More links — search sheet music
Click
here for the previous month's archive.
This page displays the March 2006 archive.
Click here for the next month's archive.
Three of the most recent films I've seen have demonstrated to me the varying way character can help or hurt my appreciation of a work of narrative art.
In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's film about film maker
Timothy Treadwell, a nature activist obsessed with grizzly bears, the title character so annoyed me on a personal level that I could not watch the film straight through, though I admired much of it, as well as Herzog's craft. My problem is I was revolted by the silliness of the film's focal character. He invaded grizzly bear territory to somehow protect the bears, and stood up
to them, talking baby talk. I can barely stand grown-up people talking baby talk to babies; to bears this is just ridiculous.
I'm afraid, as uncharitable as it sounds, after watching him talk baby talk to bears, learning that he was killed by those bears was a kind of poetic justice. Yeah for the bears! Truth is, I skimmed through the second half of the movie. I'd had enough of Timothy Treadwell. (So had the bears, apparently.)
I saw Woody Allen's Match Point the next day. I had heard that it was in a sense a redo
of the most ineptly titled film in Woody's oeuvre, Crimes and Misdemeanors. I had heard it was not funny. I had heard from FilmFlam discussants that it was not very good.
And it was obvious from the first scene that we were not going to be able to identify with the protagonist. He's almost a cipher. The only thing we know of this lower-class Brit is that he's very ambitious. This Chris Wilton, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, says he's ambitious, and we know more than those around him how true this is: he prepares well. He reads Dostoevsky to impress his boss and girlfriend's father. He claims to like opera. We see him go to the opera. Is he pretending, just to fit in with the upper class? We're not sure, though we suspect the answer is yes.
Most of the film is devoted to his gaining of a career and a wife and a lifestyle. And the second half of the film is about his affair with an American actress, played by American actress Scarlett Johansson. This affair becomes complicated, and he must choose: his lifestyle and his cute-but-not-exciting wife, or this woman. What is he prepared to do?
As a man who prepares well, he then prepares for crime. Up until this last half hour, a certain amount of who cares
has crept into the audience. Well, at least this viewer. But as the film finally narrows in on the final volleys of the game, interest picks up. I soon found myself wanting him to succeed at . . . murder.
A Hitchcockian theme, really, sympathizing with a criminal. And all the more remarkable because the protagonist is not really likable. He's not exactly unlikeable, but there's nothing much to be said for him. How does Allen pull off the extraordinary empathy required to make the ending work?
Preparation. He's prepared for it well. Everything makes sense.
And we are laughing as we leave the theater. A horrible thing has happened, injustice has won (as it does, so often, in real life), and we leave the theater laughing. Well, at least I did. It satisfies.
So much so that I'm putting it on my Top Ten List for 2005. Grizzly Man, please notice, is nowhere on the list*:
If Allen had added some character to Chris Wilton — perhaps a love of opera, with his confession to love opera's characteristically outlandish plots of murder for love, suicide, and the like — the film would likely have been better. Or perhaps if we would have seen him give up something he truly loved, early on, to get ahead; something to make him seem human. Young Mr. Wilton starts out as a tennis player. A tennis metaphor holds the movie together. But we never know how much he liked tennis. He himself pooh-poohs the sport. If we had seen a true love of the sport, on his part, rather than mere mechanical expertise, and then seen him give it up, then this, too, might have added to the initial sympathy. But as it is, he's something of an ambition robot, a mechanical man going through the motions of a mechanical life. His only humanity
appears to be his passion for the actress; sex with his wife is mechanical, sex with the actress, anything but.
Woody Allen has made a clear-cut little film. He risks all on mostly unlikable characters. And yet the thing has a great ending. Like Spike Lee, Allen knows how to end a film, even if he risks tedium during the bulk of the preceding. Woody has given us a perfect clockwork of a movie. It may seem as tedious as a timepiece in the first half, but as the plot kicks in and the bells gong and the bird appears (metaphor, folks), I can't help but join the chiming: Good movie.
Lord of War is also on my list, and it's the third film I've just seen, and which helps explain the many ways character can affect the appreciation of a film. Nicolas Cage's hangdog sadness throughout most of the film is now his signature (he does it well in The Weather Man, too) and without it Lord of War would have been a much less enjoyable film. It seems a tragedy — a tragedy that a man who is good at only one thing, selling guns, loses everything because of his calling. And gets away with the enormity of his actions because he is so good at it, and because the world is a world of war. Another character, heedless of humanity, would have made this a much more cynical, much less watchable film. As it is, it's a deeply moving exercise in sympathy and crime and cynicism and loss.
Of the main films of last year, it's only Capote that I haven't seen — and which no doubt would nudge Match Point off the list. Oh, well. The ball hits the net, it could go either way . . .
* Also note that Syriana and Munich, two very highly praised films of 2005, are also not on my list. They were both greatly over-rated, though I liked them both. But to my judgment, both are far more deeply flawed than Match Point, the former to the point of near-incomprehensibility (one character being utterly unnecessary) and the latter to the point of risibility (a scene combining sex and violence in what's now almost a cliche manner).
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 2, 2006 | permalink |
Harry Browne libertarianism See: Harry Browne, RIP
Harry Browne died a few days ago. And so passed from our reach a very dignified, very civilized man.
When I met him, he was tall, slender, white-haired, and smiling. And very, very gracious.
Up till that point, he had been most famous for his hard-money investment advocacy, and for a self-help tome: How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Every now and then I get this notion that the perfect homage to the book and the man would be a sequel: How I Found Responsibility in an Irrresponsible World. Unfortunatley, that means I'd have to become responsible first! (Some things are too much to ask from a mere author.)
Bill Bradford, whom I worked for at the time, said nothing bad about him, other than that Bradford thought he'd lost his wealth somehow or another. Still, Bradford, who could be censorious, wasn't critical of Browne. Not then, in the mid-'90s, anyway.
Browne wrote a number of books, but when he ran for the presidency of the United States, his book was as simple as they come: Why Government Doesn't Work. Harry sent me a nice autographed copy. He called me once, at home, hoping I'd review it. He didn't think that Liberty, where I worked, had done enough promoting it. (The magazine was selling it, I believe.)
I liked Harry so much I couldn't review the book. I wasn't a big fan. Though I had used the government doesn't work
mantra myself, I was far from committed to the rhetoric. The reality, it seemed to me, was that government was and is very effective at doing some things. It's very effective at maintaining an army and navy and all the other elements related to war (it was less effective at peace, however). And, if you want to create a permanent parasite class, you should look nowhere else but government. Government can do it best, and keep it going the longest. And it's so constructed that even the lowest on the pecking order can become enthusiastic supporters of their oppressors.
