waste

Callback from the nyrb

Quotes Simon Leys:

Their spiritual prestige remained virtually unchallenged till our time: it took the irreverent wit of Lu Xun—the most mordant iconoclast in modern Chinese letters—to point out that

since a genuine hermit is someone who disappears from the view of historians, the hundreds about whom we know so much must have been rather less than sincere; being a hermit is a way of making a living like any other, and hence requires the hermit to hang up a sign advertising for himself.

Thereby reminding me of this post from, actually, not that long ago, though the period when I was inclined to think about The Unknown Masterpiece long predates that (the book turns out not at all to be what I had been expecting).  Had I already read The Fall when writing the linked post, I would surely have made some reference or allusion to it and the narrator's strategy of first condemning himself in order to be in a position to judge; however, since I have only recently read it, I did not. (“I have left philosophy—thus proving myself the best philosopher.”)

How I got this way

Before tonight I already knew that my father used to own a boa constrictor whom he took on walks (this was when he was a med student, maybe also as an undergrad). However, it was only tonight that I learned that the snake was eight feet long and once got coiled so nearly inextricably up behind a radiator that he had be to be injected with nembutal before it could be removed, and that he was named Siegfried, "because he was so idle".

Jonah Goldberg in villanelle form

Relocated from a comment thread at unfogged because I'm vain like that. Background here, here, and here (oh, and here for a different bit), with many more embarrassing excerpts from the book that I hadn't yet seen also available at Sadly, No (eg).

These liberals are all fascists through and through.
Organic food, health care, the smoking ban?
What they don't tell you is that Hitler did it too.

They'll barricade the church and overturn each pew,
Atheistic unbelievers to a man.
These liberals are all fascists through and through.

They'll teach your kids what Darwin said is true:
But unnatural selection's their real plan.
What they don't tell you is that Hitler did it too.

They'll cant sensitivity to those with another view,
And turn around and then oppress the Klan.
These liberals are all fascists through and through.

They'll say animals are with human rights imbued,
And try to keep your steak from out your pan.
What they don't tell you is that Hitler did it too.

It's time we gave these little Eichmanns what is due,
Then maybe go to war, just to prove we can.
These liberals are all fascists through and through.
What they don't tell you is that Hitler did it too.

Intriguing supposition

Is the title JZ Smith's article I am a Parrot (Red) explicitly modelled on those of the supposedly pornographic Swedish films I am Curious (Yellow) and I am Curious (Blue)? It seems nearly impossible that it should not be so, but confirmation by me may not be possible—I don't think he uses email.

I would mention what the article is about but I don't believe I've ever actually read it and can no longer find it.  It's not in Relating Religion, which means I must at some point have made a photocopy of it and misplaced it.  Alas! Presumably it has something to do with some tribe whose members claimed that they were parrots and the interpretation of this claim by anthropologists and students of religion.  (I recall his in class having said that the mythological identifications of some tribes were labelled Urdummheit by their first German cataloguers, and that, given that they don't actually treat one another as if they really were parrots or whatever, this identification and straight-faced acceptance of the claims proffered could be construed as evidence of a yet Urer Dummheit.)

An update: it occurred to me that, given the fact that Smith once titled an essay "Manna, Mana Everywhere and /˘/˘/" (pronounced "manna, mana everywhere and BUM bum BUM bum BUM"), it is virtually impossible that the parrot essay not have been titled after the named Swedish films.  This is perhaps also a worthy place in which to reproduce the footnote from the "bio-bibliographical essay", "When the Chips are Down", that leads off Relating Religion, in which he explains his research methodology (p37n27):

It was during this period of 'playing in the stacks', supported by a Yale Junior Sterling Fellowship, that, having read John Livingstone Lowes' description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading habits (Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of Imagination [1927; reprint, New York, 1959], 30–36), I developed a set of reading rules I have followed ever since. These include: always read the entire chapter of a book in which a reference you are looking for occurs, then read at least the first and last chapters; always skim the entire volume of a journal in which you are seeking a particular article, then read the tables of contents for the entire run of the journal; after locating a particular volume on the shelves, always skim five volumes to the left and to the right of it; always trace citations in a footnote back to their original sources. (For one surprising result of the latter rule, see Smith, "Always Read the Fine Print", Signs and Times of the Yale Divinity School 3.6 [1963]: 5–8). Later, I added: do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work available to you.

