Category Archives: quote

Glorious sentence

It’s the most delicious pleasure to linger over bits of prose like this, where every word and clause is artfully placed to inform the reader:

Since those moments on the terrace, Harold had daily become more of the solicitous and indirectly beseeching lover; and Esther, from the very fact that she was weighed on by thoughts that were painfully bewildering to her –by thoughts which, in their newness to her young mind, seemed to shake her belief that life could be anything else than a compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste– had become more passive to his attentions at the very time that she had begun to feel more profoundly that in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love for ever behind her, and must adjust her wishes to a life of middling delights, overhung with the langourous haziness of motiveless ease, where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her husband’s back was turned.
(George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical pg 426)

Protection rackets

During my years of wandering the Groves of Academe I read many thousands of pages of books and papers, and (I can see now) shuttled from one enthusiasm to the next, driven and drawn, blown and tumbled through a vast array of subjects and quite a few academic disciplines. The file cabinets in the barn hold a lot of the remains of the odyssey, and promise/demand many hours of rainy-day sorting –but perhaps (some would say) might as well go straight to recycling. Anyway, my pantheon of much-admired writers includes Charles Tilly. Today’s Crooked Timber tells me that Tilly has won the Social Science Research Council’s Hirschman Prize, and there’s a link to a pdf of his (1982) essay Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime. I grabbed it and started reading… and was projected back to the Maxell Moment mindspace

that I have so often enjoyed as a reader of fine academic prose. Listen:

Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price of protection ‘anarchists’, ‘subversives’, or both at once. But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat, then charges for its reduction. Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary, or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket.

Hmmmm. 1982. I’m just saying…

Three more snippets

To persuade you that McDaid’s Keyboard Practice belongs in your life, I offer these:

Of software:

These tools are all written by programmers driven by frightful agendas: lobbying memos from marketing, quarterly marching orders from managers, apologetic memos from engineering VPs describing overblown promises made to analysts by desperate CEOs, pet peeves, side bets on Easter eggs, crank theories, smoldering resentment over midyear reviews, bad habits from college programming courses, and the numb, looming horror of fixed ship dates. It’s a wonder any of this stuff works. Ever.

Of the sorting of the ambitious young:

They all dream of becoming the Elect – until they spend long enough in the City to realize that dreams don’t come true. The culture protects itself from an excess of artists by throwing up filters: editors, critics, teachers, device logging, all the machineries of meritocratic Selektion. Someone needs to determine where the culture will invest its reproductive capital. (“Money’s own genitals!” yelped Rilke, but we never learned who he was transcribing.)

The downside, as always, is time lags, slippage, human error, and an inevitable overgating. Are a few false negatives too high a price to pay?

Of the limitations of the ambitious young:

But their understanding of the world has been shaped by the presuppositionless “now this”-ness of the Net. Everything to them is sequence; flipping through the world by remote control, reality is just one damned thing after another. Their narrated digital space is not a medium that promotes reflection or deductive logic. And their induction never pushes past vague first-order syntheses; they’ve been taught to distrust master narratives, and schemas, res ipsa loquitur, are always tools of oppression.

No wonder they can’t play Bach.

McDaid’s Keyboard Practice

I was wandering in the depths of my collection of mp3 files, looking for something to accompany a long walk, and stumbled upon John D. McDaid’s “Keyboard Practice”, which I’d found via a January 2006 Cory Doctorow posting on BoingBoing. It’s still available (read by McDaid himself) for download, and its two hours of running time is really, I mean really worth your attention. An excerpt from John Joseph Adams’ SciFiWire interview suggests a bit of the why, in terms of theme and antecedents:

“Keyboard Practice,” which originally appeared in the January 2005 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, tells the story of a near-future piano competition. “[It’s] conducted in the harsh style of American Idol, set in a world of ubiquitous podcasting and intelligent pianos, and narrated by a disaffected sound technician,” McDaid said. “Drawing on the structure of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the story is told through a series of short scenes—variations—at the climax of which the spirit of a former winner seems to appear.”

McDaid added: “On one level, I was trying to write a hard-SF ghost story, using musical scores, DNA, A.I. and physicist David Bohm’s notion of the ‘implicate order’ as points of entry. I was fascinated as a college student by [Douglas R.] Hofstadter’s [book] Gödel, Escher, Bach. My friend Michael Joyce, a mainstream novelist, turned me on to the Goldberg Variations and suggested it had literary possibilities. That fit very nicely with the ideas I was playing with.”

