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The newest planet for our solar system — well-planet candidate; a conclave of astronomers has been organized to determine whether 2003 UB 313 deserves the designation of planet
— is made up, we are told, of rock and ice. The interesting thing about this is not that it may or may not be worthy of the planetary designation, or that it is out there in Kuiper Belt, or that it was likely once in close contact with Neptune. What's interesting about it is that it's made up of rock and ice. Ice, especially.
Ice has also been found on Mars. A lake of it, in fact, bright and shiny. And under the surface, we've reason to believe that there's lots of ice.
What does all this mean?
Well, one thing it means is that space travel beyond the Earth-Moon system is going to be doable. We will not need to transport huge amounts of water. The water is already there, ready for . . . mining.
Meanwhile, back here in our gravity well, our leaders remain adamant about close-contact intervention in the affairs of backward Muslims, thus continuing (inevitably) an imperialist/religious war that should never have got started. America's future is not in Asia. It's up, in space. Unless of course our current batch of leaders, by enmiring us in a hopeless direct confrontation with pre-modernity, have prevented the future from unfolding as it should. How I hate the current batch of numskull Republicans!
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 1, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Why Bother?
Death surrounds me, these days. I went for years without the shadow of death crossing my path. But now, people I know are dying. And animals are dying. Around me, everywhere, the dying.
I spent the last few days in the city, taking care of the cats and dog of a friend. His mother had died, and so he and his family flew away. And I came to keep company with animals.
And while I was away, one of my pets died. An 18-year-old cat was run over. I always called her Brown Kitty, since her real name, Honey Hope, seemed, well, too frilly for a raspy Siamese. She was brown. And she was friendly. Now she is no more.
And then there are the deaths of people once close, but now distant; and, further, rumors of death. So of course I'm thinking about death more often than I did in the past.
But suicide less often. As I see it, my death is someone else's problem. But the death of those I love? Mine. The awesome existential weirdness involved in the cessation of life, our regret in the face of not being able to affect the world according to our wishes, our lingering inability to make an imagined counterfactual (no death; continued life; immortality) factual — these things, in contemplation, can make us dread our own deaths. But really, they are fullest in our contemplation of the deaths of those we love.
Death is of course part of life. I munch on dead animals all the time. I am, as one famous vegetarian health Nazi put it, a corpse eater.
I can live with that. And I can live with the death of those beings dearer to me, whose corpses I'd never eat.
But that doesn't mean I have to like death, or really approve of it. Death is an evil, and were One Being or group of beings responsible for death, then I know which side I'd be on.
Of course, death is built into the warp and woof of the world. Life — almost all life, and certainly all higher life
— is inconceivable without death. We eat dead beings. To survive, we often must kill those beings that are in conflict with us. It could not be any other way, unless we were creatures not of carbon, but of light.
We are not . . . beings of that kind. And someday, we — each of us — won't be . . . beings of any kind. We will, each of us, cease to be.
Such is death, such is life.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 6, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Justice
I spent a few days in Redmond Country, again, last weekend. I even travelled into Redmond itself, after a pleasant stroll through the much more beautiful Kirkland.
But back across Lake Washington, in Seattle, the most pleasant thing to see was not Kirkland's lovely parks with lovely women in skimpy bikinis. Nor was it Redmond's strip answer to Somtow Suchariktul's Mallworld. I walked around the Wallingford district, and looked in the windows of a few cafes. People were using their laptops in the cafes.
And all I saw were iBooks and PowerBooks. Macintosh computers, in other words. Not one Wintel PC.
At the Wallingford Library I used a clunky old PC, of course, to get on the Net. But that's because my PowerBook doesn't (yet) have wireless! Next time I'm in Seattle, I'll be able to fit right in. (I hope to get a wireless card this month.)
So close to the heart of the heart of the empire, so close to Redmond, it was great to find an outpost of Mac users.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 8, 2005 | Netizen permalink
successfullyrun without the widespread use of indiscriminate violence, he should argue that case. Ferguson's sanitized version of empire is steeped far too heavily in Kipling, and somehow ignores the admonitions of Orwell (who is conspicuous in his absence from th book's index).
music neurology See: Men do have trouble hearing women: research
Some of my best friends have been women. In my 20s, most of my friends were women. It took me some time to become accustomed to the company of men. (There's one exception, a friend I've had since age 19.) This has put me at odds, somewhat, with normal male culture.
