"A step-by-step direction guide of harmonium. It presents topics ranging from basics of understanding and handling the instrument to teaching fingering, and, learning the scale and octaves."--Amazon.com.

Part love story, part academic satire, part spiritual quest, the novel is also just plain funny.

An “incandescent….redefining biography of a major poet whose reputation continues to ascend” (Booklist, starred review)—Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. “A biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable” (Library Journal, starred review), The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet he had his Dionysian side, reveling in long fishing (and drinking) trips to the sun-drenched tropics of Key West. He was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens’s poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems, both early and late. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani’s The Whole Harmonium “is an excellent, superb, thrilling story of a mind….unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows” (The New Yorker).

The Harmonium Handbook provides detailed instruction in how to play, maintain, and repair this popular devotional instrument. It also reveals the colorful history of free-reed instruments such as the harmonium, which dates back to the time of Marco Polo. The story behind the modern version of the harmonium is a fascinating testimony to the love, skill, innovation, and intermingling of many of the world’s great cultures. The Harmonium Handbook Reveals: The history of the Indian harmonium, from Ancient China to Europe and America. The essentials of owning and caring for Indian harmoniums, helping them give many years of service. How to play the harmonium in a variety of styles, from the simple to the complex, including single-note melody, melody with a drone, chords, and other more advanced methods (a complete appendix of chords and chord inversions is provided). How to explore the “inner realms” of the instrument and perform a variety of adjustments and corrections, including how to tune a harmonium’s individual brass reeds. Satyaki Kraig Brockschmidt is a Microsoft design engineer. He offers precision, inspiration, and an occasional dose of wit in sharing both his musical and technical experience with this special instrument.

English Lit professor Janey Erlicksen wonders if she's coming unravelled, as her daily life progresses through the onslaught from work, friends and family, and her despotic toddler Little Max. Janey knows she should be trying to put her academic career on the map, but how? She'll more readily poke fun at than engage in yet another overly dry and theoretical conference. And her husband and their friends simply encourage her off the serious academic path, providing anarchic ideas from Foucault-in-snowsuits to erotic poetry addressed to the harmonium collecting dust in the music department. A Large Harmonium is a sharply comical year-in-the-gloriously-unruly- life story. We follow Janey as she negotiates motherhood (“Little Max is a Roald Dahl story, I decide”); career (“the whole enterprise starts to resemble a lion-taming act without the lions”); frightful in-laws (“At breakfast, the two of them are serene and fit-looking. I never can see how people look like that in the morning”); and which literary hero her husband Hector most resembles (“Rochester! Why should I be Rochester? He's a bastard. And he has to be blinded and lose an arm or something before he can be tamed.”) Along the way, she relies on Hector, boy-wonder babysitter Rene, and even crazy unreliable friend Jam. And on Jake, the understanding minister who helps her pick her way through it all.

"The last great work of the age of reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view ... Unabashed optimism, and unabashed racism, pervades many entries in the 11th, and provide its defining characteristics ... Despite its occasional ugliness, the reputation of the 11th persists today because of the staggering depth of knowledge contained with its volumes. It is especially strong in its biographical entries. These delve deeply into the history of men and women prominent in their eras who have since been largely forgotten - except by the historians, scholars"-- The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/apr/10/encyclopedia-britannica-11th-edition.