.

I'll be glad to share my chronicle on this with anyone who asks. It's 
the newer chronicle, my cochlear implant, that will be full of new 
developments. Stay tuned and come visit us in Georgetown on Saturday if 
you can.

[This paragraph is to a list I have been running ever since I took over 
on my own initiative the Willem Mengelberg Society from its founder, 
Ronald Klett, who died in 2000, and turned it from a periodic 
newsletter to an online e-mail list, to which anyone may join for 
free.] Mengelberg connection? I am not sure how this whole business of 
my cochlear implant is directly related to the great Dutch conductor. I 
don't think I've listened to any of his recordings since my operation, 
but I shall do so tonight. I pick the first movement of the Victor 
Eroica, not as wild as the Telefunken and various live ones, but worth 
relistening to, which I've not done for a long, long time. How well 
I'll hear it is another matter.

Sunday: Sarah thought I am now doing so well with the 32 spondaic words 
that I ought to get another list of them. So I moved far away to make it 
more difficult for me to hear them. Even at about fifteen feet, my 
processor kept amplifying the sounds to the same loudness that I hear 
right next to her. I move a couple of more feet away, and this time the 
sound was rather faint and I didn't do all that much better than chance.

For the first time, I tried listening in stereo, with the left channel 
coming through my left *ear* and the right from my cyborg ear. I chose 
Wellington's Victory. This work, which is looked down upon by most critics 
I find to be a delightful one that accomplishes what it was supposed to. 
One army comes in from the left, the other from the right. They exchange 
fire, until the French are finally defeated and their rifle fire dies 
down. (The symphony of victory, which comprises the second movement is a 
well-constructed work.) At first, I could hear little difference when I 
joined the channels together by a switch. But later, when the music 
switched to the left army, I could hear a difference in my left ear, 
namely that the sound level was reduced, as only half of it was coming in. 
I really couldn't follow the music very well, though. Then I put on the 
seventh quartet and got out my score, again listening to both sides. (One 
of the Budapest Quartet members said that, though the fourteenth quartet 
was the greatest, it was the seventh they loved the most. Only a little 
bit of luck. It was getting so many hallucinations that I had to struggle 
mightily to listen to the music behind the noise. This, I think, was a 
useful excercise. Then I finally did what I had talked about earlier, 
listening to my half-speed recording of Glenn Gould playing the little 
Mozart Sonata 16 (old no. 15) in C, K. 545, along with the score. A fair 
amount of luck with the first and, more so, the third movements. Again, 
listening to the second movement, I was contaminated with memories of the 
first, which I have played myself far more than the other two. I'll have 
to try it on the right side alone tomorrow as I walk home from the subway.

Monday: It was a good idea to start with the second movement, which I 
heard pretty well out of my cyber-ear only. The third movement went 
even better. But, oddly enough, not the first, the one I have played by 
far the most, even with both ears going. After I got out the score, I 
tried it again. I could follow it pretty well.

Tuesday: Art museum. Andrea changed my setting to the loudest of three. 
There was now so much noise that I started hallucinating the first 
concerto again. But there were a lot more people in the museum this 
time. Couldn't make anything out, though. As I was leaving, several 
visitor were listening to a volunteer docent, Laura G. Wyman, most 
enthusiastically describe an El Greco painting. I went in close to hear 
her, but there was an echo in the gallery I never heard before! I 
really wish I heard here, and unlike the teevee shows I've been 
training with, I was very eager to hear her. I rather dislike El Greco 
and want to learn why I shouldn't. I found that the second setting did 
filter out some of the background noise. She took the visitors to some 
other paintings, but eventually I decided to forego Andrea's injunction 
not to fiddle with the sensitivity control. I peeled off the Scotch 
tape and tried to find a combination of volume and sensitivity that 
would improve things. I found hardly any difference. Maybe she hasn't 
customimized a default program yet. She told me I wasn't ready for it, 
but I decided to fiddle, on the grounds that it wouldn't hurt my brain 
and here was a chance to try it out in a situation where hearing just 
three words would be good.

Back on went the tape after I eventually gave up and went back to work. 
There not being any immediate project for me to work on, I did not 
hestitate to linger on at the museum to grab any listening experience I 
might have. Progress on my spondaic words continued. Sarah has added a 
few words, and I am no longer keeping the word list in front of me when 
Greg reads, either. My experience listening to the Mozart Sonata in C 
on the way home wasn't as good as it was the previous evening.

Wednesday: Sarah added a few more spondaic words. Started out poorly 
but got better. I listened to the Musical Offering when jogging this 
morning. I had thought this was not all that much "essential in 
stereo," but it was. I desparately kept hoping what I remembered would 
come in on the right, but I haven't started jogging using both sides 
yet, though Andrea says the processor is quite sturdy and I need not 
worry about its bouncing as I jog. As it happens--this is my memory 
here--the treble instruments are on the right, and these are now sounds 
I will eventually hear much better than ever before. Well, I hope so. 
So I mostly kept hearing the bass line over and over and over again. I 
should build an adapater that will reverse left and right channels, 
though I might not need it the next time I listen to what's become my 
favorite work of Bach, along with the solo violin music. I've gotten a 
bit too overexposed to the Gouldberg Variations.

I put the Musical Offering after the St. John Passion, which I 
listened to, but heard very little, on Good Friday. It's my reward, in 
a way. The tape finished with the Toccata and Fugue in d, S. 565. I'll 
be trying that on the walk home tonight.