Now I have a partial explanation. A recent study has found that men have trouble hearing women,
that women's voices have a wider range of timbre and melody than do men's voices, and that it's easier to process men's voices.
This also explains why I have fallen for some women, and not most. I usually refer to the timbre of their voices. Most women's voices please me, but only a few entrance me. (For me, sight can elicit lust; but only voice can inspire love.)
So now I realize that it's a processing-power issue, and that the usual trouble with female voices — that they more resemble music than do male voices — is not a trouble for me. I am obsessed with music, far more so than is the norm. So, perhaps, this explains a long-standing distance between me and other men.
There's little music in men.
Extrapolating this to those men who do mimic female voices — those gay men whom a gay friend of mine refers to as fags
— is a thought for another day. (Though I've noticed I've no instinctual dislike for the fruity voice,
except as I fear it in my own voice, when I hear a recording of my voice. Another matter entire, eh? Or is it?)
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 12, 2005 | Netizen permalink
music serialism See: Snake Oil Composers
Brad Edmonds and Jeffrey Tucker engaged in an old-fashioned sport on LewRockwell.com, recently: kicking an enemy while he's down. The enemy? Serialism, or dodecaphony (twelve-tone
music composition).
What's odd about these two articles is the bringing up of serialism in order to shove it back down. Serialism is now old hat. It was invented early in the 20th century by Charles Ives (who merely played with it), and others, most famously Arnoold Schoenberg (who mostly stuck with it). It's an odd compositional technique, allowing composers to avoid tonal centers. It was a way of keeping music going without ever feeling at rest.
In its purest form, it was deliberate atonality. As a movement, it attained something like the Mandate of Heaven after mid-century, but then went into almost immediate eclipse. Other avant-gardisms (aleatory, minimalism, collage, etc) proved more popular with daring audiences, and non-avant-gardist music proved far, far more enduring. Composers by and large moved on, except for a few stragglers like Milton Babbitt.
Not mentioned by Tucker or Edmonds is the fact that while many academic composers pushed the mathematical/contrived aspect of the music to total control
over every element of composition, quite a few composers (probably more, actually, including Copland, Dallapiccola, and even Frank Martin) used serial techniques in heterodox ways, with tonal centers, and produced some amazingly lovely and sublime music. Instead, they harp on the pure stuff:
Listening to serialism, it would take a very strange heart and mind not to long for something approaching tonality in the entire course of a composition — and perhaps creating, but not meeting, that longing is precisely what serialism is supposed to do.
Yeah, well, maybe. I don't listen to strict twelve-tone serialism very often. It simply doesn't interest me much, so I guess that's my reaction, as defined by Jeff Tucker.
But I do listen to a few works that use serialism less strictly. Several of Stravinsky's early, almost hesitant forays into the serialist vein are exquisite. The neo-Renaissance-cum-modernist Agon is brilliant, with the serial passages far outshining the neo-Renaissance passages. His Introitus in memory of T.S. Eliot is more serious than his great work of solemn worship, the Symphony of Psalms. And . . . well, aside from the Septet and a few other works, his later works don't impress me all that much.
But George Rochberg, who began as a serial composer and ended up as a neo-Romantic, wrote his most compelling work in the serial vein. Blake Songs and Serenata d'estate, two works from this period, had great performances recorded on the Nonesuch label in the '70s, and outshone most of his later work in a supposedly more accessible vein.
Stefan Wolpe is almost no one's idea of a crowd-pleaser. And his greatest work, a string quartet, is not for most ears. But it utterly captivates mine. It is one of my favorite works in that medium. It is always interesting, always evolving, new in every moment. Like a dodecaphonic serialist work in the Schoenbergian manner, it avoids repetition. But unlike most others, it does not seem to need it. Repetition, schmepetition!
Edmonds makes a stark claim: There is still not a single serial piece, among the tens of thousands composed and performed at universities, that has made its way into the standard repertoire.
Well, I would've thought several works by Berg, Schoenberg's student, would have qualified. But I'm afraid popularity contests don't quite make it for aesthetic criticism. It's also the case that most listeners hate the music of Edgard Varese. So what? Varese's best work is compelling, as hard not to listen to as a mountain on a plain not to see.