Talk about effective!
But Harry wasn't selling cynicism. He was trying to sell hope. I'm afraid I never saw the hope that clearly. If I'd reviewed the book, I would no doubt have written a downer. Neither he nor my readers would have been pleased.
I was always more than a bit skeptical of his campaigns for the presidency. I just saw no hope in the Libertarian Party, as much as I liked Harry, as much as I liked the bulk of what the party stood for. I wrote a reflection critical of the campaign, suggesting that we use libertarians' support for Harry as a test. Everyone was saying how effective Harry would be, how he was the best candidate libertarians could hope for. My idea was to take the support seriously. If Harry didn't radically increase votes for the party, then the party was proved to be useless. Harry was the best, we were repeatedly told. Then if the best proved fruitless, why, abandon — indeed, dissolve — the party.
Bill Bradford forgot
to run the reflection. He admitted it was clever. He admitted it would have been timely, before Harry's first presidential returns came in. But he somehow misplaced it.
Almost certainly Bill Bradford, who at that time supported Harry Browne's political activities, lied to me.
Harry never did. He was always very nice and very honest. He may not have done very well as a Libertarian politician, but he didn't embarrass the ideology, either (which is more than you can say for some others).
He wrote me once telling me that he'd love to be able to make a living writing about classical music. He could have, I'm sure, if he put his mind to it. I believe he could have been an effective proselytizer for fine art music, using his always-clear style for an end that he enjoyed, and one which did not require a plurality vote to measure success.
You guessed it, though: Harry's taste differend from mine! He was amazed at my love for 20th century music. I suggested Bohuslav Martinu's symphonies to him, and he ordered them off my site. But he never got back to me. I've got this feeling those great symphonies didn't exactly usher in the angels for him.
That was our last correspondence, about music. I'm sorry that we had so few occasions to write. He was always a gentleman, always civilized, a pleasure to know, to talk with. And he knew that civilization wasn't just a matter of building better toilets and cars and skateboards. Civilization also helped spawn high art. As such, he was one of the few libertarians I've met who judged by as high a standard as that, the standard of the best that has been produced by humanity.
The libertarian movement could use more people like him. Unfortunately, now it has one less.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 3, 2006 | permalink |
humanism manners See: Harry Browne, RIP?
Over at Hammer of Truth, libertarian netizens mourn Harry Browne, often with the clichéd wish that he Rest in Peace.
So that someone would write something like this is no surprise:
I am a former Libertarian who, like many of you, first heard of the LP from Mr. Browne. I am now a Christian and have since quit the party.
All these comments have brought a question to mind. With all due respect to the late Mr. Browne, I am a little perplexed with so many commending him torest in peace.Did he ever express any sort of faith in anything not derived from reason alone? Did he have a hope of eternal life? Personally or publibly, did he ever express faith in Jesus Christ's work on the cross to forgive his sins? I followed Mr. Browne for about three years and never heard much of this from him.
I know it's hard for contemporary Christians to remember this, but, the phrase rest in peace
is not in the Bible, and the general notion is shared by most other religions. Most religions that believe in an afterlife use the word rest
at some point or other. And most religious people who believe in an afterlife also hope for something beyond rest: some sort of joy transcending the mundanity of taking a load off.
Further, Epicureans, for instance — who do not believe in an afterlife — might just as well metaphorically use the phrase to designate the ultimate quietude of death.
Rest in peace
is an awfully pagan concept, really. Sleep is rest (at its best), and death seems to life what sleep is to wakefulness. A reasonable parallel, or even metaphor. At times of death, good manners suggest handy, non-controversial metaphors.
Resting in peace barely even implies an afterlife, really. It states rest. It suggests quietude. It does not suggest the active heaven of many religions. It says nothing about praising God for eternity. It says nothing about looking down on those in hell, gloating. It's a pretty benign bit of ecumenical paganism.
Still, I don't use it. I've never liked the blessing
form of religious speech, where a person commands God to do good things to people. Even when I believed in God, I never felt I could command him. God's speed,
someone says. So God's your servent, now, eh?
I wish to say.
But I tend to say nothing. It's usually impolite to get in the way from the vacuous religiosity of one's neighbors.
Still, I agree with Mencken: religion is the practice of magic congealed into an institution. Wishing people God bless you
and Rest in peace
is to command the deity or deities, to do good things. Like magic.
It always seemed disrespectful to me, disrespectful of the deity.
May he rest in peace.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 3, 2006 | permalink
economics innovation See: Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car
Fascinating story of high-school students building a bio-diesel automobile — and a sporty one at that:
A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School.
Apparently it's the hit of the Philadelphia Auto Show, and looks good as well as works well.
Unfortunately, a weird conspiracy element creeps into the story:
Stepping up is something the big automakers have yet to do. They're still in the early stages of marketing hybrid cars while playing catch-up to the Bad News Bears of auto shop.
We made this work,says Hauger.We're not geniuses. So why aren't they doing it?
Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies.
They're making billions upon billions of dollars,he says.And when this car sells, that'll go down — to low billions upon billions.
One needn't talk conspiracy. Think about it: a worldwide network of fueling stations exists for gasoline and diesel. But bio-diesel? Where's the support for that?
Why would a company spend millions or more developing a car that only might get fueled?
To make the switch, an auto company bent on radical, paradigm-shifting innovation would have to ensure that a region would introduce a new network of fueling options, and then sell the vehicles only to that region. Quite an investment. The cooperation necessary might run afoul of anti-trust legislation, which is probably why, if it gets done, it will most likely happen through some sort of government initiative.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it would be easy to convert (for starters) one pump of a fueling station to bio-diesel — all you'd need is one chain cooperating, to start, one pump at each station. (But that still implies a great deal of consumer risk, doesn' it? You buy a car and a few years later the network for fueling it goes down, because not profitable.)
So it's easy to see why, for manufacturers and consumers, the risk is much higher for bio-diesel vehicles than gasoline-electric hybrids. No conspiracy theory necessary to explain a lag of interest.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 4, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters
I'm not now, nor have I recently been, a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party. But I often vote Libertarian, even though I judge that the party has outlived its usefulness. Actually, I think the party should be dissolved; still, I wish it the best, and even mull over ways to help it perform better.
Years ago, when Russell Means was running for the LP Presidential nomination, I developed an idea. Why not make the most of the fact that parties run two candidates for national office, one P. and one V.P.?
