Currently, I am performing The Fisher of the James at venues in Richmond, VA. The Performance Schedule lists upcoming performances.

At these performances, I also sell copies of my books, CDs, and scores. Sales and donations all go to Caritas Works, a job-training program for Richmond’s homeless. Also at the sales table are exhibits and information about local organizations working for a more sustainable and humane society, such as the Citizens’ Climate Control Lobby, The Falls of the James Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Transitions Richmond Group (TRVA) and local farmers’ markets.

The first round of performances ends on March 8, 2013. Between mid-April and a final concert in the Fall at the Gelman Room in the Richmond Public Library, I will schedule a second round of performances for Caritas Works. If you are a member of a church or organization in Richmond who can host one of these performances, please contact me at rlrose45@hotmail.com

On January 27, 2013, at the Lewis home in Richmond, I will perform the first in a series of concerts for Caritas Works, a local training program to help homeless people find good jobs.

The program will consist of poetry spoken and sung, including readings and songs from Frameshifts, Hidden Moves and Hidden Voices, and Marking Time, the songs “Rappahannock” and “Just Enough,” and the featured work, The Fisher of the James, a song cycle based on the Grimms’ fairy tale, The Fisherman and His Wife, but set in modern day Richmond. An unemployed inventor and his discontented wife meet a magic fish who gives them their wishes, a history lesson, and a life-shifting lesson in the cost of wisdom.

On hand at the concerts will be my books, scores for performers, and copies of newly mastered CDs of some of my music. Books available: Volumes 1&2 of Frameshifts, Hidden Moves and Hidden Voices, Marking Time, Floats and Sinkers, and Finding a Purchase. CDs include Annunciations, Amber, The People’s Voice, The Fisher of the James, and La Rinuncia. Scores for musicians are: The People’s Voice, Annunciations, Missa brevis, La Rinuncia, and Amber. Proceeds of sales will go to Caritas Works.

I continue to work on mastering the tracks for The Books of Daniel, Runes and Tunes, and The Profit of Doom. Before too much longer, these works, together with scores for musicians and mp3 versions of all the music, should be finished. At that point, I will also place everything onto the Marginal Notes website, replacing the files currently online. Attached below is a general announcement for the series of concerts.

Most bookings after January 27, 2013 are tentative at this time, but I can tell you that one of the concerts will be in the Great Hall of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Richmond on Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 2:00 p.m.

A SERIES OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCES BY RICHMOND WRITER AND COMPOSER RICHARD ROSE, AUTHOR OF FRAMESHIFTS, ABOUT AN UNEMPLOYED FISHERMAN, HIS DISCONTENTED WIFE, AND A MAGICAL FISH WHO TEACHES THEM THE HISTORY AND WISDOM OF THE PEOPLES OF THE RIVER.

ALL PROCEEDS FROM THESE CONCERTS WILL GO TO CARITAS WORKS, OUR RICHMOND TRAINING PROGRAM TO HELP PEOPLE GO FROM HOMELESSNESS TO GOOD JOBS.

Announcement #3

A few more slippery truths from the spirit peoples of the River

Update

Rehearsals are still underway for The Fisher of the James, which I hope to perform in Richmond during 2013 for the benefit of organizations like the Climate Control Lobby, Sierra Club, and Transitions. My collaborator, the spirit-fish Mashkinonge, wanted to add a few more words. See the previous blog for his first announcement.

Announcement #2

Would I lie to you? These are only a few more of the realities which you humans seem to find so slippery. I call it a “microslice” because it’s thin on edge yet broad in scope, rather like my lovely scales. You can hear more from Mashkinonge (the fish) when Richard Rose performs The Fisher of the James. See more about this and other projects at frameshifts.com.

A Microslice of Sustainability.