Besides, the market
rewards mostly trivial music. Listen, for a day, to the drivel that stuffs most people's ears. Rock. Pop. Hip-hop. Country. Most of it is little more than vile nonsense set to cliched tedium. And my reaction to even the best of it is, well, fine, so far as it goes, but I can't take this very long.
The market provides an abundance of unimpressive art for the satiety of incurious consumers.
Take a step back from market worship for just one moment. After all, in America, currently, fine art music of any type plays second fiddle, at best, to trivial garage band hackwork. Why is that?
Perhaps it is, in part, the public schools, miseducating generations, forcing the kids to discover their own art forms. Poisoned from the start, the kids make do the best they can, aided by big label record companies.
But real art? High art? Most never experience it. Most never want to. Perhaps this is because high art doesn't get you far in the mating game, and popular music is based on two mating ritual activities: song and dance. But also it's an element of intelligence. Most people are just not smart enough to follow complex counterpoint, advanced harmonies, or motifs developing instead of straightforward melodies. So, with the bulk of the population too stupid to follow great music, and a huge chunk disabled by bad education and the evolutionary drives to mate, no wonder fine art music — classical music — gets short-changed.
Picking on serial music is one thing. Perhaps it's a good thing. But it misses the real issues of market and beauty and corruption, only hinted at by Edmonds and Tucker.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 14, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Amusements,p. 527
Roger Ebert surprised me. On his show this weekend, he admitted to not understanding a plot point of The Skeleton Key. He did not understand at what point the lawyer body-swapped with the old man played by John Hurt. But surely it was as plain as day: The lawyer, from the very beginning of the film's primary timeline, was already possessed by the hoodoo man Papa Justify, and the the old man's body, drugged, was the real lawyer.
This was obvious. I don't see why Ebert wouldn't get it. The mirror clue sealed the deal. But, yes, great misdirection with the ghost story!
Also, Roeper's complaint about the knocking of the cans in front of the secret, attic room — saying that it happened because that's what happens in movies like this — is off-point, too. The can and door were contrived as such by the old woman and the lawyer.
This, too, becomes obvious, once one sees precisely what kind of movie this is.
I kick myself for not figuring out the Big Twist. It's so obvious, afterwards.
It's a tribute to good storytelling that all the clues are presented, but still, we moviegoers follow along, heedless of the plot, just following the story, wanting to be surprised, and — surprisingly enough — being surprised.
And sated.
The film is atmospheric. I didn't notice the film score, so it obviously did the job. The acting is first-rate, with Kate Hudson doing a pretty good job for a change. I was pleasantly surprised.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 15, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Theory of Economic Society,§ 26.
The Economic Process and the Theory of Society,p. 149
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Equilibrium. The idea of a superstate of the future drugging its citizens so that no emotional highs or lows could be experienced is not exactly a leap. Destroying all the aesthetic elements in civilization is, of course. And blaming Yeats for war is idiotic. But hey: most politics is idiotic, and this is only a movie. But why this movie's superstate was called Tetragrammaton — which is the name of the ancient Hebrew god, spelled with four letters, YHWH — is a bit of a puzzle. Was the auteur making a sub rosa critique of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition? The point would seem to fly in the face of the epistle to the church at Laodicea in the Book of the Revelation. Still, Grammaton cleric
is a cool name for a state-sponsored killer. And the fighting technique of standing in the midst of shooters, and killing them all (based on statistics!) was neat as the impossibilities played in The Matrix.
Manic features the actor who starred in The Mysterious Skin, but we see less skin, and (thankfully) less sexual frolicking and raping. And the film is far more coherent. And isn't Don Cheadle great?
I saw March of the Penguins in the theater yesterday. The Regal Cinemas multiplex theater of course sported a dim bulb — or two, if you count the projectionist who screwed up the sprockets and made the film a little hard to watch. Still, it's easy to judge the film: Penguins are beautiful and absurd and even inspiring in their own way. Morgan Freeman talked too much. The music could have been better, but it also could have been (as was the case with Winged Migration) much, much worse.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 18, 2005 | Netizen permalink
music Hovhaness See: click INTERVIEWS, and then click the 1983 interview
I greatly enjoyed Richard Howard's 1983 interview with American composer and world citizen Alan Hovhaness, on Hovhaness.com, recently put up by the site's great webmaster, Marco Shirodkar:
I know one famous conductor said he wanted to have keyed trombones, but I think that is a kind of disaster, because of the tyranny of the modern piano.