I usually insist that Libertarian candidates be well-informed, well-prepared, well-funded, and well-mannered. What I want is a super-wonk who can answer all the hard questions. I don't want a slow-witted politician-salesman who makes everything seem easy.
But when Means ran, I realized that that's not what most Americans want. They want someone who can play the part
convincingly. They don't need much else.
Would Russell Means have worked well? Not for any other party, but perhaps for the LP. He would have added a sense of presence to the role of polite revolutionary. He would have been imposing. And it might have been possible to take his presence and his self-definition as something of a prophet, and sold it in a libertarian fashion.
Which brought me to Moses. Here was a man assigned the task of something like organizing a secession. He had the passion to counter the overbearing overlords he was set against, but didn't feel he had the silver tongue usually required for diplomacy and negotiation. So Aaron helped, became sort of Moses' spokesman.
Still, the best lines in Exodus are spoken by Moses, not Aaron. We think of Moses as the prophet, Aaron his right-hand man.
The idea of a division of labor amongst political candidates has not been optimally used, I began thinking. Why not have a Moses like Means, parading around giving short passionate speeches, posing for the role of prophet, inspiring with a myth-centered message? Leave to the V.P. candidate the usual wonkish tasks of answering specific questions, smoothing out the wrinkles in the mythology, stating in clear prose what the poetry of the prophet alludes to.
The super-wonk could be the V.P. The P. could inspire confidence in more personal and mythic ways.
Now that the Bush presidency has proven that the American people are willing to accept almost any numbskull, so long as he can be said to seem presidential,
it might be time for minor party candidates to run with the idea in a new and exciting way.
It's been almost 20 years since Means ran. Someone else would have to play the prophet today. And the LP's wonkworks is mighty low on super-wonks, too. A Moses and Aaron Act still strikes me as an interesting national campaign strategy, and one that could garner both crowds and media interest.
Setting up the Moses and Aaron Act would be fun. The thing to do would be to run them against each other in state after state. Both would have the sense to not criticize the other. Each would make the case only for themselves and their vision and what they offer. So when the LP finally selects a ticket, the Moses and Aaron Act sells itself: not one or the other, but both.
When Ron Paul ran successfully against Russell Means, Murray Rothbard argued that the choice was between life and death for the party; Ron Paul was the ideal candidate, he thought, and Means a nut. Well, nut or non-nut (as much as I like Ron Paul, he's sometimes a nut, no? that conspiracy blather bothers me, as does his simple-minded model of human society and economics), it was shown by that run that Ron Paul did not help the party much. He did not provide a new life for the party; like a doctor, he merely prolonged its death, its catatonic inconsequence.
Means, however, might have actually burst through onto the national stage with free publicity, the novelty of a religious-minded native American could have gone a long way. And his natural prophetic stance might have appealed to vast hordes of Americans, people who so desperately desire the comfort and excitement of myth.
For this reason, at the time I favored Means over Paul. But I did not think Paul good enough on the wonk level to properly back up Means. There were no such candidates. (I did think that the button Paul Means Freedom
would have been good, had Means deigned to run as the second banana. But I did not think that the prophetic role could be sustained in the V.P. slot, so it would have mainly wasted the potential.) The Libertarian Party is just too small and too ineffectual to develop a reservoir of good candidates. The Moses and Aaron Act will probably always be nothing more than a dream.
For the first issue of Liberty I wrote an essay on Russell Means, under the pseudonym David Sheldon. It explored the mythic and religious elements to the Means candidacy. After the first issue hit readers, Murray Rothbard called up Bill Bradford, the publisher, and complained about the pro-Means piece.
Honey Lanham, one Means's most effective promoters within the LP, called Bradford up and complained about the awful anti-Means piece.
Bill and I both laughed; we deemed the piece a journalistic success.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 11, 2006 | permalink
The Esoterics Einojuhani Rautavaara
Music for a cappella choir and solo voices is not, I suppose, music to everybody's taste. But then, most people want more variety, or least a pounding of white noise from a set of drums and cymbals. Not me. Some of the greatest music ever composed is for voices alone.
A handful of pieces in this medium are among my favorite musical works of all time. Stravinsky's Pater noster, Benjamin Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and the Passio of Arvo Pärt are truly great works, as are the Agnus Dei of Samuel Barber and the chanson Un cygne
by Paul Hindemith.
Add to that list at least one other work: Vigilia by Einojuhani Rautavaara. This is so good that my sisters and I travelled several hundred miles to attend a performance of it by The Esoterics of Seattle. The choir was magnificent, the direction impeccable, and the soloists . . . not uniformly up to par, alas. One soloist could hardly pronounce the Finnish words, and the another could have used a bit more oomph. But still, the genius of Rautavaara and the sublime beauty of his all-night vigil
were readily apparent. Most sections were performed to something near to perfection. I was rivetted.
About half of the Phinney Lutheran Church was filled with paying customers. There should have been more. A lot of people missed a fine concert, and The Esoterics obviously need more listeners. They do amazing work.
Vigilia is not easy music to perform. It's a difficult score. And Finnish doesn't exactly come easy to American singers!
Vigilia is, though, easy music to listen to. The choral writing is often amazingly, astonishingly beautiful. The soloists sing in microtonal chanting, per the Byzantine origins of the Orthodox church Rautavaara wrote for, but this doesn't sound weird so much as add contrast and interest to the piece. And just when you think you've heard everything,
so to speak, Rautavaara adds whispering. It's quite exquisite.
And rhythmically interesting. It keeps moving. There's very little repetition of words, as in the bulk of religious music by fine art composers. Further, Rautavaara does not feel himself somehow above
melody. Singable, whistable themes occur and re-occur throughout the piece. This adds cohesion to what is, after all, a long work, at least 80 minutes long in this performance.
My sisters enjoyed it. I treated my younger sister to the concert for her 44th birthday. An amateur pianist and former clarinetist, she followed the music with pleasure. My two older sisters also enjoyed it, my eldest paying close attention to the Finnish words, following line-by-line with the program provided; her younger sister (the middle sibling
), a fantastic flute player, owns a CD recording of the work, so knew what to expect, and was smiling on the way out.
The director of the choir, in an email, characterized the work as quite a somber piece,
but I don't think that hits the nail dead center. Serious, yes. Somber, no. The ecstatic beauty that pervades much of it, and the happy Hallelujahs and triumphant ending prevent me from using such a word as somber.
And hey: it's not uniformly dark, it's not gloomy, certainly not oppressively solemn or sober, nor dismal, foreboding. Those are Oxford's synonyms for somber. Can't follow Banks in this.