He related some of these rules in his class on Durkheim's Elementary Forms, if I remember correctly.  Remarkably, his claims regarding these practices inspire, in me at least, not the least skepticism. Note, however, the inconsistency in citation styles in the note: citing Lowes he uses a comma following the right bracket; citing himself, a colon.  One for the errata slip.

Maître du boulevard: a compound of butter, garlic, and persiflage

My father, a doctor, recently related to me an unusual and historic case concerning a patient a colleague of his had treated.  The man had just graduated from college and had backpacked around Western Europe for a few months before returning back to Irvine (where he had also gone to college) to start his job at Google's new office.  He had hit the high points of what used to be the Grand Tour, and had spent most of his time in Paris, his first and last stop, and reported that he had particularly enjoyed the narrow, crowded streets of the Latin Quarter, which are completely unlike the broad highways of Orange County, as I hope none of you has any cause to experience first-hand.  As many people in his situation do, he picked up a few affectations while abroad; in particular, although he had never been a smoker before, he returned devoted to Gauloises.  (He was not a particularly original fellow.)  They reminded him, he said, of the chimneylike Parisians whose eccentricities, so unlike those of his friends in the States, had enchanted him.

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, not long after his return, after he settled in to his work routine, he started experiencing shortness of breath and sometimes sharp pain when he inhaled deeply—which he found himself doing more often, despite the pain, since during the slightest physical exertion his breath was so rapid and shallow that he was left gasping when it ceased.  He blamed the cigarettes, of course, and vowed to stop smoking, only to discover when he did so that his symptoms worsened.  It was at this point that he went to my dad's colleague to see what might be ailing him.

This doctor had an inkling what might have been causing it, but it had never been diagnosed in the States, and internationally only very infrequently, so he wasn't certain.  He knew, however, how to figure out if it was indeed what he expected. While the man sat in his skivvies on a table, he tut-tutted, paced a bit, hmmmmed, and expressed other concern-behavior, and then told the man what he wanted him to do: he thought that what was wanted was exercise: conditioning for his lungs.  But not, obviously, strenuous exercise; that would only bring the situation to disaster. So he wanted the man to go on walks, and to ensure that he didn't strain himself too much even while walking (how likely, thought the man to himself as he heard the doctor's somewhat embarrassed explanation of all this, is it that I'll walk too fast?), he had a somewhat odd prescription for him: he was to go to a pet store and procure a tortoise, which he would take on walks with him, and than which he was not to go faster.  The doctor instructed him to come back in two weeks and let him know how things were going.

Two weeks later the man returned, with tidings that, it must be admitted, stupefied their bearer. While on these walks down Irvine's unwalkable boulevards, going nowhere, since there's nowhere to go on foot, bearing a tortoise on a leash, and uncertain whether the scoffing glances he received were because of his unusual choice of travelling companion, or his unusual choice of travelling by foot, his condition was much improved—seemed even to vanish.  Indeed, even though he gave in to the near-overwhelming temptation while on these strolls to smoke a cigarette or two, no ill effects attended this action; indeed, while dragging on the cigarette, he seemed to feel even better than he did before!

I suspected as much, the doctor said, when the man had finished his report in wonderment. While you were in Paris, you picked up a nasty case of flâneurisy.