I must also mention one of the finest American composers of symphonies and large and smaller works too, William Schuman, born in 1910. I admire his Third Symphony very much and I heard his Second Symphony which I thought was quite original. The Sixth and Eighth Iıve known, and I think he is a very powerful composer.
I admire Zeami as I admire Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights.
were one.
I think the only way I could ever get heard of anyway, was that I was the fastest composer. If they needed something quickly, theyıd come to me, otherwise theyıd go to someone else whom they thought was more fashionable. If they really needed fast work theyıd come to me. And somehow, I donıt know, I'm inspired when I work fast — itıs hard for me to work slowly.
I use the trumpet like the voice of a priest. It has power and grandeur — as the cantor in the synagogue is supposed to be the voice of god, the trumpet can be that in the orchestra.
I showed him some passages in his scores that I loved very much, and whisky spilled on them and he saidCritics wonıt call me dry anymore!
Alan Hovhaness was one of the most original composers of the 20th century. While fine art music was dominated by two strains, the neoclassical and the serialist, he was one of the better examples of an often-maligned strain, the exoticists,
in whose ranks Bela Bartok might fit, as well as other composers as varied as Olivier Messiaen (birdsong, Asian musics, and Catholic mysticism), and Colin McPhee (Balinese orchestral). These composers were inspired by non-Western musics, musics that had had little influence on the Western tradition. Their approach might seem akin to neoclassicism, with a different classical
tradition to draw from. And in McPhee's case, that might be close. Bartok, too. But Hovhaness and Messiaen certainly transformed these traditions in highly personal ways, and combined them with Western musics in ways quite distinct from that of Stravinsky or Martinu.
I like to think that the modern tintinabulists/transcendentalists/neo-medievalists such as Pärt and Taverner also belong, in a way, to this school. Their work is not so much neo-medieval as the personalization of a now-exotic music.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 23, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Where Words Come From,p. 82–83
bats intimidation See: Not-So-Dangerous Liaisons
Friday night, I awoke to the flapping of a bat in my bedroom. It was huge — much bigger than I'm used to in a flying mouse.
Looked more like a flying rat. So I went downstairs to sleep.
Saturday morning I trapped it in the bathroom. Saturday night it had crawled through the rather narrow opening between the door and its jamb, and was flapping its wings in the hall, darting about. I couldn't find a straw broom, so I didn't attack it right away. This morning, finally supressing my squeamishness, I took a lawn rake and killed the thing. It was a pretty easy target, since it had dehydrated itself during its stay in the house. Its corpse is, right now, in an almost-antique lunchbox on the porch. Decomposing as well as dehydrating. Bye-bye, bat.
I hesitated to kill it. I wouldn't sleep around it. This surely makes me seem . . . less than intimidating, no? And yet, I obviously seem like a bat-killer to some. At least, when they know me only by my prose. Bat-killer prose-style? But a meek bat-fearer in real life?
I guess so.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 28, 2005 | Netizen permalink
terrorism security See: Taking an ice pick to airline security
On Townhall.com yesterday, Paul Jacob brings up the TSA and its attempts to bring some security to airline travel. The TSA wants to let passengers carry-on a number of previously prohibited items onboard. Jacob notes that while ice picks may be allowed, the TSA had previously fought the idea of arming pilots. Apparently, the TSA wants passengers to be better armed than pilots,
Jacob writes. It looks to me that the TSA is merely considering changing its mind, and that it's probably premature to praise anyone for anything. In any case, Jacob wants just a little more trust of passengers, and I guess I agree.
But I've got this suspicion: though we demand security in the air, obsessing about it down to the last blade and point is probably a distraction from the next terrorist threat. The TSA may very well be today's Maginot Line. The next attack (and we're told there will be more) will more likely be to the power grid, a nuclear waste holding facility, or a city water supply.