Friday, 2007 April 6

Not much to report from Wednesday or Thursday. On Friday, I watched All 
My Children again. My sister, Marti, asks whether Erica is still on the 
show. She wasn't yesterday, but she was the week before, I think. Marti 
says she's been married to at least seven men. Here's the Wikipedia 
list:

Marital Status

Jackson "Jack" Montgomery (Married) [5/24/05+]

Past Marriage(s)

Jeffery "Jeff" Martin (Divorced) [1971-1974]
Phillip Brent (Divorced, deceased) [1976]
Tom Cudahy (Divorced) [1981]
Adam Chandler Sr. (Divorced, first time) [1984-1993]
Mike Roy (Invalid) [1987]
Travis Montgomery (Invalid, deceased, first time) [1988]
Travis Montgomery (Invalid, deceased, second time) [1991]
Adam Chandler Sr. (Divorced; seoncd time) [1993]
Dimitri Marick (Divorced, first time) [1994-1995]
Dimitri Marick (Divorced, second time) [1996-1999]

She had twelve other "flings & relationships."

Susan Victoria Lucci, who plays her, has said that she considers Erica the
greatest role ever written for a woman. She was born 1946.12.23, which makes
her about two months younger than Marti. She has an Italian father and
Swedish mother and is a Republican. She has had exactly one marriage, on
1969.9.13. She and Ray MacDonnell are the only two that have been on the
show since its debut on 1970.1.5. AMC was the favorite TV show of author P.G
Wodehouse, who otherwise loathed television.

Guiding Light (known as The Guiding Light prior to 1975) is an American
television program credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as being
the longest-running soap opera in production and the longest running drama
in television history. The 15,000th televised episode of Guiding Light aired
on September 7, 2006. Due to this series run, it is not only considered to
be the longest soap opera, but the longest series of any show created.

The program was created by soap writer Irna Phillips, and began as an NBC
radio serial on January 25, 1937 before moving to CBS on June 30, 1952, as a
televised serial.

The second oldest Soap Opera is As the World Turns, which debuted on
1956.4.2.

Well, this is supposed to be about my hearing. For some reason, I didn't
hear very much of this episode. I did fairly well with The Jim Lehrer News
Hour.

What was upsetting is that after that I put on a disc of misc. piano works
from the Brilliant Classics 172-CD "complete" Mozart Edition. I got so
locked into the first item, Andante in Bb, K. 15ii, that it kept going
through my head and I couldn't focus in on any of the other pieces.
Moreover, my hallucination was of a piano, not the organ upon which the work
was played! I don't know what to do about this.

Very often, when a lot of background sound is coming in, the noise results
in my brain cranking out an approximation of the opening of Beethoven's
first concerto, with the last part often going over and over again and only
sometimes starting from the beginning. I discovered that if I sing "Freude,
schöner Gotterfunken" a few times (Sarah says I still don't get it right),
it is that tune that I'll hallucinate, but only for awhile. Then it's back
to the default first concerto. In a way, I don't really mind these sounds,
since I've had tinnitus for a long time. It's when they interfere with my
hearing that is a problem. I may have to consult a neurologist.

Tuesday, 2007 April 3

Sarah found a software course, called Sound and Beyond, that seems 
exactly what I need. It costs $290, and I'm hoping to get someone else 
to pay for it, maybe the Montgomery Country Rehabilitative Services, 
maybe where I work (but it will have to be convincingly described as a 
"reasonable accommodation" for a handicap, maybe by convincing someone 
in the Department who evaluates these things to get it and let me do 
the evaluation.

The URL for Sound and Beyond is 
http://cochlearamericas.com/Support/169.asp in case you might want to 
look it up.

Coming home I listened with both ears to some Mozart piano variations 
(still Gianoli). I kept the right cochlear ear down to a minimum this 
time. In fact, I think I'll try doing this routinely as a way of 
training my cyborg ear. Then I'll slowly rack of the volume in the 
right and then lower it in the left, to the point where I listen only 
with the cyborg ear. There's no real cost here, as I'm not doing 
anything else at the time. Well, a small cost, since I won't be 
listening to the outside world like Andrea says I should be doing, but 
this will not be for long periods. I must try out what I can.

I continue to progress in with the spondaic words. I may be getting 
about half of them right, but by chance it should be 1/32. And I've had 
little problem following Dr. Seuss.

Monday, 2007 April 2

I jogged some 6.5 miles into to Kaiser early for a cholesterol test, a 
test where one needs to fast for twelve hours before hand. The result 
came back that afternoon, and my cholesterol, surprisingly high for 
someone of my build, is under control. I jogged the rest of the way 
into work, giving me 8.2 miles total and without any soreness in my 
knees. This is very good. I stopped on my final trip in at the Peace 
Tent across the street from the White House and spoke with Thomas, who 
mans it for twelve hours a day. He is not your typical Leftist peace 
nut, though that is his background. Rather, he has a strong libertarian 
streak. The woman who womans the tent the other twelve hours day in and 
day out--they take six hour shifts--has been quite weathered by all her 
years and it shows in her personality. Thomas, who himself has been at 
it quite a while, is completely sane and articulate. Their site is 
http://prop1.org and shows a picture of his new dog, his faithful 
companion of for nine years, passed away.

