The Ides of September Have Passed, My Love

Today is the 15th day of September, 2021.  It's hard to believe that the month is already half over.  I was thinking today was the "ides of September," but when I looked up just what word "ides" meant, I learned it was "the 15th day of March, May, July, or October, or the 13th day of any other month in the ancient Roman calendar." So the "ides of September" passed two days ago and I didn't even notice it. Happy belated ides.  

It is the 258th day of 2021.  There are 107 days remaining in the year and today is the day of delight; with it, the mind is peaceful and tranquil.

The Georgia sun rose at 7:21 a.m. this morning and will set at 7:43 p.m. this evening for 12 hours and 22 minutes of daylight.  The waxing gibbous moon is 68% full and rose in the afternoon sky at 4:39 p.m. and will set at 2:33 a.m. early tomorrow morning.

The Austrian composer Anton Webern is known for extending the twelve-tone system previously made famous by Arnold Schoenberg. Breaking with tonality and creating serial composition, his innovations led to what is known as total serialism.  From 1908 to 1925, he wrote only freely atonal music and after that, he only used Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique in every composition.  Often described as an uncompromising idealist, he spent most of his career unrecognized as a musician. He was blacklisted and branded by the Nazis during World War II as a degenerate artist and stripped of all his conducting posts. His only son died as a result of the war, so he and his remaining family fled to safety near Salzburg.

After a cheerful family dinner on this day (September 15) in 1945, Webern was enjoying a cigar in the cool air on the steps of his refuge. The family dinner and cigar were a rare treat after the previous years in Nazi-occupied, war-torn Vienna, and the cigar was a gift from his son-in-law, Benno Mattel, who led a thriving black-market operation. As Webern stepped outside to avoid the cigar smoke from disturbing his grandchildren, Mattel received two Americans inside to complete some pre-arranged business. Three drinks later, the visitors drew revolvers. They were not black-market business colleagues at all but U.S. soldiers on a mission to expose Mattel’s operation. Mattel was immediately placed under arrest. At some point, one of the Americans, a company cook from North Carolina, rushed out of the house and passed Webern on the steps. Inexplicably, he fired three shots, hitting the composer.  Webern stumbled inside shouting for help and was laid down on a mattress by his wife and his daughter. He quietly murmured "It is over," and by the time medical help arrived, he was dead, aged 61. Impermanence is swift.

On the same day in 1945 that Webern died, across the Atlantic, operatic soprano Jessye Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia.  Norman was a commanding presence on operatic, concert and recital stages. The New York Times described her voice as a "grand mansion of sound", containing "enormous dimensions, reaching backward and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms, narrow passageways, cavernous halls."  She sang leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera, and at the second inauguration of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.  She sang at Queen Elizabeth II's 60th birthday celebration in 1986 and at the 1996 Summer Olympics opening ceremony here in Atlanta.  She won five Grammy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award.  She won a National Medal of Arts and was named a member of the British Royal Academy of Music. In 1990, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar named her an Honorary Ambassador to the United Nations. I would have led this by saying that today was her birthday, but sadly she passed away in 2019.  Impermanence is swift.

The Georgia sky must have been ominous and foreboding on the day that Norman was born in Augusta, because on that same September 15, 1945 that Anton Webern died, the Homestead hurricane made landfall in Florida (back then, hurricanes weren't given person names like they are today).  The hardest hit area was Miami-Dade County. Most of the city of Homestead was destroyed, while a fire ignited during the storm burned down three hangars at the Richmond Naval Air Station . The Homestead Army Air Corps Base, to the east of Homestead, was completely destroyed as winds of up to 145 miles per hour tore through the buildings. A force of 400 German prisoners of war and 200 Bahamian laborers participated in the cleanup process.

In the here and now of 2021, Tropical Depression Nicholas has petered out over the State of Louisiana and shows no apparent interest in crossing Mississippi and Alabama to get to Atlanta.  It will bring still more rain to already besodden New Orleans, but we here in Atlanta will be spared the bulk of the rainfall. 

There is another disturbance located northeast of the Bahamas that has about a 50-50 chance of developing into a hurricane but if it does, I wouldn't expect it to make landfall on the U.S. given its northerly latitude.

I may have called the peak of the delta wave of the covid pandemic too soon, but there's a lot of noise in the signal.  There was certainly a drop in the number of new covid cases after August 31, with a sharp but short-lived downward spike over the Labor Day weekend, probably due to underreporting of cases during the holiday.  The downward trend continued after the Labor Day weekend but was interrupted by a sharp but short-lived upward spike, almost a reverse mirror image of the holiday downward spike.  The upward spike may represent an accounting for all the cases missed over the holiday weekend.  Following the upward spike, case numbers started dropping again, and the seven-day average number of new cases yesterday (6,691), although still way too high, is lower than it's been since August 16. 

The national trend is similar to that of Georgia, including an apparent late-August peak and two opposing spikes in new case numbers.  As of today, Tennessee leads the country in recent cases per capita but even there, the rate of increase in new cases has started to slow.  I'm banking on the trend's continued decline, and today I gambled and went ahead and bought a 3-day pass to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville next March.

Let's see, what else is new?  My Amazon order arrived today - I purchased the sci-fi trilogy The Three-Body Problem (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End) by Cixin Liu.  I haven't started reading yet, but at nearly 1,300 pages, I have my work cut out for me.