But Eric Banks's singing — his is the first voice we hear — is something I can follow with pleasure! What a great voice. And he's obviously a talented director. The Esoterics is his choir, from the beginning. I'm especially fascinated to read that his dissertation was on one of my favorite and, alas, most unjustly neglected of 20th century composers, Carlos Chávez. (I've never heard any of Chávez's choral music, and the very idea of such music intrigues me.)
After the concert, the help seemed eager to leave; CDs by The Esoterics were packed away by the time I reached the table. (I only buy performers' CDs after the concert; call this my native skepticism showing.) But I'll no doubt buy one, at least, in the future, so I'll return to http://www.theesoterics.org/toplevel/recordings.htm.
I'd drive 300 miles for Rautavaara, apparently (call it demonstrated preference). With interesting programming coming up — including a performance of the great Hymn to St. Cecilia — I'll probably have future occasion to say that I'd drive 300 miles for The Esoterics, too. I arrived at home at 2:00 AM, so this all-night vigil
was, indeed, close to an all-night vigil for me.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 12, 2006 | permalink
I've learned something new about Finnish culture: The Kalevala is not alone. There is also The Kanteletar.
Eric Banks, director of The Esoterics, Seattle's choir that just performed Rautavvara's Vigilia, writes that his group has commissioned a new work by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, Kosijat (The Suitors
), a 20-minute work taking its text from the The Kanteletar.
Readers of Finnish can pick up a free version of The Kanteletar, while English readers will have to buy from Amazon. To listen to the Mäntyjärvi work, wait till July and trek to Seattle: The Esoterics perform it then.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 12, 2006 | permalink | ReadingMatters
pi math See: As Simple as Pi
The number π (pi), Archimedes' Constant,
is a number expressing a ratio: 3.14159265358979323846 . . .
You can see why tomorrow's the day to celebrate pi! Third month, 14th day . . . . I suggest, tomorrow, sometime during the fifteenth hour (after 2:00 PM), find a circle and walk the circumference. Then walk the diameter. Perhaps you should chant: "9 2 6 5 2 6 5 3 5" etc.
Does this seem, well, irrational? How apt, then: π is an irrational number!
Or you could just eat a pie. Remember to cut it right down the middle, though.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 13, 2006 | permalink
for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right to be let alone.Seeing what a tangled web of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities the existing law is, it would be remarkable if a principle could not be extracted from it which might be invoked for the protection of any claim whatever. It is, therefore, not at all to be wondered at that these two able writers have succeeded in making out a very strong case for extending the existing law so as to cover the whole area of what they call an inviolate personality. What exactly this means it would be difficult to define. It is vague; but not vaguer than the rights which the law already professes to recognise.
A correspondent — who shall be nameless here because she has preserved her anonymity with me — argues for a metaphysics of assent
:
Empirical sense-data is great for learning about physical reality, but man also has an intellect for working with non-physical reality. It's hard to cultivate and discipline an intellect you don't believe to be real. And it's unnecessary to take a committed position on things you honestly don't believe to be real, so the modern mind shifts and equivocates and blusters with impunity, counting on there being no right answers.
I tend to look at this a bit differently. Data are great, yes, and our intellects can handle quite a bit of data, organizing it all and even making predictions that seem sensible. But before I'd jump to say that we have intellects in order to deal with non-physical reality, I'd say that our intellects — which handle physical reality pretty well, when the intellect is well-ordered — use non-physical means to handle the physicality. The mental constructs, which take place in the brain (so to speak), aided by the words we speak into the world, and hear from others, and write and read on paper and computer, are not physical as such. It's not the pitch or timbre of the grunting I make when I say Ding an sich
but its meaning that's important. And the meaning is another level of reality than the physical.
Unsurprisingly, I'm not one of those people who've ever been able to deny physical reality. Existants resist denial, quite convincingly. So, too, with mental realities. But I don't like to pretend they exist just like things do
; they exist, if that's the proper word (and it may not be), very differently. To me, Santayana's essences and Meinong's assumptions and just plain old fantasies have an ontological reality without ever once crossing over into physical reality.
Further, I've always believed that brains have minds. But I've been cautious about conceiving of minds without brains. I've seen no evidence for such. Mind seems to be (to speak loosely) the function of a brain. (And not all brains are made of protein, but that's another issue.) The idea of a mind without a brain strikes me as a fantasy, or at least a popular hypothesis for which no evidence exists.
But to suggest that, from the obvoius non-physical nature of the intellect, that other non-physical realities exist simply because we can conceive of them, is to be guilty of hasty reification. We are fanciful creatures, and the reality of our fancies must be tested.
My correspondent is a good writer. I like this paragraph:
Once you believe you have a lovely transcendent intellect rather than just a gooey chemical brain, you can consciously choose to stock it with reliable products like the Laws of Thought [Identity, . . . Excluded Middle, . . . Nonctradiction, . . . ], definitions, classifications, Stoic grammar, Aristotle's logic, Aristotle's ethics, Stoics on personal conduct. Classic stuff still referred to casually today, but not used methodically to produce healthy mental certainty.
I have an intellect. And I've stocked it with some notions and habits I believe to be useful. Is it transcendent? Well, what does it transcend? Mere physicality, yes. My mind is not just an electro-chemical system. As Herbert Spencer put it, it is a set of inner relations that allow me to adjust to outer relations. And this continual adjustment project is more than just a set of physical adjustments. Because I can conceive (as can you) of alternative courses of action, for instance, fantasy and counterfactuals enter the physical world and end up affecting it.
The mind is a semiotic engine. (I like the sound of that. Perhaps a bit hastily overstated, but . . .) It deals in signs. It uses signs to signify things, and other signs, and relations among things and signs. It is amazingly complicated. I don't see it as merely a chemical goo.
Never have. And this is where my correspondent and I are similar. Further, her idea of a metaphysics of assent is close to my semiotics.
But certainty? I'm uncertain about certainty. I'm most certain about some other people's putative certainties, I admit. When they say they are most certain (and that's often when they have the least evidence), that's when my suspicions tend to rise highest. I doubt. My correspondent makes her case very differently than I would make any case for certainty:
Certainty from a realist point of view depends on assent. We assent to the concepts behind the terms we use every day, to definitions, to the principles of grammatical speech, to principles of reason, to conlusions arrived at by reasoned arguments. We rely constantly on assent to received mental forms. But with materialist ontological assumptions, we don't believe those things to be as solid as furniture. They should be: they are our mental furniture.
The assents
listed above are largely assents to use the intersubjective tools we've been handed down in a way that gets the intellect's jobs done most efficiently. Does certainty rest upon them? Or derive therefrom? Well, in a way, yes. But not in a way that most people mean when they talk certainty.