This time the concerti came in good and clear. I saved the Mendelssohn 
first concerto to listen to with my right cochlear-ear alone on my walk 
from the subway to home. It went rather well. This particular work is 
of some importance to me, for Mr. Kitson played it to us in his music 
class in the ninth grade. I already knew the work from hearing it on 
KCMS-FM, which played classical music from 12-3 daily (though the 
co-owner, Bud Edmonds, had an inexplicable fondness for Victory at 
Sea). He would take requests, and I made them often, building up a 
little library on open-reel tapes on a spare recorder Dad brought home 
from the office. They were on acetate tapes and thus prone to break. 
Several years ago I transcribed what tapes I still had to cassettes. 
Lots of jumps and starts at the breaks, and of meaning only to me. I 
sure wish I knew who played the Kreutzer sonata! I also transcribed the 
playing of Robin Nicholson (a year ahead of me) on the piano. Anyhow, 
though Mr. Kitson wrote on the evaluation of my progress to my parents 
that he rarely had a student who knew as much about music as I did, he 
would not give me an A for the course. He only awarded an A once in his 
entire teaching career! An A really meant something back then. I was 
enormously proud to have earned a full A (not an A-) in a couple of 
monthly marking periods, though I got them routinely in math. However, 
hubris overcame me on my final exam in geometry. I finished it in 3/4 
an hour, while the exam was supposed to take three hours. There were a 
large number of trick questions, so for once I got a B+ in a math 
course. A lesson learned. Later, I learned that the final exam in a 
graduate topology course (not mine) consisted of 75 yes-or-no answers, 
and your score was right minus wrong. Quite a few students got negative 
scores. To do well on the test, you either had better be able either to 
give a proof or show a definite counter-example. There's a book by a 
man who became an indefatigable math educator, Lynn Arthur Steen, 
called "Counterexamples in Topology." I have the Dover reprint. His 
pedagogical books are a delight to read.

At the National Gallery this time, it was quite noisy. Keeping the 
volume at 12 O'Clock, as I had been instructed to, the noise coming in 
was so loud that auditory hallucinations (something resembling the 
opening of the Beethoven first concerto) plagued me. But--I've got to 
keep it up, so that my brain will at length tune these voices out. I 
got so irritated that I shut the thing off after about 45 minutes just 
to enjoy the paintings.

Sunday, 2007 April 1

Still having problems with the concerti. Kevin came to pick up some 
metal book cases, which we had replaced with some wooden ones we got 
from John, who got an even better set of wooden cases for his own 
apartment. Our books look really terrific now, and we have some eight 
boxes of books to dispose of. We plan on inviting our friends to come 
over and help themselves. Loads of really good books, but ones we are 
highly unlikely to read ourselves. So we need a good home for them. The 
remainder will either be sold or just given away. The terrific thing 
was that I was able to hear Kevin in my cochlear ear very well.

Saturday, 2007 March 31

I was distressed that I couldn't follow concerti I ordinarily can't 
hear in my left. It was just a cacophony of noise. Kelley and Betsy 
came by briefly to load up some family furniture but I had the greatest 
difficulty following them in my right cochlear-ear. Not a good day at 
all.

Friday, 2007 March 30

Sarah found several articles about implanted patients and their 
experience listening to music. This is a quite active field. While no 
new wires are used, there are ways of doing something like multiplexing 
so that it sounds as if a hundred or so wires are coming out of the 
electrode. An esp. good article in _Wired_ is by a man who was one of 
these guinea pigs and used the variety of instruments in Bolero as his 
touchstone. He would rejoice when he at last became able to hear an 
instrument combination that he didn't hear before. I've gotten burned 
out on the music, and Ravel himself deplored the excessive popularity 
that greeted the work, but this sounds like a good work to use myself. 
I have the first three recordings of the work, all made within a month 
of one another iirc: by the composer, by Willem Mengelberg, my very 
favorite conductor, and by Piero Coppola, an Italian who would not give 
up his Italian citizenship upon settling in France and was not allow to 
conduct the big concert orchestras. As a result, he devoted his efforts 
to something called Le Orchestre du Concerts du Gramophone. He made a 
huge number of first recordings of French music and does the best job 
of anyone of persuading me of the merits of French orchestral music. 
Otherwise, I don't think I'd care for much of it at all. French chamber 
music I like very much. Then orchestral now. And Reine Gianoli, French 
despite her last name, does not so well convincing me of the merit of 
French music for solo piano. French vocal music, probably never.

All My Children: The background noises continue to recede. I forgot I 
wasn't to look at the captions. It turns out that Adam was fighting for 
control of his company with his (he says) no good drunk of a son. This 
episode generally has a great deal of shouting and arguing. I didn't 
follow much of it and don't know who won the battle at the board 
meeting. One happy episode, though. A little girl climbed into bed with 
a man and a woman to hear the woman read a bedtime story. Retraining my 
ears or not, I *had* to watch the captions this time to catch the 
story. Well, I've already forgotten the story, but the man was so 
charmed that he proposed marriage to the woman, who accepted. I anyone 
here is watching, please guess how long this marriage will last. What 
is the shortest, average, and longest duration of a marriage on this 
show. Besides this happy episode, I'm glad to know there is at least 
one means of visible support for the characters, namely that Adam 
started a business.

The Jim Lehrer Report: I'm writing this on Tuesday and don't remember a 
thing that was discussed, only that my hearing is getting better. This 
says something about the world, being less memorable than a thoroughly 
unmemorable teevee soap opera.

Thursday, 2007 March 29

Andrea says my improvement is moving apace. She was not worried about 
my occasional use of both ears, but she strongly chastised me for not 
keeping my processor on at all times when awake. This I did not 
understand and will do so, except that I must remember to turn it on in 
the first place! I had kept my hearing aids off unless I really wanted 
to listen to something. What I have to do now is to learn what the 
nuisance sounds are so that my brain can filter them out. She also 
chastised me for fiddling around with the sensitivity control and put a 
piece of tape over it. That it was not set in the middle was just an 
accident, though. I have gotten curious about it, but she said my brain 
isn't ready for it yet.