McDaid recently read and recorded an MP3 version of the story and has made it available as a free download on his Web site. “Podcasting is central to the story; it would be really obtuse of me not to use the medium,” he said.

I have a lifelong entanglement with the music of J.S. Bach, and enjoy binges from time to time. McDaid offers all sorts of inducements to dust off various versions of the Goldberg Variations, but he also sneaks in some wonderful commentary on elements of present-day life. I’ll quote a couple:

(Manny the AI piano on equal temperament)
“Equal temperament is a typical meat-assed solution,” said Manny. This was one of the Manster’s leitmotifs, and once he fired this subroutine, you had little choice but to take the ride. I was testing his solenoids, two hours until the second round started, so I just grunted noncommittally.

“A key’s true intervals are based on harmonics, the vibrations of fractional lengths of its fundamental string. But that means an F relative to a C isn’t the same as an F relative to a D. That’s okay for one-key instruments, but in us keyboards, where the scale is modular and repeatable, my ancestors’ Northern European artisans ran into tuning problems immediately.”

I knew what was coming, with the same numbing certainty you have watching the first act of a tragedy. In case we humans missed it, here was our hamaitia, from Manny’s unbiased perspective.

“So they resorted to a purely arbitrary mathematical solution. Equal temperament.”

“And why,” I said with mock curiosity, “is that such a bad thing?”

“In their pornographic haste to cram every key into one box, they bashed each one until it fit. Instead of fractions of the fundamental, the ratio of each successive semitone’s frequency increases by the twelfth root of two. Does that sound like a solution designed by nature? It makes all keys suboptimal. But prior to digital instruments, it was imposed by your Western scale and the physical realities of keyboard hardware.”

(describing the contestants)
There is, about the contestants, a common sense of anticipation and emptiness; despite well-honed performance personae, in some sense, they all have heads like blank media. Every year they come here, and I realize all over again that they are just kids, really; most teenagers, the rest still developmentally adolescent. Social misfits, chained to keyboards, with acne problems, arrested sexuality, feature length backlists of old comedy routines burned into long-term memory, obsolete tattoos, bedrooms plastered with fatally idiosyncratic icons, circles of friends who tolerate their clinging presence because it occasionally deters the wrath of vice-principals, fantasies of broad-spectrum competence…

I found the text of the story (48 pages) via ProQuest, and I’m happily reading through it to re-savor what I heard. There’s a lot tucked into this one.

Rushdie turns a phrase or two

Last week’s New Yorker had a Salman Rushdie story with numerous succulent bits. The bit that especially caught my eye:

Bhakti Ram Jain proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomiums could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing. Bhakti Ram Jain’s memory was unerring. He could fawn for hours.

The phrase “excessive encomiums” has a stylistic sonority (some might find it objectionably orotund), and I got to wondering about its other contexts. A Google search turns up eight instances besides Rushdie’s use, and Yahoo finds a couple of others (one in a rock music review, the other in a letter of Benjamin Franklin, Dec 21 1789…)

Quote of the ummmm week

“It’s a very strange paper. There is a core that is competently done; it’s a review of the various functions of the mitochondrion, and 90% of it is useful, detailed stuff. It’s a bit outside my field, but what I could follow seemed reasonable. But then…oh, man. Every once in a while, it just goes cockeyed and throws out these incredible non sequiturs, making bizarre assertions that are unjustified by the evidence. If Norman Bates were the author of this paper, I’d be able to tell you exactly which parts he wrote while wearing a dress.”

(PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, and thanks to Nick for calling it to my attention)

Uh huh

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. 😉

(last sentence of Blogs by Sarah Boxer, in NYRB 14 Feb 2008)

Oh yeah

Peter Brantley (over at O’Reilly Radar) points in the direction of Joe Esposito, who wrote a piece on The Processed Book in 2003 (in First Monday) and updated it in 2005, and more recently says this that’s right on the ummmm money:

Business is not about making people happy. Business is about making capital happy. This is why Apple has a proprietary format for the iPod and why Amazon is attempting to lock users into its broad ecosystem. The Kindle is not a device. It is a component of a system.

Father Mowbray nails it

One of those time-shiftable bits from Brideshead Revisited:

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” (pg. 186)