Humans, the world is always ending. The Earth remains. Every death is the end of a world. That we cannot feel the catastrophes of others makes them no less real. The despair of an Indian farmer or fear felt by a mother in Rio’s favella are not our despair and fear. An “enlightened society of health, sustainability, peace and prosperity,” as Stephen Dinan describes it, is a world, but it is not the Earth. Worlds are patterns for understanding. The world of the day-laborer in Florida exposed to the sprayed teratogen metrabuzin because her employer tells her to return to work before the end of the prescribed restricted entry interval is not the world of the 28,258 people viewing internet pornography every second. The world that some of us want to sustain includes building on flood plains and beach fronts, spending $300 million on Hallowe’en pet costumes, deploying subdivisions, air conditioning, and water lines as reservoirs sink, urging eight year olds to tackle hard, and importing food from distant suppliers who prepare it for shipment and storage by adding harmful preservatives and taste-enhancers, using monoculture to make vegetables and fruits of standardized size and diminished quality, and processes like desiccation with glyphosphate to give wheat a uniform appearance. Others want to sustain a world of uninhibited consumption and unfettered production in which the industries of energy, financial speculation, medicine, food, media, and military contracting receive both public support and freedom from blame for any economic, environmental, or health consequences of their activities. Others, more technically minded, sustained by the idea of the world as an engineering challenge, plan using mirrors to deflect the sun’s rays, geothermal and solar energy projects , and nanoelectronics, and are confident of a Solution. Granting that “sustainability” properly refers to a world where the well-being of humans and their habitats out-ranks the idea of progress, it is not clear that we agree upon what sustainability is or upon the deeper assumptions it might require.

The world is always ending but the Earth remains. After the collapses of the Anasazi, Babylonians, and Harappans, the habitats of their civilizations were physically altered and unable to support them but were transformed by ecological succession into habitats for other organisms. The omnivorous australopithecines from whom you descend used pebble tools and lived in balance with their habitat for several million years without benefit of civilization before their world ended and your species emerged from an evolutionary bottleneck. Do you assume that permaculture, sacred economics, and LEED building codes will give you a million-year run? Do you assume that last-minute stewardship, farmers’ markets, smaller energy footprints, Berkshares, spiritual convergences, aid-concerts—or even your wearing hemp and thrift-store hair-shirts and going off the grid—will suffice to change the world for enough of the young, exponentially growing population to make a statistically significant difference before you intersect the first limit to growth? Perhaps it helps to remind yourselves that the world is not the same as the Earth.

There is no doubt that humanity is in a crucial transitional period. Skewed distribution of wealth, depletion of resources, and the alteration of climate by creating your current civilization from fossil fuels are processes which have not yet run their course, but the results are highly predictable. Your species will pass through another evolutionary bottleneck. Your website, sewage system, electrical grid, legal system, highways, stock market, malls, and consumer goods will be left behind. Humans will carry what they can in their hands and heads, as always. Perhaps they will bring a new world with them.

In that world, they will want what they have, cherish what they imagine, value learning, sustained attention and creative engagement, and yet avoid the infliction of expertise and power upon each other and their habitat. Entering that world, they will have made the transitions from ignoring nature and their own natures to understanding, from grasping to acceptance, from waste to salvage, from fatalism to action, from fear to hope, from opportunism to compassion, from exclusion to inclusion, and from partial efforts to whole-hearted soul work. I use the word “soul” in the old sense of a harmonious systemic dynamic balance requiring continual attention.

From such reconsidered assumptions, perhaps still connected to each other in a decentralized world-quilt of small communities over the habitable Earth, your descendants will value anything you can send them that will be of help. We of the spirit world wish you luck.

Currently I am rehearsing the musical setting of a Grimms’ fairy-tale, The Fisher and his Wife, modified for our times and set in Richmond, VA. It’s called The Fisher of the James, and like most of my narrative music, will be presented as a benefit concert. This time, I hope to use the music to call attention to the need for local conservation efforts in light of the worsening effects of climate change and the adverse consequences of delaying needed change.  The date, venue, and sponsors of this event are still being considered.