We might hope or expect our government to be fighting that next front. But the generals always fight the last war, and the current crowd in chrage of our defense — especially our P, VP, and SS — amount to a pretty dumb lot. We should expect nothing other than incompetence in our defense — and a defense geared to the last threat, not the next one.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 29, 2005 | Netizen permalink
A Theory of Marriage
Lolita Nabokov See: The seduction
Lolita is 50 years old. Yes, the greatest American novel is 50 years old.
Nabokov's finely wrought, twisted masterwork still confuses readers and critics, many of whom are left writhing long before the book ends. What to make of a book written about a pedophile's love for a pre-pubescent girl in elegant first-person narrative, from the point of view of the pedophile himself?
In The Boston Globe's retrospective article, Leland de la Durantaye — a name itself as if out of Nabokov's inspired brain — tries to come to grips with the novel in twenty-one paragraphs. He does not mention last year's scandal, about Nabokov's alleged plagiarism
of the title character's name and the book's basic theme, but he does mention that Adolf Eichmann found it a very unwholesome book.
Well, thank you. I don't trust Eichmann for my moral criticism, and neither do I trust most readers for their aesthetic interpretations:
Many gifted readers have found Lolita a beautiful and rending tale of love and loss. And many gifted readers have found it a shameless apology for sin and style irrespective of moral content.
Well, it's obvious that many, many readers are plain wrong. The book contains love and loss, of course. But that isn't quite the book's point, now, is it? This is no romance. The eroticism turns cold halfway through the book, as the anti-hero gets
the girl. And things change, kaleidically, for the rest of this amazing, and amazingly odd, book.
It's also no shameless apology for immorality. My neighbor Robert Pyle — an editor of Nabokov's Butterflies, a book I just bought in my last trip to town — insists that readers pay careful attention to the last paragraphs of the novel. The author had something up his sleeve, and he unrolls it, finally, on the last page. What? A realization. Humbert Humbert realized he had done something very wrong.
And, though Lolita's a beautiful book, Humbert's revelation wasn't about beauty. He had done the very thing the hero of American Beauty didn't do. But the narrator of American Beauty thinks that his story was all about beauty. Humbert Humbert, whom de la Durantaye wisely notes is an aesthete, realizes that the wrong was distinct from an aesthetic wrong.
Some people understand how beautiful the cobra is, but remain wary. Others refuse to grant the cobra his beauty. The standard moralistic criticism of any unsettling work of art is to declare it ugly, when it is (from an aesthetic point of view) merely dangerous. The opposite error is to deny the cobra its danger. There are many defenders of beautiful books who deny that they can be dangerous. Silly people.
Nabokov was not a silly person. He was that dangerous creature, a sophisticate. For his whole career he poked fun at lesser minds, whether bourgeois moralists or boho Freudians. The world is complex enough that one must make often elaborate categorizations. This was one thing the author of Lolita was not only willing, but able, to do. He pinned things down in an elaborate chart. His best chart was a novel, Lolita. Reading it well, though, may be an art most readers aren't quite up to.
They've had 50 years to learn. Maybe in another 50, more will understand. And perhaps then they can move on to The Cream of the Jest, the other flawless Great American Novel about the sins of the flesh.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 30, 2005 | Netizen permalink
That was a magnificent performance,the critic remarked.
Don't be a fool,replied the violinist,
that man Beecham is a big bluff. He can't conduct at all. He acts as though symphonic music was just a lot of fun.
Writing is like shitting,
says the Old Hack. I say nothing, which is all the encouragement he needs.
Some writers sit down, strain for hours to produce a few golden nuggets that would drift away into nothing without further attention. Another sits down, and without strain or grunting out comes a long, unbroken monument to man's presence on the planet.
I gurgle.
The classics are coprolites,
he goes on, and the Internet is a vast flushing system that backs up into other people's homes.
Some metaphors we pray will end. Unfortunately, I'm not a praying man, and the Old Hack doesn't listen to entreaties.
Editors are sculptors who finish what most writers are too squeamish to do: mold separate productions into one seamless whole.
I'm an editor, and I have this itch to resay what he just said, with a revision or two.
Every writer feels best after he's written. Those who like the process — actually prefer the process to the result — we look upon as special kinds of perverts. Fortunately, writing, like shitting, is a private business, and we don't really need to know how the job gets done.
Thank you, Mr. Hack.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 31, 2005 | Netizen permalink
The Mysterious World of Trade and Money,p. 95
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