I'm most certain about the validity of well-constructed syllogisms than I am about the truth of those syllogisms, though. Why? Because truth is about something more than the validity of an argument. Validity often leads to certainy, within the narrow bounds of the phenomenological reduction. Truth, however, is another step up. All healthy Vulcans bleed green blood when pricked. Spock is a healthy Vulcan. Therefore, if you prick him, he'll bleed green.
I'm pretty certain of the validity of that syllogism, because I've assented to the meanings involved. But I've not assented to the truth-value of those meanings. Do Vulcans exist? Well, they are a fantasy species of intelligent beings from the mind of fantasist Gene Roddenberry. So, the answer is no. Vulcans do not exist; Spock, if pricked, will not bleed green blood.
Perhaps I should never start a blog entry not knowing how it will end. After having gone on and on, I'll now end where I should've begun: There are several sorts of materialism. In philosophy, we ignore the common definition, the life-style of obsessive wealth or commodity acquisition. The belief that only matter and energy are real
is not the only form that materialism can take. George Santayana wrote a four-volume treatise of ontology, defining the realms of matter, essence, truth and spirit. And yet he called himself a materialist, since he believed that were it not for matter, nothing else could be present to us as any form of reality. I believe that the signs and functions of signs that allow human beings to think and communicate are not best described as material forces. And yet they are very real. Still, despite their reality, it is logically odd to speak of them as existing.
Furthermore, it is logically invalid to infer from their non-physical reality that certain other non-physical things, long in dispute, are therefore real. I accept the non-physical reality of the realms of essence, truth, fantasy, and assumptions and values and the like because I can understand them as affecting my life, and the lives of those around me, and, as I continue my researches into philosophy, I think I understand the intersection of these non-physical realities with the nexus of physical reality that I've never denied. But some of the essences that seem so real to many people have a reality borne of fantasy. If that is their only form of reality, I will not assent to their truth. I will assent only that they are understandable as fantasies. Or lies.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 15, 2006 | permalink
Very true,replied the Baron,
and very just. I have forty millions of marks: the population of the country is forty millions. Your shares, therefore, will be one mark each. Here you are, gentlemen. Good morning.
Finnish-American holiday See: Ahistorical traditions
Today is St. Urho's Day, a bit of Finnish-American japery. The day is a take-off on the popular Irish celebration, St. Patrick's day. According to fabricated legend, St. Urho drove the grasshoppers out of Finland. For reasons unclear to me, one is supposed to wear purple to celebrate this.
Perhaps the whole mad day's a result of porphyria.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 16, 2006 | permalink
Years ago, I would occasionally advise my boss at the time, Bill Bradford, to read this or that. He rarely did. He had enough to read. And his days of reading philosophy were over. Probably my favorite Bill Bradford story
is about Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana.
I was arguing that Santayana was the most unjustly neglected philosopher of the 20th century. Santayana's ontology was not just another pseudoscience of being,
as Walter Kaufmann put it — it was a critical common-sense emprise; it made sense.
So I told Bill, You really should read Scepticism and Animal Faith.
He smiled and asked, Does Santayana spell
skepticism
with a c or a k?
Why?
I asked.
I'll only read it if it's spelled with a k.
Well, the very European
Santayana spelled the word in question in the British manner, with a c. And Bill Bradford never did read the book.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 16, 2006 | permalink
I looked up ordinal numbers
on both Britannica and Wikipedia and got a lot of interesting and confusing information. I am obviously not a mathematician.
Though it is heartening to note that mathematicians have spent a lot of energy thinking about ordinal numbers, well, I was just trying to make sense of the simple confusion surrounding our use of ordinals and cardinal numbers dealing in our everyday aids to figuring time: the clock and the calendar.
In the calendar, the ordinal numbers of days in a month are the same as the cardinal numbers. But on a clock that is not the case! Why?
Before I speculate, or even research, perhaps I should clarify what I'm saying.
On a calendar, the first day of the month is known as the first,
and marked with the cardinal number 1.
On a clock, on the other hand, the first hour of the day begins at midnight, and every minute of that hour is preceeded by the cardinal number 12. The second hour of the day is designated as One o'clock
and all its minutes are preceeded by a 1.
This confuses people, I submit, and they have harder time figuring other ordinal usages because of it. I'm in my 47th year, but only 46 years old. Most people think that they are living the ordinal year designated by their last birthday anniversary. They are not. They are, instead, confused.
I find the relationship between cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers interesting. But I've not yet found them interesting enough to try to follow the complexities of thought in either of the encyclopedias I've used.
Perhaps I will, in my 48th year.
For now I will congratulate myself for my longstanding acknowledgement of another basic (but commonly forgotten) truth about our time tool, the 12-hour clock . . . that there is no such thing as 12:00 PM or 12:00 AM, that both are misnomers. There is 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight. Noon marks the Meridian
and PM stands for post meridiem [same thing, different language], and one can't be both after a thing and the thing itself. I've long thought that people shouldn't use the cardinal number 12 to speak of time; it's too confusing. There's noon and there's midnight. And the ambiguities about the noon hour
? I get around them by talking of, say, noon thirty
! — half-passed noon,
of course, being the correct everyday jargon.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 17, 2006 | permalink
War Bull,September 29, 2002
Iraq foreign policy See: Iraq Progress Report
The Reason magazine survey Iraq Progress Report,
billed as Advocates for liberty weigh in after three years,
is a useful, brief survey of its writers on an important subject. Of the many interesting comments, my favorite is from Jesse Walker:
A little smugger
Jesse Walker
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No, but I've probably gotten a little smugger about it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out in the least damaging manner possible. That will probably entail splitting the country in three.
This is one of the most concise contributions, and honest, to boot. No one asks me my opinion, but I'll answer as if Reason did:
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Not in the manner argued for. I believed then that the official reasons for invasion were based on lies and self-contradictory moral stances, and that the best reason to go in (to clean up after past Realpolitik support for a dictator) should have been the official reason. Going in for any other reason would poison the intervention from the start.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. The nature of the lies and misinformation has become clear. My fears about Islamic backlash to the method of going in have been justified. Still, it's been nice to see Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime toppled. I never doubted that getting rid of a dictatorship might have SOME good consequences.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Repent publicly, and get out before summer's end. Offer to keep troops for an extra year in any region that decides to split off from the idiotic British construct known asIraq,thus (perhaps) facilitating a peaceful secession-and-tolerance movement in the Mid-East. Make a major statement of future foreign policy, transitioning back to the Monroe Doctrine over a five-year period (entailing disengagement and withdrawal from all Old World countries by the end of that period, including insufferable Europe). Cease giving any taxpayer-paid-for funds to foreign countries for any reason after that point. (Message to Israel: sink or swim. Message to Saudi Arabia: reform or die in revolution; we won't lift a finger. Message to Egypt: wise up or collapse into a medieval hell-hole.)