A difficult endeavor

I have started reading, when not reading philosophy, writing, or grading, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts.  It's ... not that great, really.  It sort of wants to be Snow Crash except with MEMES!!! and no cyberpunk elements.  Well, whatever.  There is a puzzle with which the narrator is confronted: an earlier, pre-amnesia version of himself (don't ask) has left a message encoded for him in a curious wise.  First, it's in morse code according to a recorded light going on or off.  (Shades of Cryptonomicon.)  That's not so interesting.  The interesting part is that the morse-encoded letter stands for one of eight other letters, depending on the layout of the QWERTY keyboard.  So, say, "b" could be any of: v, n,r, t, y, f, g, h.  The eight adjacent letters, wrapping around, with the two lower rows shifted hard to the left to make a grid.  (This makes what do with p or l or the like a little underdefined, but one can stipulate a solution.)  The narrator notes that it's difficult to decode because you can't do it piecewise—you'll only be able to tell whether you've begun correctly by verifying that that beginning allows you to get all the way to the end.  For instance: if you get something like "I would like to tell you that", and then are left over with one letter, somewhere you've made a mistake.

This looks, thought I, like a job for backtracking! Surely Our Hero could just write up a little program to parse his text into words and then check to see if any of them made a lick of sense. If I still had SICP, or had ever really learned Scheme, or Icon, or any language with continuations, I would presumably know how to do this sort of problem in my sleep, but I seem to have come up with something that works ok using only Python's generators.  If Our Hero tried that strategy he'd probably have to come up with a better algorithm and a better-regulated dictionary, though: run on the string "usnrzpo", I did get the intended string—"i am tall"—back out, but it was one of 45983, and I suspect that run on a text of, say, a hundred or so characters it would be nigh interminable.  And not only that, "I am tall" wasn't even the only comprehensible result: maybe the message is recommending a game ("netball") or calumniating an airport ("hate lax") or expressing confidence in the sender's magical powers ("mage am i").  With a longer input string there would be more ways for multiple comprehensible outputs to occur.  So even if you do get to the end, you can't be certain that that's the right message, since it could just be coincidental.

Korsgaard & Uexküll on animals

You can see from this description that incentives and principles exist in natural pairs. The fact that an animal has certain instincts explains why it is subject to the associated incentives. In this sense the animal's instincts play a double role in the account of its actions. They both explain why the animal is subject to certain incentives in the first place, and what it does in response to those incentives once they are present.

K supra, U infra (text from A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, image from Theoretical Biology):

Here again, we have an interrupted chain of functional cycles, not a goal action.  The perceptual cue of peeping normally comes indirectly from an enemy who is attacking the chick.  According to plan, this sensory cue is extinguished by the effector cue of beak thrusts, which chase the foe away.  The struggling, but not-peeping chick is not a sensory cue that would release a specific activity. It would be quite incongruous if it were, too, as the mother hen is in no position to loosen a noose.

The image ends up not fitting well with the layout and so a link to it has been substituted.

Staggering

There are many cases in which we need a hard and fast concept for the purposes of philosohical understanding … even where there is not a hard and fast line in nature.—so aren't we left with a philosophical misunderstanding?

(It's from Korsgaard's Locke Lectures, number three, page seventeen, in section three point four point six.)

One is also moved to wonder at this: Self-conscious action—that [is] to say human action—there's no human action which is not self-conscious?

Conference of the dogs

I suppose I must live up to my billing at least to some extent, though doing so will be slightly problematic, as I don't think I've ever written a shaggy dog story in this medium.  A meandering story with something of the form of a long joke which concludes with a pun or bit of wordplay is not a shaggy dog story; it's at best a convoluted pun and at worst grounds for imprisonment.  The key to the shaggy dog story is that there is no payoff whatsoever. Or rather, now that I see what I have been reported to have said on this topic before, the vehicle of the payoff is something not recognizeable outside the context of its bearing the payoff as a punchline or something that would be funny or the like at all (this has the counterintuitive effect of making shaggy dog stories more witty than most jokes, at least if you think of jokes and wit the way I do). The correlate of this is that in any particular telling of such a story there is no particular term that has to be avoided, whereas if your convoluted pun is going to culminate in "Ligeti split", say, you had better not use the word "Ligeti" during the setup, unless, of course, you're messing with your audience in what would, I admit, be a shaggy-dog-like way.  (I suppose I would allow such things into the class of shaggy dog stories, as a variant in which, by the time you reach the end, the vehicle has been so leeched of surprise or wit that it serves only to deflate—but I haven't written any of those either.)