Before I had three programs, soft, medium, and loud, settings otherwise 
the same. She adjusted the frequency curves and gave me three program, 
one as loud as I could stand reasonably, another the same but fixed so 
that I can listen better in noisy environments, and a third that cut 
out the outside side world and takes only what I have plugged into it 
(like my WalkWoman). This is great, because I can listen to music when 
walking home from the subway and not have to hear any traffic. The 
first two mix the world coming in through my microphone with what's 
plugged in 50-50^ There was a fourth program that was working all 
along, but this one uses the same input plug to feed an output 
somewhere, I guess so that others could hear what is coming out. Well, 
just hooked my left receiver into it. I was hoping something really 
weird so y'all could hear what I'm going through. No such luck. It 
sounds pretty similar to me to what I would be hearing with a hearing 
aid, though I suppose Andrea's adjustments would get heard. I can't 
tell and she won't let me have the software so I can fiddle, fiddle, 
fiddle without knowing what I'm doing. I suppose I could fiddle and go 
back to whatever setting she made. But I manifestly don't follow simple 
instructions, like leave the thing on all the time. (Plea: I didn't 
really get the message.)

^[In that old standby, _How to Lie with Statistics_, there's a story of 
a man who got caught selling horse meat when he advertised rabbit meat. 
"But I mix 'em 50-50," he said in excuse, "one rabbit, one horse."]

She told me that I might not get to hear music as well as I did. After 
all, I have only 16 wires coming out of my electrode and going into my 
brain, while a piano has 88 keys. I was in great despair the rest of 
the evening about this. I put on the Diabelli Variations (Backhaus, not 
Silverman, since I know the Backhaus so well) and got out the score. I 
got lost trying to follow it, even when listening with both ears. But 
this isn't a terrible surprise.

Wednesday, 2007 March 28

Hooray! Tomorrow we visit Andrea to get my processor more finely tuned. 
Right now I just have soft, medium, and loud all on the same curve. I 
can plug in an external source (WalkWoman, telephone, external 
directional microphone, whatever), which will also pick up the mike 
that is in the same button that rests just outside my skull above my 
ear, which also transmits the digital signals across the skull to the 
chip inside my skull that makes me a cyborg. There's an additional 
setting that shuts of this mike and gets the input only from the 
external source, but which doesn't work right now. The fear is that if 
the external source is only my WalkWoman, I won't be hearing menacing 
vehicles. That is already a problem, for since my cyborg ear is deaf to 
the world unless something is coming in from the processor and if I 
blast music from my WalkWoman, I'll barely be able to hear said 
menacing traffic. I must, and do, pay careful attention to the traffic!

Monday: I went back to the National Gallery of Art and kept the 
processor on, in hopes of grasping snatches of low level conversation 
from the other patrons. The two guards would often be chattering to one 
another. But when I edged toward them to find out what they were 
chattering about, they stopped talking! I couldn't make out anything 
the other visitors said, either. Greg came up, and we worked with all 
32 spondaic words. I did pretty well. I had thought to listen to the 
beginning preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier, but I 
forgot to bring the tape. So I listened to whatever I did have, some 
Debussy (played by my favorite lady pianist, Reine Gianoli. I forget 
now just what the piece was. In any case, not much luck.

On Tuesday, Sarah not only used all 32 words, but took my list away 
from me. I did so well that she stopped after seven minutes, instead of 
going on for the usual ten. Greg continued with all 32 words. It was on 
my walk from the subway back home that I listened to about six of the 
WTC preludes and fugues. The first prelude came on extremely well. The 
public library didn't have a score. I can't find mine, but will look 
one up online. Not even the foul Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the 
"Sonny Bono Act") reaches back to 1744. I did fairly well on the first 
fugue, the second prelude, and much better on the second fugue (the one 
in c minor that Mr. Kitson played for us in the ninth grade on the 
piano himself, which is especially ground into my head. But I got lost 
during the following preludes and fugues. Still, feeling overjoyed at 
the progress, I pulled out the score of Mozart's Sonata 16 (Old No. 15) 
that I used to play myself. Right cyber-ear only, and I followed the 
first movement very well. But when it came to the second movement, the 
first movement kept going through my head and I just couldn't lock into 
the second movement at all, even after I went ahead and plugged in my 
right ear. I kept trying and trying. Again, I could follow the third 
movement a good bit--still using both sides. I got lost in the score, 
but not as badly as the first time. And I did get lost in the first 
movement, cyber-ear only. I used the Silverman recording again. I think 
he took all the repeats. I just remembered that I taped Gould's 
recording of this easiest of Mozart's piano sonatas at half speed. This 
is still faster than I could ever play it for myself! I'll have to work 
with this half-speed recording next time.

On Wednesday, while jogging in I listened to Gianoli playing Ravel and 
though Couperin's Tomb No. 3 is a simple enough piece, with bass notes 
below some simple but repetitious but still slow notes in the treble. 
Listen to it on the way home. Greg came up again. I tried to ditch my 
word list but gave up soon on. He thinks I did better, well a little 
bit, but I didn't really think so. I put on Couperin's Tomb No. 3 but 
it wasn't the success I had hoped for. But the first WTC prelude was a 
success, of sorts, again. Not enough for me to really follow the tune, 
just note the modulations of the melody. Continuing with the fugue, I 
must report that I can't much yet distinguish two or more ongoing 
melodies by that master of counterpoint. Keep trying I shall do.

