waste

Sándor Márai

Everyone loves the sound of an orchestra tuning up—right?  The audience at the Concert for Bangla Desh liked Ravi Shankar's peeps tuning up so much that they applauded, or so the story goes.  My proposal: a piece for those orchestral instruments that can easily be retuned (which as far as I know is just strings without keyboards) consisting entirely of a succession of various tunings, different for different sections, to which the members are to tune their instruments, each at his or her own pace, without any regard for keeping quiet.  I thought, on the basis of this review (that, at the time I read it first, I thought a bit unfair) that "scordatura" referred to the practice of playing while manipulating a tuning peg (the one for the string being played upon, natch), since IIRC Friedlander does do that and simply playing in an alternate tuning (what wikipedia claims scordatura is) isn't of itself "freaky-dirty".  Anyway, I envision a doing-that-and-harmonics solo.

Scissors

These are some neato scissors, uh huh.  (My mother is the only person I have ever met who would have written the preceding sentence "this is a neato scissors", assuming she'd use the word "neato" at all.)

Via the same source, some enigmatic pedantry.

These things coming into my memory as I am writing this, it would be unnatural for me to omit them

I would note that I find it somewhat ironic that the Facebook group "Keep UChicago Nerdy" was founded by Phoebe Maltz, not exactly the first person of whom one thinks, when one's thoughts turn nerdly to Chicago (though perhaps her conviction stems from other roots*), but in order to do so I'd have tacitly to admit that I notice such things and, in fact, that I spend any time on Facebook at all, and I'd rather avoid that, thanks much, so præteritefuckingamus.   I yet find Facebook quite strange, though without it I probably never would have learned of an acquaintance's engagement.  OTOH if I wouldn't have learned of it otherwise, well, what sort of acquaintances are we?  The kind that have communicated in years, that's what sort.

The title is taken from Harry Mathews' The Journalist (actually from Plutarch via TJ), in which a diary-keeper devises an ever more articulated system for classifying his observations.  It would be interesting to see those bloggers who tend to the diaristic adopt them (and, indeed, for such persons to read the book, which is good).  Where I am now, the scheme is thus, and the classifiers (AII/b.1, eg) appear in the margins.  As I was reading it this evening in a café I decided that I should write some stuff down about it (don't worry, I noted the irony (though not, like, in writing)) so that it wouldn't all flow away and, having commandeered a napkin since I had no paper with me and saw no likely candidates from whom I could purloin a piece, scribbled some notes thereon, which gossamer sheet, as I was preparing to leave, I slipped between the more substantial sheets of the book, along with a ... book thing.  umbrella.  place holder.  shit.  envelope. bookmark!  Along with a bookmark.

Then I lost it.  Well, shit.

*I'm not sure if that's an awful mixed metaphor or a moderately clever unmixed one

Idea from antproof case

Idea: describe the parallels, if any exist, between the part of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language in which Kripke discusses quounting and quindependence and the strategy Ken Thompson outlines in "Reflections on Trusting Trust".  This will surely lead to great profit.

That there are any I owe to an idea had while sleepily driving home from a What We Live concert, and what more reliable ideas are there than those had during a tired drive home?  Possible candidates are, but are not only: those had while falling asleep in bed; those had while going about one's (pre-coffee, for them as imbibe) morning ablutions; those that result from strange auditory confluences or hallucinations; those found entrails or tortillas.

What I have learned from Cigarettes

Any attempt to make amends with someone, even for a wrong that only the amends-maker thinks exists, will either begin to convince the other party that everything is actually much worse than it is (else why make amends?) or confirm that party in h/h suspicions, and foster much resentment and misunderstanding etc etc etc.

Mise en pwnage

AOTW the image used on the French Wikipedia to illustrate mise en abyme is of the main page of the Portuguese Wikipedia.  What?  Obviously it should depict the very article it illustrates.  Can't those frenchies get their own concepts right?