It's also hard to write a shaggy dog story, because one can generally read faster than one can listen.  Maybe Hegel could write an shaggy dog story effective when read.  Maybe MH Abrams is wrong, and the Phenomenology is not the Bildungsroman of Spirit, but a shaggy dog story: this might explain the incomprehensibility of the last chapter. (That's the joke, see.) But if one is cursed with as fluent and readable a prose style as mine, one will have to write quite a lot in order to induce the required desire in the reader that I bloody well get on with it.  (Imagine if John Bunyan or Robert Burton tried to write such a story—failure.)  I'm already hampered when telling such stories by my mellifluous voice the very listening to of which induces such delight in all.  But in the spoken case one needn't go on for too long before people will begin to suspect that one might not be going anywhere in particular, and then, of course, one must start reassuring them that it'll totally be worth it. It helps if there are other people around who know what's coming who can assure the marks that they've heard it before and it's great. (It is for the benefit of such of those people as happen to be present, and oneself, that one tells a shaggy dog story in the first place.)  I hypothesize that one best tells a shaggy dog story to someone who has a meeting that's not too important but not completely trivial coming up in, say, twenty minutes.  But if such a person were reading a shaggy dog story, s/he could always just return to it later.  And of course the author can't directly interact with the reader.  It's a decidedly non-optimal situation.

For all these reasons and more I simply cannot relate to you a shaggy dog story here.  But I can inform you of a new shaggy dog story type, or anyway method of conclusion.

For reaons of conceptual purity I think such stories should actually involve shaggy dogs.  I know of two basic frames—either there is a shaggy dog contest, or someone has lost his shaggy dog—and two basic ways of telling them—profuse or laconic.  I prefer the latter and the former, respectively.  In the shaggy dog contest variant, at each level Our Hero's dog wins and, if you are telling it profusely, has ever more effusive praise heaped on it and its shagginess, until, at the very end, the judges merely say "that's not a very shaggy dog". In the missing-dog variant, the owner of the missing dog sends Our Hero away each time, telling him that his dog was much shaggier than that, until at the end he says something like: good lord, not that shaggy!. What I present to you here is a twist on the missing-dog variant, which takes its inspiration from such works of literature as The Conference of the Birds, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, and Little, Big (each of the latter two, if I remember correctly, explicitly referring to the foremost).  Basically one need only consider that as Our Hero quests for this dog, he has less and less time to spend on his own needs, thus growing wilder and less kempt all over and, through constant exposure to various dogs un and shaggy, grows to resemble them more and more (here the teller might be well served by a digression on the subject of bicycles in The Third Policeman).  Until by the very end, worn out and weary, clothes in tatters, he leads a monumentally shaggy dog to the owner of the missing dog's door, rings the bell/works the knocker/summons the butler and collapses.  A passing zephyr raptures the dog away and the person who answers the door looks down and sees what else but—the missing dog!

Years later, a son of the house is overheard conversing with a fellow on the school playground, saying that there's a boy in his home who thinks he's a dog, and what's more, everyone else thinks he's a dog too.  Why don't you take him to a psychiatrist? asks his playmate.  Well, he responds, we would, but we need someone to fetch our sticks.

More mysteries

Butter and its rises in price seem to have exercised Wittgenstein a fair bit, though his opinion does not change much; despite this, it does not occur in the index to PI at all and now I cannot locate its first occurence (perhaps Markson is right about grad students).  The mysteries, though: §594 ends with (Ich kann des Andern Zeugnis nicht annehmen, weil es kein Zeugnis ist. Es sagt mir nur, was er zu sagen geneigt ist.), and §386 with (Ich kann sein Zeugnis nicht annehmen, weil es kein Zeugnis ist. Es sagt mir nur, was er zu sagen geneigt ist.).  These are englished, respectively, as (I cannot accept someone else's testimony, because it is not testimony. It only tells me what he is inclined to say.) and (I cannot accept his testimony because it is not testimony. It only tells me what he is inclined to say.).  (Odd how the most minor changes loom large to me.)  And even stranger, if you look under either testimony or Zeugnis in the index, only §386 is listed.