Now, some more practice with Dr. Seuss books. What I'll need to get 
from Andrea is further practice tips. Progressively cut down the 
volume? Listen in noisy situations. Dispense with the texts? New texts? 
If so, how can I get them. I'll have to draw up a list of things to ask 
her tomorrow.

Sunday, 2007 March 25

Practice with Sarah on the spondaic words, maybe an improvement over 
yesterday, maybe not. I listened to all seven Dr. Seuss books I have 
the texts for, this time with very little losing my place. No cheating 
with my left ear, either. This is a good sign.

So to the music, thinking this might be a very good day. I was, but 
only for the Beethoven 7th. (If you ever want to investigate classical 
music, I recommend listening to this movement a dozen times. If you 
want to listen to it more, you're on you way to being hooked. Write to 
me and I'll guide you toward a lifelong absorption in the 
civilization's finest artistic achievements. I'll combine what your 
preferences seem to be with what everything thinking person should 
know.)

And some excellent progress here. The trick is that my ears still 
distort frequencies. With a score in hand--sometimes adding my left ear 
(but mostly to keep my place in the score), sometimes not--I know from 
the score (and from memory, of course) what I *should* be hearing. I 
hope this exercise will make my brain do the necessary correcting 
faster than it would have otherwise. This should help my understanding 
speech. I'll have to ask Andrea in what aspects morphemes differ in 
ways other than pitch. (I already have some of the answers in H.A. 
Gleason, Jr., _An Introduction to English Linguistics_, 1955 rev. 
1961), the principle textbook for a graduate English course I took in 
my third-undergraduate year at U.Va. I had been familiar already with 
some of these terms from my father's audiologist at the Colorado 
Springs Medical Center back in junior high.) In music, there is the 
strength of overtones and undertones (the organ being esp. rich) and 
the attack and decay patterns (the sound of a piano coming in abruptly 
and decaying gradually, while the organ swells up and cuts off sharply. 
I recall that one can take notes from a piano, play them in reverse, 
put them in an echo chamber--I'm not sure about this--record them that 
way, play them back in reverse, and get something whose sound 
approximates an organ. And mutatis mutandis for the organ to sound like 
a piano.

An irrelevant fear? It may be that the human voice is so different from 
that of music that there won't be any substantial "transfer of 
learning" from my experimenting with music to my improved understanding 
of speech, or vice versa. It would be hard to prove in any case, for 
there are few patients at any one time within commuting distance for 
proper statistical experiments to be made about this transfer of 
learning and that my potential employment as a guinea pig would result 
in a sample size of one (1) and might not even be suggestive. But I'm 
trying this experiment as an addition to my other training, not as a 
substitute for it. The words I am devoting to music are all out of 
proportion to the time involved. But even if there is no transfer, 
except maybe in my imagination, it is good for me to do at least some 
work on my oldest love, namely music. Yet there is a possibility that 
my experimenting with music is actually harming my training for speech. 
I can't see how this could be the case, but then again, I don't have an 
advanced degree in audiology. Andrea may think otherwise, and I shall 
listen to her, even as I will no doubt remain my ornery self and want 
to know how she could know of this harm when, as I said, statistical 
studies would be hard to conduct. She may have her theoretical reasons, 
but unless they are quite strong, my thinking is that these reasons are 
more on the order of generalities. Always ask, "How big is the 
molehill?"

A problem I had with following the score of the Beethoven 7th is that, 
when the music comes to a rest, my right cyborg-ear continues to hear 
noises. I can't distinguish tone well enough to say whether these 
noises simply continued the melody of the music through the duration of 
the rest (another G after the end of the fourth measure or an A after 
the end of the eighth), were something else, or whether they were just 
auditory hallucinations (tinnitus) that accompany my brain pretty 
regularly. I spoke earlier of repetitions of the opening bars of 
Beethoven's first piano concerto, which are not in key. Not now, my 
head is pretty quiet, except for some low-pitched sounds like machinery 
that have been with me for quite a while. No point my moving to the 
country to experience silence! I'm rather imagining the opening of the 
first concerto, not the same as hallucinating it. But, until my 
operation, I did not hallucinate this. I'd much rather hallucinate the 
slow movement of the Beethoven 7th!

I should get out a keyboard to figure out--using my left ear and right 
cyborg-ear both--to figure out how notes sound.

Two complaints and a joy: When I shake my head, and to a lesser extent 
when I go jogging, though this is diminishing, I get a swooshing sound 
in my head like I did right after or soon after the operation. This has 
not healed. And a minor tenderness outside in my skull which was cut 
open for the operation continues. The joy is that, having been forced 
to stop jogging, the pain in my knees has disappeared! It's a function 
aging. In addition to wearing orthotics and breaking out a new pair of 
shoes every four months, I started wearing knee pads, putting athletic 
tape on my feet on the their back half, jogging on grass whenever I 
can, taking Iboprufen and Sam-E before going out, and cutting back my 
jogging from 17 to 14 miles a week. And to think that I ran (legally) 
in the Boston Marathon in 1978 and had been running 40 miles a week 
until 1985 or so. I could only witness a continued decline. The pain 
was minor, but I want to go on running as I slide into the peace of 
senility, if that is my fate. But, after the month's rest, I feel I 
could run a lot, lot more, as I don't feel any soreness at all after 
running. But--I'm going to keep up these practices anyhow. It seems 
that I've added several years to a running life.