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 19, 2006 | permalink
Months and months ago, two miscreants broke into my office and stole thousands of dollars worth of computers and DVDs and the like, including a book on insects . . . and my checkbook. Today, I discovered that someone is writing checks off of that checkbook: $25 at a Plaid Pantry for cigarettes.
To offset the psychic disutility brought on by this discovery, I ordered a book, The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, by Paul Collins. A friend had recommended the work, which he said was delightful. And since it will actually be useful to me in my business, I will feel especially pleased checking it off on my Profit and Loss statement or whatever The IRS form is called.
And on Amazon, on that book's page, I found something I hadn't noticed before. It's a new feature called Statistically Improbable Phrases,
and Amazon lists two, corn merchant
and earth closet.
Here's the explanation for this new Amazon feature:
Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.
Click on a SIP to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs. You can also view a list of references to the phrase in each book. Learn more about the phrase by clicking on the A9.com search link.
The SIP list for Mises' Human Action is long:
gross market rate, originary interest, fiduciary media, welfare propagandists, institutional unemployment, positive price premium, vendible goods, abstention from buying, catallactic problems, originary rate, evenly rotating economy, unhampered market economy, circulation credit theory, catallactic competition, debt abatement, government omnipotence, nonhistorical sciences, concrete capital goods, autistic exchange, catallactic theory, hegemonic bond, praxeological categories, praxeological concept, gratifying labor, praxeological knowledge
The SIPs for Jack Vance's great novel Emphyrio is much shorter:
magic tablet, welfare agents, welfare regulations
Statistically improbable is right: Emphyrio is an odd novel, a science fiction novel where the hero rebels against the welfare state, of all things . . . which in this case is exposed as an alien imposition, a regulatory hegemony for exploitation's sake.
Not too unrealistic, eh?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 20, 2006 | permalink
Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?And he said,
I do well to be angry, even unto death.Then said the Lord,
Thou has had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I spare Ninevah, that great city, in which are more than sixscore thousand persons, that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?
When I was a teenager, the pastor of the church I attended gave me a church history text. In combination with the Britannica, I was suitably humbled and appalled. The history of Christendom seems as bad as a history politics in general: bloodshed upon bloodshed, horror upon horror.
Daniel Dennett, speaking on C-SPAN Book TV this weekend, about his new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, quoted someone names Steven Weinberg:
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
I think Dennett elided the human dignity
part of the apophthegm. It's an overstatement still, but it has a point. The crimes of religion are many. That is to say, crimes done for religious reasons are many.
These days a lot of them are done by Muslims. Christianity has been largely tamed, though I know well-meaning Christians are champ at the bit that the Enlightenment placed upon them. (They don't like separation of church and state, and they aren't thrilled about the freedoms that allow others to act in ways opposed to their religion.)
Still, it's Muslims who do the worst damage these days, commit the greatest atrocities for their religion's sake. There's now some man in Afghanistan sitting in prison, waiting for a judge to decide whether he should be executed or not. His crime? He converted to Christianity sometime back. His Islamic family turned him in. An Islamic court tried him. Islam, it has been charged, has been attacked by his change of heart.
This story will be eaten up by American Christians, who haven't really had a good martyr in some time. They like to think of themselves as a beleaguered minority, but as minorities go, they sure have a lot of power. For instance, you can get elected to the top position in the country by calling yourself a born-again Christian.
But you can't get elected to dog-catcher if you call yourself an atheist.
Furthermore, our current president has gotten a lot of mileage out of his religious beliefs. It's allowed him to string along the evangelical Christian community, even though he hasn't made any great moves towards making, say, abortion illegal (aside from his Supreme Court appointments, which might be enough). And his war on terror
is widely interpreted in this community as a war upon Islam (despite his protestations), and among evangelicals I know (that is, those who aren't family members) there seems to be a strong pro-war-with-Islam strain.
From what I can tell of evangelical Christians in general, they want a war with Islam. There's this hope, I think, that it will lead to an Armageddon Ending, which would usher in the End Times. Previously, Russian communism had been their hope for an Utter Evil to bring on the short Age of the Antichrist, but now evangelical eschatologists seem to be leaning towards Islam.
So, if they were in charge, and not some opportunist ex-drug user who feels beholden to a neocon (neoimperialist
) contingent who made him rich and powerful, the war would be bloodier and far more extreme. That means a lot more innocent dead, a lot more explosions and beheadings and strafings and the like.
Fortunately, they are not in charge. Unfortunately, the American government seems intent on consolidating power in nation states in the Mid-East, rather than setting up loose federations based on Constitutional principles. So we now have Iraq in a low-grade civil war
and Iran pushed to the wall to defend itself against continued American threats. None of this is a recipe for peace.
Iraq should have been split into three limited-power states after the initial conquest. Give up on unity, try peaceful coexistence instead. Alas, even that is asking a lot from Muslims.
Not a peaceful people. They have a huge chip on their shoulders. I call it Allah.
I've long since broken the spell such ideas can have over me. Though I like theological notions and characters, I like them in literature, particularly in fantasy and science fiction, where they belong. I've many favorite characters of this kind, including Gilgamesh, Perseus, and Mycroft (Adam Selene). One of my favorite characters in literature is Yahweh, a fire deity who, over the course of a thousand years of additional scriptural accounts became almost civilized. But it's his early appearances, in the early literature, that is most charming. (You just have to leave your morality aside when opening the books, same as you do when going to see most movies.)
That someone would still worship the charming fiend today is a bit hard to swallow, but his presence in books from Genesis to the minor prophets is endlessly fascinating. My favorite book of this series is Jonah, a short, comic account of a hapless prophet and his travails avoiding his mission, and then avoiding the point of his mission, after it was accomplished.
A book to be read in many contexts. You'd have to be off your gourd not to like it. And Yahweh comes off as a pretty congenial god. He has some pretty amusing words for Jonah.
Daniel Dennett's talk encouraged me to read his book, too. (I've ordered it.) It's not going to be like Jonah, of course, but Dennett does provide some very good ways of looking at religion. He's onto something with this distinction about belief: Some people believe in God. Others believe in believing in God. The latter are often almost undistinguishable from the former. The former accept the latter, except when the latter actually explain themselves honestly. In any case, as Dennett explained, a lot of people seem to think that a belief in God is good even if no God exists, or if our access to knowledge of that deity is necessarily hazy or circumscribed.