Doing my part to support the Dalkey Archive

Yesterday, on the way to an n+1 shindig, about which perhaps more later, I ducked into a bookstore off Market, thinking that it might have some of David Markson's recent work.  It did not, but it did have Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat in a single volume, which I purchased, and which is how I came to know how the former begins.  This evening, having read about half of Epitaph for a Tramp, I decided that I should get a copy for my mom, since she likes crime novels and whatnot, and it would be up her English major alley, so wandered up the street from Bittersweet into a different bookstore.

But there were no Epitaphs to be had, not even for ready money: instead, all of Markson's more experimental offerings were lined up on the shelf, not very far to the left of many of Harry Mathews'.  O cruel fate! I lamented, unable to stop myself from purchasing This Is Not A Novel, Reader's Block, and Wittgenstein's Mistress by Markson, and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and Singular Pleasures by Mathews.

That is not all, though.  In chapter 3 of Tramp, Harry Fannin discovers his wife cheating on him with someone who, in his judgement, is a grad student; at any rate, he's taking a class in comparative literature, for which he has written an essay whose fourth page begins thus:

And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that…

Epitaph for a Tramp came out in 1959, a scant four years after The Recognitions was issued to almost entirely extremely negative notices, and Jack Green's Fire the Bastards! wouldn't appear until 1963.  G.P. Cranley was one prescient guy, though if Fannin's impression of the dives he hangs out in is anything to go by, he's also the sort of person that Gaddis mocks pretty scathingly in his novel.  And on the bus, what should I encounter when opening Wittgenstein's Mistress to a random early page (27) but this? I would say it was in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, except that I do not believe I have ever read The Recognitions by William Gaddis..

One begins to suspect that Markson esteems The Recognitions (by William Gaddis).

Aw, don't play with me, Israel

Wotta tune!  Not bad as a sermon, either.  Not all of the latter appears in the former, though I'm pretty sure that everything's properly monotonic once you get into the tune proper (past, that is, the introductory declamation of the title), and not just that but increasing as well.  It would actually be interesting to know just how much the recording of the sermon has been manipulated: one of the interesting things about it is that it's a setting not just of a text, but of a particular reading of a text: a performance that sets another performance within it.  (Writing the preceding inspired me to look up some info about Berio's Sinfonia, part of the third movement of which exists on Youtube: probably I should apprehend a complete recording.)

And this from the sermon itself, a part which is included in the setting:

But that isn't what Jesus did; he did something altogether different. He said in substance, "Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you're going to be my disciple, you must be." But he reordered priorities. And he said, "Yes, don't give up this instinct. It's a good instinct if you use it right. (Yes) It's a good instinct if you don't distort it and pervert it. Don't give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first.  …

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That's a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve.

There's not much in the way of humility there, but there is a bit of explicit revaluation of values, eh wot?

The first novel

Ah, how one's mature style is presaged in one's early works, even if in unclear wise!

You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers—like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?

I'd taken a cold shower at one o'clock. Since then I'd recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from teh early thirties, I'd tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I'd ever known carnally, and now I was running through parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I'd even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about her.

Pretty kickass. The opening paragraphs of Markson, Epitaph for a Tramp, just picked up in a used bookstore, since I thought they might have Wittgenstein's Mistress or one of the first two of his last three novels.  Compare a few consecutive bits from the only other thing by him I've read, The Last Novel:

E.M. Forster's astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.

Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar—or at least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.

Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by Le Figaro.

Heine read Plutarch's Lives for the first time when quite young.
And said it made whim wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.