Here’s a small flyer of miscellaneous facts about some of the issues we would do better to embrace than to deny:

Would I lie to you?  Here are a few realities. Mix and match as you wish: .Cost to repair the nation’s sewers: $500 billion. Total allocated to fix the nation’s sewers: about $650 million. (from Eaarth, as are the following) Cost to repair its roads, spread over 20 years: $450 billion, and here are a few more:

• Citibank’s bailout: $350 billion. Cost of Katrina’s cleanup: $130 billion. New Orleans levee repairs $14 billion. Safe-proofing New Orleans against a category 5 storm: $80 billion.
• Growth of retail space per person from 1990 to 2005: from 19 to 38 sq. feet.
• Population of Richmond’s metro area: 1.2 million. Richmond proper: 200,000. Richmond metro’s median income: $55,000. Richmond proper: $31,000.
• In 1980 the Arctic icepack covered about 2.5 million square miles. Now it’s about 1.2 million square miles.
• The US Forest service in Tennessee found urban trees contribute $80B in carbon capture and other benefits. (Appalachian Voices)
• It is commonplace for states to subsidize multinational companies by allowing them tax credits equal to the state income tax paid by their employees. (The Fine Print, 2012)
• Households with incomes <$13K spent 9% of income on lottery tickets in 2008 (The Week 4/13/2012)
• 2.5% population consumed artificially sweetened drinks in 2003; and 10.8% in 2012.
• 43 billion gallons of freshwater per day are needed to supply America’s electricity, more water than 140 New York cities. (Appalachian Voices, September 2012. And following.)
• Nuclear power plants use 25-60 gallons of water per kilowatt hour. Since a typical home uses 958 kwh/mo, a home uses 19,160 gallons of water per month.
• A coal fired plant producing 600 megawatts loses 2 billion gallons of water per year to evaporation. A large coal or nuclear station can draw in 500 million gallons of water per day . In the Great Lakes, 100 million fish and 1.2 billion fish larvae die per year in intake screens. At outlets, more habitat destruction occurs because of the hot water released. In North Carolina,  this  caused striped bass die-offs  in 2004, 2005, and 2010. I’d rather have had them for lunch.
• Increased droughts since 2004 has forced a dozen power plants to shut down or reduce power output in peak temperature months.
• Coal companies dump toxic slurry water into abandoned mines in Appalachia and elsewhere. The heavy metals and other toxins find aquifers and enter ground water and wells, causing sickness, as in the 1972 Buffalo Creek release of 132 million gallons of slurry from a dam. Although no longer stored in impoundments, the slurry in mine shafts still enters water systems.
• In Virginia, House Bill 710 (Kilgore) leaves empty mines, called “voids,” under the control of the lessee of the property, not the lessor (owner). This means that property owners whose land was leased only to allow mining cannot necessarily prevent a mining company from adding coal slurry to the void, even though there is no longer any coal to mine. (VA League of Conservation Voters, and following).  This taking of property for nonpublic use, and probable use against the public good, is sponsored by the public. As a fish, I find this puzzling.
• HB 869 and SB 274 eliminate requirements that areas of rapid growth seek to focus development on compact, energy-efficient neighborhoods rather than adding to the costly, inefficient, habitat destruction of sprawled development.  A similar sprawl-promoting law is the HB 599 Northern Virginia Transportation District Authority law, which indirectly discourages mass transit in favor of more auto traffic.
• The people of Vanua Levu, the second largest of the FijiIslands, have not contributed much to cause climate change, but they are one of the first communities to begin relocation in order to escape the rising sea.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks 1018 hate groups, a 69% increase since 2000, as well as 1274 antigovernment patriot groups and armed militias, such as the Hammerskin  Nation, one of whose members killed members of a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.  Hear more from Mashkinonge (the fish) when Richard Rose performs The Fisher of the James.  See more about this and other projects  at Rose’s blog,  http://www.frameshifts.com.