As for me, I gave up on that belief before I gave up on the former. It seemed to me that a belief in God was only good, and could only be good, if three things pertained:
If the first proves untrue, I thought, then all utility for the belief in God falls apart. And if the first proves true, but the second item untrue, then even the third point, if true, would make an unanchored belief in God suspect, to say the least. (I was sort of on J.S. Mill's side: a God as construed by the religionists of his time, if he existed, should be opposed.)
Most people do not agree with my logic. They believe that believing in a good God
helps make people better. They believe that it adds so much goodness and piety to human struggles that even if no eternal rewards accrue to the believers, the near-term rewards of the fantasy are obvious and worth any choking of the philosophical spirit to maintain the illusions.
I had read enough history to decide that this was utterly wrong-headed. Further, I explored the nature of goodness and evil around me and decided that a lot of it had to do with circumstances and contexts and . . . well, I believed that most people want to live peacefully with most other people, and that a belief in God often proved a stumbling block to that. People often chose cruelty because they thought they gained in specific situations. Usually that also proved illusory, and in a contrived context of a widespread commitment to civilization, such pocket opportunities for anti-social action would diminish.
Today's culture wars are, I submit, proof positive for my interpretation.
So, no belief in the goodness of the believing in God
for me. If God doesn't exist, and, if existing, he's not shown to be demonstrably just, and, if just in his own dealings, he's not shown to intercede for his believers, then there can remain no good reason to believe in God.
Of course, for some of us, truth is what matters. And the utility of a belief, in non-truth terms, is not a reason to believe or not believe. Utility of beliefs only affect which beliefs we concentrate on, amongst those we believe to be true.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 21, 2006 | permalink
Arise, go to Ninevah, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish, from the presence of the LORD. . . .
When I was in high school, my friend Naki would often pose what he thought were paradoxes, or puzzles, which should be solved:
What if in the Andromeda Galaxy there's this snake that eats its tail, and the tail keeps growing? And it keeps eating? On and on and on . . .
Why he was interested in a closed-loop system, I don't know. I remember not being much interested. Perpetual motion machines didn't interest me, either, though my great uncle Oscar, inventor of the choker (and many other logging inventions) is said to have devoted time to the idea. What a time waster.
I thought the business of learning was to explain reality, not conjure up counterfactuals and then explain them. But I've come across a lot of people, over the years, for whom the well-constructed thought experiment,
no matter how extravagant, was the way to do philosophy.
That's never been my favored method, though surely I use bizarre examples from time to time.
In reality, and contra Andromeda's snake, there's waste. You eat, use some of the eaten material to nurture one's body, and then excrete what can't be used. Ouroboros (for that's the traditional name for the snake that eats its tail), to exist, would have to use all of its own tail, and that tail would have to be the perfect food. Nothing to excrete. This, and a slow eating pattern, and fast regeneration about the head-end of the neck, and you have a closed-loop system. Something we might need to emulate, for space travel, but not something you'd want to live with.
Excretion is here to stay. Close-looped systems are not what life's all about.
I later learned that Naki went through college majoring in philosophy. I wonder if he ever did anything with Ouroboros?
It is mildly interesting to realize that the figure of a snake eating its tail, with one twist, is very nearly our symbol for infinity. Munching on one's ass end forever. Aaargh. Makes you feel good about excreting from your ass end, doesn't it? And dying? That's waste, too. The part of one's life that cannot continue as a vital form, forever.
What if, Naki, in the future we flush corpses away?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 21, 2006 | permalink
Last week on CBS's 60 Minutes, there was a segment on the origins of homosexuality in men. It was very interesting, and offered a theory that makes sense to me: it's not in the genes, it's in the hormones, particularly the mother's hormones during pregnancy.
It helps explain the most interesting statistic about homsexuality: a right-handed male's chance of being homosexual increases (by some degree I've forgotten) the more older brothers he has. So, if you have nine older brothers, your chances of being gay are pretty high.
The hormonal theorists had a very interesting explanation as to why this would be the case: the female body doesn't know how to handle male hormones, but with each pregnancy with a male in the womb, the mother's body learns better how to suppress male hormones in her male infants.
In a sense, homosexuality then would be the result of a very adaptable and strong immunosuppressant system.
Not mentioned, to the best of my recollection, was the upshot of this: the future ability to control pregnanices to prevent homosexuality amongst males.
Also not mentioned was the possibility that there is more than one type of homosexuality. The one latched onto on 60 Minutes is what I think of as flamboyent homosexuality,
or simple (heh hem) gaiety. The effeminate gayness that, in large doses, so many people find at once amusing and annoying (rather like so many white Americans find African-American histrionic joviality and badinage at once entertaining and somehow embarrassing).
But there's at least one other kind of homosexuality, the kind I've come across not infrequently, and which seems to be historically dominant in many, many cultures: pederastic homosexuality. That is, homosexuality borne of lust for young flesh. It often starts in youth, between youths. Sometimes it stops there. For those in whom it lingers, either turning into normal gayness
(that is, modern socially acceptable adult-on-adult gayness) or those for whom sexual attraction centers on true pederasty (which is literally a lover of boys
), the male holding those fixations does not at all seem effeminate. He can be strong. Forceful. Manly. He just prefers sex with younger, beautiful men and boys.
True pederasty is not socially acceptable at all, in large part because we defined hirsute young men as boys, and seem to want to extend the period of protected adolescence at least to age 21. But I've met a number of men who qualify as pederasts. I've also met a number of apparent heterosexuals who began their sexual careers as homosexual, in that, during their early days, their only sexual relationships were with other boys. Some of these may be classic pederasts, others . . .
. . . may be nothing other than horndogs, lustful boys who will be (and desire) boys. Some grow up into bisexuals. Some grow up (like the sexual, boyhood fixation of Gore Vidal's protagonist in The City and the Pillar) to be ordinary heterosexuals, who've given up all that.
And others grow up to be homosexuals, perhaps preferring younger sexual partners (as most heterosexual men would, if they were allowed it) but accommodating themselves to social pressure to go for other men. In any case, these men, like the pederasts proper, are not the kind of gays discussed on 60 Minutes, the kind with certain effeminate characteristics.
It's my opinion that, once the gay guys are figured out, then we have to consider the pederasts and the horndogs.
But, well, should we do anything about these men? I don't see any reason to worry about them. As long as we keep an eye on pre-pubescent boys, the rest of the issues will sort themselves out pretty well, to most people's satisfactions.