William Blake's emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.

Actually, if entered into in the proper spirit, one probably could make a decent case for stylistic continuity (where decency would, of course, be a decency relative to the proper spirit).  (The back of the crime novel is careful to explain that Markson only wrote such things, before turning to serious writing (so called), to make money.  Well, whatever.)

More patterns

How serendipitous that Dennett chose to write about a chess-playing computer program; because of this, when Haugeland writes that

The first leaf falling today could be white's opening, P-K4; the second leaf could be black's reply, also P-K4; and so one, at tournament level.  Obviously, the recognitions must be beholden somehow to what is ostensibly being recognized, yet in such a way that the criteria of correctness are induced from above.

Here lies the true import of the phrase you know one when you see one: recognition is essentially a skill.

(Who, incidentally, still describes chess in terms of pawns moving to king's four?  This essay appeared in 1994!) We are perhaps put in mind of §200 the Investigations (though it may also happen that the being put in mind of goes in the other direction, depending on when one reads what, and it may moreover be true that one who understands that section would not be put in mind of or by it: but then it may not):

But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of afctions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game—say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. [W]ould we still be inclined to say they were playing a game?

What the significance of this being put in mind might be is of course quite beyond my ken, though I do suspect that the outer/inner recognition contrast is the way to answer Korsgaard's question as to the possibility of bad action, and that what, to speak maximally generally, makes it occasionally seem to this reader as if her own answers are implausible is that it seems as if she wants to get all the work done by inner recognition.  Though I'm not sure what to make of this bit, which appears in the same paragraph as the above quotation from Haugeland:

The constitutive standards for a given domain—e.g. the rules of chess—set conditions jointly on a range of responsive dispositions and a range of phenomena: if they are both such that the former consistently find the latter to accord with the standards, then the former are recognition skills and the latter are objects in the domain.

It seems to derive outer recognition, what would enable us to see that a game of chess is taking place here in the first place, from the standards which apply to chessy things, and allow us to say whether something is legal or illegal.  But he later insists that outer and inner recognition must at least be distinct capabilities.

None of that bears the least relation to this, a fact which should puzzle us more than it does.

Alarm Will Sound

I just (several hours ago, meaning this was finished around 2am, accounting to some degree for its rambling incoherence) saw them performing various arhythmic pieces, including two by Aphex Twin (Gwely Mermans and Cock/Ver 10, an encore) and one by Mochipet, who was in the audience (Dessert Search 4 Techno Baklava—for some reason I was put out that the program didn't explain that the title plays, as anyway I assume, on that of the Mr. Bungle tune Desert Search for Techno Allah). The string instruments were amplified and the artistic director (Alan Pierson) seemed to have mispronounced Ligeti's given name.

Had this concert been given fifteen years ago, the techno arrangements would of course not have appeared; if something of the sort did appear, it would have been Frank Zappa—The Black Page or Approximate or something like that. The Ensemble Modern even did an album (now two) of Zappa arrangements, just as AWS has done one of Aphex Twin, and the London Sinfonietta of various Warp artists. I believe that Philip Glass has collaborated with Aphex Twin, too. I asked Pierson about this after a really painfully inane "panel discussion" after the concert but I think that the question was misinterpreted because of my admittedly combative and unclear phrasing. I assume that the Ensemble Modern didn't work with Zappa to shift units but because at least someone associated with the group thought it would be artistically worthwhile or some such nonsense. And it's true that Zappa and Aphex have in common that, though nominally commercial artists ("nominally" there not to imply that they aren't commercial, but merely to point out that they, but not AWS or the EM, are denominated "commercial")—and it's interesting that that "though" is thought proper at all—a chamber group could do arrangements of them without insulting either themselves or their audience. But of course that's true of lots of groups (AWS demonstrated this with the Shaggs, but one could imagine cases in which the derivation of the interest would not be so uncertain as to the original intention: Beefheart, say, or Henry Cow, or Zs), so—why the shift, and why this particular shift?