Advice for the shopworn

When composing dadaist works, or nonsense verse, or, really, anything designed not to be tractable by hermeutic villainy, one has to be on one's guard against the accidental production of meaning, for, as we know, the slightest slip in one's vigilance can result in the inadvertent writing of semantically rich sentences.  Even if one thinks one is producing text with utter randomness, occasionally a second reading reveals that, in fact, something was indeed said—sometimes even with a plainness that would be admirable in other contexts.  And of course one never knows what one's readers will make of a passage wholly impenetrable to its author, what significant words or phrases might have been yoked together by chance.

Therefore, after completing a draft, it's often advisable to go back over it, and stanch any flowing prose, leaky references, or inadvertant significance with a cryptic pencil.

(For writing polemics not too polemical, defamatory verse just on this side of libel, jeremaids that won't rouse the rabble too vigorously, or sarcasm not too bitter, on the other hand, one might want to exchange one's poison pen for a caustic pencil.)

This is even less well-thought-through than usual

I admit that I'm not quite sure what the claim about rock and jazz made here is—that older players aren't expected to have continued relevance, that they're expected to have diminished quality, or that they're expected to reprise the same sorts of things that they did when young (that is, not supposed to have different stylistic phases), or something else entirely (or some mix). But surely there are legions of counterexamples to each, and especially the first two? (Though I'm not sure how to assess the relevance except, well, relatively; when was the last time, after all, that free improv was generally relevant, much less the improviser of age x?) I actually know plenty of people who like Dylan's recent work just fine (some who think it's better than what he put out as a youth, even), but who wouldn't compare it to his earlier albums simply because they're quite different—he's got a different style now.  Tom Waits similarly. People don't go to Dylan's shows now just hoping to hear the old stuff—somewhat remarkably.  In some cases (though the recent folk-rock rediscoveries such as Vashti Bunyan, whose second album is not markedly dissimilar from her first, proves that it's certainly not all—that whole topic of what people make of the albums made by suddenly-rediscovered or unearthed folks would probably be pretty interesting in this light) there's an expectation that the player will change, lest extreme patheticness set in. (Consider the Rolling Stones. These cases are, I guess, those in which the early material is obviously the product of youth, or tied to being young; I think a lot of Dylan's (and certainly the Stones') early material is like that in a way that that of Bunyan or, say, Robert Wyatt, to take another person who's continued to put out quality after 40, simply isn't.)

Scott Walker's over 60, and it would take a lot of effort to maintain that his current style isn't that far removed from "Make It Easy On Yourself", and Tilt and The Drift have certainly received their fair share of praise.  Joe Maneri's first album as a leader came out in 1991—he was 67; nearly all of Steffen Basho-Junghans and Derek Bailey's albums as leader came after their 40th birthdays (Joseph Holbrooke, though, was formed when Bailey was 33).  Paul Flaherty seems to be everywhere these days, and while I'm not sure how old he is, he's certainly over 40. Both Peter Brötzmann and Sonny Sharrock were over 40 when Last Exit was formed, and Hamid Drake only started attracting serious attention after that point. As far as I can tell Keiji Haino, John Zorn (most or all of the Masada material comes from after his 40th year), and most of the AMM crew are still relevant and producing quality output. Fred Frith's output has only gotten increasingly varied as time's gone on.  Otomo Yoshihide, Tony Buck (I haven't checked this but he looked old when I saw him), Jon Rose, Evan Parker, blah.

Even Blixa Bargeld is over 40, and when I saw him last year it was amazing.

With regard to this bit from this article by Said, all, alas, that I've read:

Yet what of the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health (which, in a younger person, brings on the possibility of an untimely end)?

Bailey's Carpal Tunnel immediately suggests itself, as do Warren Zevon's last few albums.  (We pass over in silence Mike Watt's album about when he almost died from an infection on his perineum.)

Most of the above-named are improv types, of course.  Partly this is a function of the fact that it's easier to find out how old they are (how old is Rick Bishop?  Beats me.), and partly it's because there are a lot more obvious candidates there (also I don't trust myself to have a good sense about who the candidates are in rockier territory, which is kind of ironic, since I'm most familiar with it… ah well).  But I also think that, even if it were true that rock audiences would reject or be inclined to reject stuff from older bands/persons in the past, that's changing; I don't see any reason, anyway, to believe that Jim O'Rourke or The Melvins, say, are just going to stop producing interesting music in three years. (Though it turns out that Buzz Osborne is already over 40.)