Another note. I'm winding my way through a 182-CD Brilliant Classics 
set of the "complete" Mozart, using my left ear, mostly to get through 
it. Mozart cranked out a tremendous amount of minor works. I am not 
thrilled by the operas he wrote as a teen-ager. Besides, I rather doubt 
that very many of the performances will be anywhere as striking as 
those I've collected over the years. (It will be quite a while before I 
buy any new CDs, a nice savings indeed.) I must report that, when 
listening to the first two string quintets, I imagined that I was 
hearing vocal music. That was yesterday. Today, I listened to the 
third, the one in C, K. 515. No such thing. This is a work I long 
regarded as just one more piece of Mozart's, until I came across the 
vigorous performance on 78s of the Pro Arte Quartet and Alfred Hobday, 
second viola. That made the work for me. It's a masterpiece, but had it 
not been for the transcendental performance, I would never have 
discovered it. The new one, Orlando Quartet with Nobuko Imai, seemed to 
sound vigorous, but I just can't compare it with the transcendental 
one.

Saturday, 2007 March 24

Music!

I'm listening to some very, very familiar works to see (hear!) what I 
may be able to hear in my right ear (chip!). Here they are:

1. Bach: Tocatta, Adagio, and Fugue in C, S. 564, my favorite organ 
work. (Helmut Walcha. Blind from an early age, he memorized the score 
line by line, not chord by chord as they appear on the printed page. 
His playing intertwines the counterpoint as no other. And he brings a 
gravity wholly fitting to the music. Accept nothing else!) Not a whole 
lot of luck. I not hearing too well out of my left ear, which make me 
strongly feel that hearing is a matter of the whole brain, not just the 
ear. But the organ is unusually rich in overtones and undertones. A 
little more luck on the fugue. Tried to follow with the score.

2. Bach: Well-Tempered Klavier, Preludes and Fugues Nos. 1 and 2. Glenn 
Gould, piano. (Who else, possibly?) The first prelude simplicity 
itself, just the same few notes over and over again, with variations. 
Beneath the simplicity is invention after invention. I can't seem to 
find my score. Not much luck either. What I'm going to do is play this 
every evening as I walk from the subway to my apartment. The hope is 
that my brain will start sorting out the modulations of this quiet but 
ingenious deceptively simple prelude. (I'll move on to the fugue and 
then to the second prelude and fugue as I fancy.)

3. Bach: Partita 2 in d for violin alone, S. 1004: 1, Allemande and 5, 
Chaconne (Bach's greatest movement) and Partita 3 e, S. 1006: 1, 
Preludio. Joseph Szigeti. Recorded late in his career with a supposedly 
marked deterioration in his intonation, but not at all in his incisive 
musicianship. Some day I hope to be able to hear this failing 
intonation. I now hear only the musicianship. Maybe there's something 
to be said for poor hearing, after all. I have the score, but not much 
luck either.

4. Beethoven: Symphony 7 in A, Op. 92: 2, Allegretto. Arturo Toscanini, 
New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1936.

This is the movement that starts out:

EE E E    EE  EE
EE E E    EE EE
EE E F#   GG GG
GG G G    GG RR
GG G A    BB BB
F#F# F#G# AA AA
EE E E    EE EE
DD F# G#  AA RR

Only one of my correspondents identified this to me. Shame! He's a 
reviewer for _fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors_, 
which is the best of them all, I have found practically since it began 
thirty years ago. Again, not much luck, even with the score and 
sneaking in sound in my left ear.

5. Debussy: Préludes, Book: 6, Steps in the Snow. (This time is Alfred 
Cortot recorded 1931.) I mentioned listening to it on the right side 
only walking home on Thursday. So I thought I'd give it a try again. 
Not much. This is not a good day for music.

Two practice sessions with Sarah on the spondaic words. A general sense 
of improvement.

Friday, 2007 March 23

I plum forgot to watch All My Children, as I got preoccupied answering 
e-mail. I did watch the Jim Lehrer News Hour. What's good to report is 
that I caught nearly every word spoken by Ray Suarez reporting from 
Europe on religion and politics there, except when my attention lagged, 
which was not often. This came late in the program, too, by the time my 
brain should have been well fatigued. This is the first time where I 
caught nearly everything!

I got a tape of one of the girl's all-time favorites, Margaret Wise 
Brown, Good Night, Moon. The kiddies loved this especially when I would 
close with "Good night, bowel movement." They were just at the right 
age when they would take delight in such things. Sadly, there was too 
much music in the background. The text is rather short, and I don't 
think it would be a good use of my time to listen for many minutes of 
racket just to get a minute of text. Still, it might be a good idea to 
be able to tell when words finally get spoken. I'll give it at least 
another try. I'm just going by intuition here in guessing what will be 
good training for me. Whether there is some master theory, able to be 
applied to a specific individual (me), I don't know. As should be 
obvious, I'm wildly experimenting. But working on a sample size of one 
(1, namely me) is not good statistics. I do hope my report might be 
useful to scholars of cochlear speech therapists, but I don't know whom 
to contact.

I then went through my three new Dr. Seuss books again. I xeroxed the 
pages, so I can return the books to the library. I was sneaking in the 
hearing aid receiver into my left hear to get back on track in the 
third book, until I discovered that the xeroxed pages were out of 
order. I'm not sure about sneaking in the receiver. On the one hand, I 
don't have to start all over again and will be practicing the whole 
text evenly. On the other hand, maybe I will force my brain to pay more 
attention if I have to go through the beginning over and over again. 
Even with the pages now put into the correct order, I had problems 
following the text. It was late, I was tired, and I gave up.

Thursday, 2007 March 22

I worked with Greg and Sarah both on the second set of sixteen spondaic 
words (list B) and did surprisingly well, I thought. I quickly had Greg 
just feed me the first half of List B, namely eight words. I did much 
better, since I had fewer options to choose from. We worked on the 
second half of list B, too. We went back to list A and I did a good 
deal better than I did on Monday. Same with Sarah. I'd love to know 
more about the theory about how these particular words were selected. I 
will ask Andrea about what to do after I've practiced a long time with 
these words. Maybe employ a rock band or go to a noisy environment to 
practice. There may be other tools, too.