Pierson make the Alexrossian ipod argument: these are just the people we like! Presumably there are also people at the Sinfonietta who were receptive to the Warp project (I have no idea whether that originated at the label or at the orchestra, of course; I wasn't involved). So it would still be an interesting question as to why different groups of folks arrived at the same sorts of conclusion, assuming, as we will assume, that it's not motivated by marketing thoughts. It may even be a less interesting question why, just because you like these people, you want to arrange them for a 22-person chamber group. Of course I don't think that repertoires should be strictly divided from one another. And did give some reasons that make a lot of sense to me: it was a challenge: a timbral challenge to get the orchestration right, a technical challenge to actually play the stuff at tempo, etc. (This would have to be changed for the Shaggs.) But he also said that the search which ended in their deciding to do an album of Aphex stuff was initiated by a decision to do arrangements of electronica in particular, which is an interesting criterion already, and that part of the reason Richard D. James appealed to them so much was the virtuosity of his (so to speak) orchestration—the color of his own arrangements, etc. But that seems like just as much an argument not to do anything with them, but just to affirm them as good and interesting in their own right.

That the Warpers are simultaneously quite commercial (James lives in a bank and owns a tank, ferchrissakes) and artistically ambitious in a self-sufficient way may make them safer, or more comprehensible, both for this treatment and for the affection of those who are otherwise engaged in art-musical (so called) pursuits. (Similarly: Zeitkratzer's rendition of Metal Machine Music.) It would be weird for a group that could seem to be pointed at the western musical establishment to receive that kind of attention. Yes, say, particularly with the feel one can get, mostly at secondhand, that they were interested in asserting that they were too composers, dammit, or for that matter the above-mentioned Henry Cow, though I actually like them. There too you have artistic ambition, even ambition successfully brought off, but it's so naked—not to mention unfashionable. It's hip to like the Shaggs, on the other hand. And the nakedness, and unfashionability, is related to the fact that it's manifested in a rather traditional way, even when the manifestations are mostly modernist: that's the way musical modernism manifests itself in western art music.

Part of the weirdness would be that giving them that recognition, since it does amount to recognition in a laudatory sense (you know that some nontrivial proportion of the purchasers of The Yellow Shark felt that finally Zappa was getting his due, or some of it), would encourage them, which until recently has gone against the general grain. People playing actual instruments in a popular music context are not to be encouraged to think that they have that sort of musical bonae fidei! Imagine what that guy who gives out grades at the Village Voice would say. But the techno types are in a pretty different game, where that kind of strange snobbery mostly doesn't obtain. Probably others do instead. And part of it would come from the fact that, since the sort of thing those groups do is already oriented in some way towards art music anyway, what would be the point? The Shaggs weren't so oriented, of course. Arguably Beefheart as well, though this is contentious. So they are likely to survive as groups people will like and will consider to hold sufficient complexity to be worthy of arrangement.

But if you liked "The Decay of Cities" from Western Civilization, why not? It would probably present challenges of its own as well. If that sort of reason is going to be sufficient, then surely anything goes. None of it needs to be brought over into the other medium; each is complete as it stands. But it still does seem as if to do this to Henry Cow would be stranger in some way I can't really put my finger on—perhaps because it would more closely approximate rearranging a work already in the tradition for different forces, though it's not as if that doesn't happen too. (Perhaps just because the results are harder to imagine. Someone actually did orchestrate King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic II", which seems to me a really weird choice and certainly not the one I'd make, and I can only assume that the results were pretty dire.)

Or if you liked "I Can't Concentrate" from the most recent Zs album. Zs being not just an ambitious rock band but also, depending on who describes them, a composers' collective cum performing group, that would be especially interesting; it would be neat, maybe, to have something like Cuneiform Record's Unsettled Scores for your new chamber groups with composers: pieces written for the groups, along with those renditions, combined with rearrangements by the composers in other groups for their groups. Why not? You could put it out on Cantaloupe or something.