I tried to find some rockier people who I thought would be candidates for already- or soon-to-be- over-40dom, and was repeatedly foiled by the lack of easily available information.Then I made one anyway and it's posted below because it occurred to me that I can't really assess stylistic change in many of them.  But I really think the age-based thing only applies to the rawkier parts of rock and the poppier parts of pop.  K-Space isn't much like Henry Cow.  (But who cares about K-Space?  Beats me, but "relevance" seems like a suspicious criterion.)

And so the chorus points to a secret joke

People often wonder about the actual value of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, aka PGR, aka Leiter Report, after its founder.  Does it really, these curious folk ask themselves, make sense to rank graduate schools or philosophy departments?  What about all those that are left off?  Disserves it not the students, and causes it not various other ill effects not mentionable in polite company, or, indeed, among philosophers?

Perhaps—if one uses it in the wrong way.  The Leiter Report is not, I hypothesize, meant to be taken as Word, immutable and true; rather, the student wishing to maximize its value should allow him or herself to be reoriented by it.  True, there is a big list of rankings, but the student need not base h/h applications solely thereon, but can rather take it as an indication of the, if you will, lay of the land; a map at that level of generality, though, ought not be followed too closely.  Indeed, we see Leiter's own advice on how to use the Report advocating using it basically to get one's bearings and then to toss it away:

3.It can make good sense to choose a much lower ranked program (say, more than 1.0 or more apart) over a higher ranked program if that program meets your special interests. Because Departments are increasingly specialized in their coverage and methodologies, it is quite possible for a lower-ranked program to offer a stronger program in a sub-field than a higher-ranked one. Where you already have a specialized philosophical interest (e.g., ancient philosophy or Kant or philosophy of biology), you should certainly consider choosing a program that is weaker overall, but stronger in your specialty, than others to which you are admitted.

He persists in such locutions as "weaker overall", but the conflict between the general drift of his words here, and that locution (as well as the list of rankings itself), will only make more apparent to the attentive student that the entire business is, strictly speaking, nonsense—but not, for all that, ineffectual.

The encounter with the Leiter Report will be of service to the student applying to graduate programs in philosophy, no doubt, but the student must also remember that, once having gleaned what information h/s can from it, h/s ought not lean on it as a crutch, but rather set it aside.

If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit

How could I have been so blind?  Markus Stockhausen and Lukas Ligeti need to form a band, statim.

This gin-drinking anagrammatist

Oulipo has a website and it's got lots of interesting stuff on it (or so I assume, almost all of it being in French—when I wrote the nonparenthesized portions of this sentence I had only actually seen some meager portions that are bilingual)!  Exempli gratia, a catalogue of Oulipian techniques employed by Harry Mathews (though in the Compendium it states that Cigarettes was written in accordance with a modified version of “x mistakes y for z”, though that work is not listed on the page), including, in some cases, brief examples, such as the epithalamium whence my title is taken.

(I think the epithalamium quite nice and it's easily found in the long page by scrolling down a bit from here.)

Our false philosophy is incorporated in our language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely

There's something quite charming about "Hello, world!" programs.

An auction at which people bid with things other than money, e.g., books.

I read somewhere that Alvin Lucier encouraged people to perform/realize "I Am Sitting In A Room" with alternate texts than the one he uses on the canonical recording, viz:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of r-r-r-rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity nnnnnot so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to s-s-smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

(Of course the stutter isn't so much part of the text as one of the irregularities his speech has.)  I think it would be moderately clever to do this with the following text, the first paragraph of Quine's "The Scope and Language of Science", thoughtfully provided on a handout by a colloquium speaker:

I am a physical object sitting in a physical world.  Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric airwaves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, prime numbres, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.

It's shorter, of course, but meh.