Family events and life in general have intervened since the last blog. In late February and early March, I took FRAMESHIFTS to the Chicago conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. It was an opportunity for many conversations and sharing of work, like these publications:

Although mostly engaged at my own booth across from the fascinating motionpoems.com exhibit, I also enjoyed conversations with Richard Greenfield from NMSU, Ellen Wade Beals, and Joanna Beth Tweedy. Ellen’s book, SOLACE, is a collection of poems solicited from a wide group of poets, asking the question: Where do you find solace? This prompt has elicited some amazing poems. Joanna’s work is distinctive for both narrative and her studied focus on dialect. Sandy Zulauf gave me a copy of the Journal of New Jersey poetry in exchange for a copy of FRAMESHIFTS. Lee Barnes came by the booth to say that “it takes guts to publish a book yourself.” (Well, it does take cash. Perhaps it also takes stubbornness.) I even had pleasant discussions with the editor of The Arsenic Lobster and the representatives of the Prairie Schooner, both of which publications have rejected my poems, although I still await the verdict on a book of poems, Floaters and Sinkers, under review at the Prairie Schooner. By the way, although your poems may be rejected, The Arsenic Lobster is always happy to receive pictures of lobsters.

Less pleasant was a conversation with a printer-publisher who was packing to leave a day early. Many small literary magazines, he said, do not have to make a profit. They would rather give things away than pay to ship out. He owned his own press and bindery. This practice, he said, was unfair to him and to his authors. It devalues work. It devalues the very writing programs represented at AAW. What value is this work if it’s given away? What does this practice teach the students in such programs about making a living as writers?

He packed off at 11 a.m. on Friday, before the conference opened to the public on Saturday.

What is value in a piece of writing or music? After over a hundred conversations with conference participants, I came away convinced that we are the best audience for each other’s work. How do we find each other’s work without being told what to read by a marketing department? More than ten thousand readers were in Chicago. It was a good place to start. The business of publishing is another matter. Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon have monetized writing and undercut independent booksellers. Borders and Barnes & Noble are now on the receiving end of “progress,” with Borders the first casualty. The current issue of The Nation traces the history of Amazon from a package of search tools to set information free to a monopoly that cuts out suppliers who don’t toe the company line. Also see the article about the fixed-price, government-subsidized publishing business in Germany and some other EU nations. By setting public value on the cultural importance of writing, these countries have found ways to publish more new works, encourage translations, provide tax relief to independent publishers for unsold inventories, and use the proceeds from best-sellers to support low sellers—and the authors who write them. What’s the value of a piece of writing? Pretty much what society says. Certainly, writers know this. Shakespeare could wonder and write about the problems of succession, but he knew better than to make his comparisons too close to Elizabeth I. Society dealt sharply with such writers—sending Peter Wentworth to prison for ten years simply for raising a question about succession. Definitely bad for business. Of course, some writers have made a name for disregarding the business side of writing, often posthumously.

But it seems to me that unless one is prepared to include the necessary genre-ingredients designated by business, one’s writing will simply remain a hobby or, as I call it, a folk art. Certainly this seems to be true of what I do, since the book that requires permission to write is not the book that I want to write.

Recently I’ve written a book of short stories and begun a song cycle, The Fisher of the James. Both works feature Richmond, Virginia, our new home.

Leading this book of short stories, HIDDEN MOVES AND HIDDEN FACES, is the tale of a priest who has lost his vocation but is unable to escape caring for the souls around him in Richmond’s tattooed, crystal-scrying young painters, musicians, and cult-followers. This story is a sequel to FRAMESHIFTS. Other stories include an update for the online age of the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, a macabre story about a henpecked husband short-lived relief from a psychotic mate, a story about a barber who thinks he’s received an email from God, and other stories. Available only in a small printing, I will send you one for postage if you are interested. Good writing.