Except, of course, those people who think of homosexuality and the various homosexual acts as somehow sinful.
I think a good scientific explanation for that view is itself in order, too. Can it really simply be a memetic element in human nature? Or does it have something to do with toilet training? Hormones?
If we think of memes as viruses, and the concept of sin
as a retrograde idea, perhaps we can say that the persistence of guilt about and fear of sin in modern times is the result of a retro-virus (meme) which we can call ARMS: Acquired Reactionary Morality Syndrome. It's a debilitating deficiency in moral development that limits one's view of morality to a few absolutist rules and fixations, rather than to a broadening view of achieving human excellence, wherein rules play a subsidiary role, dealing with cases of pervasive imbalance only. In a robust morality, aspiration is stem and flower, obligation the root. Obligations exist in a context of unseemly coercion; aspirations to achieve excellence, on the other hand, rise high above the muck-end of human existence. Which aspiration you choose may be optional; that you have some is to be expected.
And I see homosexuals and bisexuals as having as much right (in the soil) to rise above it and flower in our civilization as the next person, hetero or otherwise.
But then, I don't encourage shame-based moralities, nor do I fear competition from alien flowerings.
Others, especially in the sin
culture, very much do. That's why they kill apostates, and hate people who do sex
differently. They are not confident of their own values, in their own skin. So, through fear, they seek to erase the values and practices that undermine their way of life.
It's a pathetic stance. But quite widespread, even within our civilization.
As you can tell, it's not my stance. Were it so, I would never have learned as much by asking friends and acquaintances about their early sexual lives. Like Kinsey said, you'll never learn if you don't ask. Shame culture prevents most people from asking. Not me.
I like to ask.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 26, 2006 | permalink
Paul Hindemith's early chamber concerti, the Kammermusik series, are justifiably well known and highly respected. Indeed, in terms of critical acceptance, they seem to far outshine his other concerti, such as the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and even the Der Schwanendreher. This is fine. They are that good.
But Hindemith's work in this genre did not stop with his major contributions
for piano, violin and viola. He also wrote a series of wind concerti in the late '40s. And one of these is the best thing he ever did in the concerto form. It is the Horn Concerto.
It is by no means a classically constructed work, but it is a major statement. Two short, arresting fast movements are followed by a longer third movement, predominantly slower. And in it, Hindemith instructs that a short poem be read!
Why is the work so good? First: the tunes (and motifs
) are very good. The contrapuntal writing is good, as always. The horn writing is fantastic. The writing for the other instruments arguably even better, at times. It begins with a brisk march, turns playful with a great little scherzo, and then turns serioso; you feel that you have gone somewhere, at work's end.
All of Hindemith's hallmarks are obvious: a fine balance of quartal and triadic harmony; a pan-modal approach to melodic development; a demonstrated belief that music should be readily appreciable.
The Horn Concerto is right up there with the best of both early and mature Hindemith: Der Dämon, Das Nusch-Nuschi, the Kammermusik, the Kleine Kammermusik for Wind Quintet, Mathis Der Maler Symphony, the Concert Music for Brass and Strings, the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, Nobillisima Visione, the chansons, and the best of the sonatas, such as the great Clarinet Sonata.
Hindemith's style is easy to recognize. Even his early music sounds of a piece
with his later work. It's true, the goofy good fun of the first Kammermusik piece seems a long distance from later Hindemith. But take that work's slow movement. You can detect the entelechy of his art pretty easily.
But one reason the Horn Concerto works so well is that, while not goofy,
it's great fun. The first two movements are joys, with memorable melodies and gestures
(whatever those are!). And even amidst the more serious and extended third movement, melodies enter, exit, and develop that are joys to the ear, some of them even being whistable. It is far and away my favorite concerto for that instrument, favored (by me) over even Mozart's great series, or Strauss's famous pair.
It's been over 55 years since this work was premiered by Dennis Brain. I've heard two recordings (one with and the other without the declaimed poem), both good. It deserves more performances, is one of those unjustly neglected concerti of the 20th century, like Chavez's Piano Concerto and Sessions's Violin Concerto, or the several great works in the genre by Alexander Tcherepnin.
I'm pretty confident in this, though: more people would fall for Hindemith's work than for Chavez's, Sessions's, or Tcherepnin's.
The Horn Concerto is a potentially popular piece. That it is not popular is something of a mystery to me.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 28, 2006 | permalink
Today I chose to wear bib overalls to the office. And a few minutes before a rare visitor knocked on my door, my purple toenail — the result of a stubbing seven months ago — started to come off. So, in barefeet and overalls, I invite somebody I had only once previously met into my office for a visit.
The toenail came off some time during the conversation. I tried to hide it, but, well, I doubt if I succeeded.
I will someday tell the tale with much joviality, in the course of recounting my exploits in sub-mannered doltishness. Right now I waver from embarrassment and relief . . . that the toenail is finally off.
Of such is the way of all the earth.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 28, 2006 | permalink
co-operative movement,not in a general co-operation theoretic sense] is that it attempts to supersede the business man where he is most needed.
The extent to which my dislike for sports meshes with my general political outlook is closer than you might think.
For most libertarians, whether one likes or dislikes sports, or pop music, or the fine arts, is a matter of taste, and really of no political moment. And that's my official position, too.
But I suspect that the actual, psychological foundation for my libertarianism ushers forth from the same fountain as my deep distaste for sports. For example:
positive sumexperience where
we all win.This lie at the heart of most political and bureaucratic machinations is a vexation, and I can't praise it any more than I can praise the theatrics of those who take drugs to stay
fit.
I realize I come across as rather a nut on this issue. It began when I was a pious young Christian, and I saw the paganism of the sports culture. (The head coach in football would pray before each game; then, immediately following the amen,
the ass. coach would yell: I want to hear growling out there, I want to hear animals!
What a crock.) And in truth, now I've no major opposition to the paganism. What I dislike now is simply the violence, the crowd psychology, the values that clash with my own preferences for peace and voluntary coöperation.
It is not, I hope, a completely alien psychology. To prefer beauty to violence, the sublime to the sportive, the just to the ludic, these are of a piece with my generally anti-coercion take on life. But as a libertarian, of course, voluntary agreements to contest each other in perhaps vile ways are something I would defend.
And of course it goes without saying that some of my best friends like sports.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | March 28, 2006 | permalink
The Evanescence of Evil
Wirkman Netizen | Archives | Instead of a Blog | No Tread Zone | Email Debate | Miscellany | TWV