On the way home from the subway, again I listened to my WalkWoman. It 
was some of Debussy's Preludes Book I. (They were played by Reine 
Gianoli, my favorite lady pianist. I listen to her Westminster 
recordings at the start of every year, after I've played my sixteen 
"Space Capsule" tapes, the twenty-four Earth hours of music I'd take 
with me if that's all I could have) and the "free" organ works of Bach, 
whom Mr. Mencken once That's what was on my cassette. I don't know them 
very well, so I had both ears going. By a lovely accident, the sixth 
one, "Des pas sur la neige" (Steps in the Snow), was an ideal piece, 
since it is slow and not complex (except how Debussy modifies it over 
its course). I could hear very well how the sound in my cyborg ear 
differs from that in my natural one. I'll practice on it later. It is 
one of the lesser-recorded of these Preludes. The great Alfred Cortot 
and also Walter Gieseking recorded all twelve on 78s. Only Friedrich 
Gulda recorded this one independently, as that as a filler to something 
else. But for me, it's a splendid piece.

Wednesday, 2007 March 21

More spondaic practice and I got some more Dr. Suess books from the 
library. I now have texts for seven of the nine (?ten) on the good CD, 
as opposed to the cassette tapes that have too much music in the 
background.

Exchanged e-mails with Janet, an elegant lady, somewhat older than 
myself (I won't ask her how much older). A former English teacher, she 
has a splendid waist-hip ratio, even if she is not quite as slender as 
she was when she was thirty. Knowing her poetry, she wished me good 
luck and told me that this is spondaic. I wrote her back and told her I 
really needed HARD WORK, not good luck. She said this is spondaic, too.

More significantly, I tried listening to Mozart's Sonata No. 16 (old 
no. 15) in C, K. 545, along with the score, trying to keep down the 
volume in my left ear, just barely enough to keep my place. This was 
the most advanced piece I learned (badly) at the piano, so I thought I 
would be able to follow it easy. Not much luck, as I wasn't hearing 
very well in my left ear and couldn't much make out the second 
movement. But this is likely to be a good piece to practice on, in 
hopes that some cross-training to speech (remember that gossip, 
rumble-bumble in office meetings, and radio talk shows are far more 
important than the imperishable truths of Mozart) will take place. Of 
course I do want to re-hear the imperishable truths as well. It will be 
good to check back.

Tuesday, 2007 March 20

I went to a mammoth annual exhibition by those who sell computer stuff 
to the feds. It's called FOSE, though no one seems to remember what the 
initials once stood for. My ability to hear was quite bad in that noisy 
environment, even though I brought along the directional microphone I 
used to use with my old hearing aids. But it competes with the mike 
that is housed in the same place where the transmitter that goes across 
my skull is. Since they were trying to sell things to me, they were 
cooperative, much more so that the usual sullen clerk of low IQ that 
infests our stores. Having been to this exhibit at least twice before, 
I initially thought I'd spend only an hour there. I spent nearly four. 
It seems that a third of the displays were given over to disaster 
recovery (hard disk burn out, lost passwords, etc.) and a third to 
security. That the government seeks an economically too high level of 
security was quite apparent. There was one exhibit that did just the 
opposite, namely Reverse911. This useful outfit helps local government 
officials, who may not know much about computers, get flood warnings 
and the like out by e-mail, PDAs, websites, cellFones, etc., quickly. 
I, too, would like the world to hear my message! Much more than I would 
like to keep it a secret.

Hey, this is supposed to be about my hearing, but I can't resist 
throwing in other thoughts.

Monday, 2007 March 17

Greg came by and spent ten minutes with me on the spondaic words. I am 
doing better than I did yesterday. More practice with Sarah, too.

Sunday, 2007 March 17

The Madeline books are swell, but Rock 'n Learn lives up to its title. 
It is infused with a rock "music" background, which comes across as 
just noise. So did the Sendak book.

The spondaic lists are swell, and I worked with Sarah on List A.

Saturday, 2007 March 16

I went to the public library and got out four more books with talking text:

Ludwig Behemans, Madeline
Ludwig Behemans, Madeline and the Gypsies
Rock 'n Learn (Ages 2-5), Nursery Rhymes
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

I also Googled "say the word railroad" and related things and landed 
upon a list of spondaic words. This term come from poetry studies and 
means a two-syllable word with equal stress on each syllable. I had 
taken hearing tests since the sixth or seventh grade that contained 
sentences like "say the word railroad." Andrea walked me through 
several of these on several visits. It turns out that such lists are 
far from random. Here's a list I found, in a technical article about 
how to measure hearing loss from word recognition as well as from pure 
tones. Much of the article is technical. This is what you study to get 
an advanced degree in audiology:

Half Lists of Spondaic Words

List A

airplane        ice cream
baseball        mousetrap
blackboard      northwest
cowboy          oatmeal
drawbridge      pancake
duck pond       playground
eardrum         railroad
horseshoe       sunset
hotdog          whitewash

List B

armchair        headlight
backbone        inkwell
birthday        mushroom
cookbook        nutmeg
doormat         outside
earthquake      padlock
eyebrow         stairway
greyhound       toothbrush
hardware        woodwork

Source: American Speech-Language Hearing Association (1988 March). 
Guidelines for Determining Speech Thresh Level for Speech. 
http://www.asha.org/NR/rdonlyres/A60E7E85-80A1-4FCD-8C53-8D739397BC49/0/1886 
3_1.pdf

Sarah and I did a trial run with this. It looks like a very good 
exercise!

Friday, 2007 March 16

All My Children. This time the background moaning music seemed much 
reduced, which maybe it was, though I had a hard time focusing on the 
content.

The Jim Lehrer News Hour. Again, I had difficulty concentrating. I 
really do need incentives to pay attention to what David Brooks and 
Mark Shields are saying to each other. Maybe. Part of the program had 
an interview with Craig Venter, the man who first decoded the human 
genome. He's now looking for genes in the ocean. Now *that* I am most 
keenly interested in. I decided most emphatically not to look at the 
captions, except when there is no hope of my hearing anything since I 
can't see the faces. At least I can get some information during those 
times. And during those times, I found out that his researches have 
already doubled the known number of human genes and that the total 
weight of bacteria exceeds that of plants and animals combined. Boy did 
I ever want to find out what use he expects this knowledge to be! So I 
hoped that sheer curiosity would force my brain to pay attention. But, 
no, it wouldn't cooperate.

I then went through the four Dr. Seuss books I have both in text and in 
sound. This was my worst listening, maybe because a lot of others were 
talking and moving about, as my device currently won't allow me to 
listen to just what I direct from my stereo. Others can't here my 
stereo, since the loudspeakers are off, but I can hear them talking. 
Still, they weren't talking all that loudly and I did have my stereo 
turned up pretty loudly (and adjusted the controls on my processor 
accordingly). It could have just been a very bad evening.

Thursday, 2007 March 15

That was a good idea, listening in the quiet of an art gallery and then 
crossing the Mall. I was able to hear the Dr. Seuss tapes a lot more 
clearly and even started guessing at the words. Of course, I'm quite 
familiar with them, having gone through them many, many times. Even so, 
I'm not very good.

Good news at work: Greg Frane, a true gentleman whom I've known for 
years, came up to my office when I told him my story and spent a while 
drilling me on "he, see, she," but still with not much more than chance 
accuracy. He'll be taking a daily break and come by for ten minutes of 
drilling. And guess which university he graduated from. If you guessed 
the University of Virginia, you are correct. There are very few fellow 
graduates of U.Va. in the bureaucracy compared to graduates from that 
training school for bureaucrats, the University of Maryland. To be 
superqualified, you get a graduate degree from the Kennedy School of 
Government at Ha'va'd and major in something like public policy. I've 
never been able to find out exactly what this course of study consists 
of, though there are plenty of them in the general office where I work.

On the way home on the subway, I saw three pretty teenage girls (one 
well over six feet tall, which shows that awesomeness does not 
necessarily go with height, for she gabbled exactly like the rest). 
I've always been curious what teenagers talk about (please don't tell 
me I don't want to know!) but I couldn't make out a syllable.

On the way from the subway to home, I tried Mozart's Sonata No. 18 (old 
no unnumbered, the one with the allegro and andante from K. 533 and the 
rondo from K. 494). In many ways it's my favorite sonata of his. Alas, 
not much luck this time either.

Wednesday, 2007 March 14

Sarah reminded me that Andrea said I should have the processor on all 
the time, except when I was asleep. I did so for only a couple of days, 
figuring that if I'm just sitting quietly in a quiet office, there is 
nothing to be gained, only irritation, from having the device on. And 
so, without thinking about, I have turned the processor off as often as 
my hearing aid, which is most of the time. The neat thing about the 
processor is that I don't have to put an ear mold into my ear anymore, 
just turn the thing on and wait three seconds. Sarah also reminded me 
that I have no ear to damage.

I reminded myself of what Andrea said when I was looking at Mannerist 
paintings in the National Gallery of Art. Why not turn the thing on? I 
did, and cranked used the loud program. The room was very quiet, though 
my tinnitus generates all sorts of racket. I wish I had a good decibel 
meter to carry around. I had one from RadioSnack, but it would only 
record loud sounds and I burned out if I put the battery in backwards. 
Didn't use it much. Anyhow, I can get one for about $100, using 
http://froogle.google.com. None go below 30 db, though, and the gallery 
may have been that quiet. While there, I started hearing footsteps! I 
turned the sensitivity switch up as well as the volume switch. Too 
loud! This was not a problem, since I can't hurt an ear, but the sound 
coming through was just a big, humming racket.

Then I started hearing people talk in quiet voices at distances I would 
never have been able even to detect. I couldn't make out any of the 
words, though. This looks like a good way to get hearing exercise, so 
next time I'll go back just to eavesdrop. I keep the device on as I 
walked across the Mall back to work. I could hear others talking, as 
evidenced by the coordination of their lips and what was coming into my 
brain. (All right side. Hearing aid in my left ear not used.) I 
couldn't make much out. The wind, which was mild but would have wreaked 
havoc with a hearing aid, didn't seem to matter much. I still couldn't 
make out any words. Finally, I was walking up the stairs to the Air and 
Space Museum. A voice came in loudly and clearly. He was speaking 
slowly and distinctly, I could tell from the precise way his mouth 
moved. Little wind or distraction from other voices. But still I 
couldn't make anything out. I then occurred to me that the reason might 
possibly be that he was Chinese speaking to other Chinese! I should 
have stopped to ask him.

So I'll definitely be keeping my device on a lot more. I am employing a 
general principle economists practice instinctively. If it costs 
nothing, you may go ahead and do it. Well, walking across the Mall with 
my device on is not keeping me from doing much else (I could be reading 
a book or listening t