Various Facebook posts, collated (20 June 2016 - 23 Jan 2017)
Because I am so wise, and because I want to have various things I've said on Facebook (and others've said on my wall) in one place without navigating through ads, poor design, stupid things I've said (I'm mostly not wise at all), ephemera, and Trump posts, of FB, I'm archiving selected posts and comments below the fold. Reverse chronological order. Others referred to by their initials. I stop when I do because last Bloomsday I got excited and posted quotations from every episode of Ulysses, and the browser was already heaving away slowly enough without going further back.
23 Jan 2017. [twitter thread about how Nazis are like vampires, the correct political reaction to whom is violence.]
23 Jan 2017. I felt somehow vaguely anxious about or dissatisfied with the Women's March Against Trump in London today, in spite of the massive turnout and obvious unalloyed goodness of its ideals. I don't know whether this article gets at my concerns, but it certainly gets closer than I can otherwise get.
13 Jan 2017. This is a facinating piece, and very good. I've been wondering a lot about work recently (no doubt catalysed by being an unemployed and lazy recently-ex-student), and this (US-centric) piece makes some important points about the cultural idolisation of 'hard work' that were new to me.
The increasing computerisation of most jobs means that soon - in perhaps fifty years - the vast majority of present jobs won't exist, and its rapidity means that (unlike with agriculture at the start of the twentieth century) they can't be replaced. (Which is one reason for the continuing effects of the financial crisis.) But - as Keynes predicted and as John Quiggin recently argued should still be thought feasible (link below) - the notion that we need to or should work as much as we do is getting well past its due date.
Livingston's piece wouldn't differ, but its focus is elsewhere: about the racism involved in the ideology of the long working week, and about the need to restructure - urgently - how to think about grounds of self-worth and maturity absent the age-old structure of work.
I would like it to have said more about the narrowness of the conception of work he adopts. As a philosopher whose friends are mostly artists, I don't really even consider 9-5 jobs typical examples of work, and certainly they're unlikely to be helpful archetypes. I'd be curious to see if the vocational attitude to work stereotypical of artists and clergypeople would offer a good way of reconceptualising work.
I would also like to know how this stuff can be connected to the fresh momentum behind the Universal Basic Income campaign. Because if we can't all work (or work all the time, or work the hours that would alone give us enough money to live by), then something needs to fill that gap financially, not just morally.
Quiggin's piece
15 Dec 2016. Godfrey-Smith makes some true but well-known points about the decline of music as a profession - there is basically no money in it any more, far less than can sustain a livelihood for any but superstars (we know!) - but his solution is frustratingly - indeed, ineffectually - modest: 'People! Buy more music!'
Yeah sure we should buy more music if we can afford to, particularly when it will help people out (young artists, experimental artists). But the deep problem is (all together now) capitalism. It is not only musicians who're struggling to make a living, and asking other people who're also struggling to make a living to help out musicians is to put pressure on those already feeling the most pressure. Better to look at how wealth can be redistributed so that musicians - or anyone else! - don't have to struggle to meet the minimum wage. Better to look at how work can be restructured so that musicians can do what they love while also having a reasonable income.
14 Dec 2016. The trouble I have with criticism of 'the cult of genius' is that there are a few people, such as Bach, who just straight up are geniuses, with all the quasi-religious defiance of comprehension that people find so annoying about genius-talk. But to put Bach at the centre of an understanding of music or art is nevertheless going to be distorting: the rest of us are so far from him that he's just not helpful as a model.
This occurred to me this evening because I saw Bernhard Schimpelsberger in the Rich Mix Centre. It was a great gig. Schimpelsberger is doing some really fun and interesting things with percussion, most notably in mixing Indian rhythms with the rock/jazz drumkit and its idioms. (Though my favourite thing about tonight was his kick drum that he pitch-shifted with his left foot like one can do with timpani. It was tabla-like, but still with that low unpitched kick.) But...
The temptation is so strong to say: 'it's good, but I wouldn't buy the CD', or give it a star rating, or wonder why he's not more widely known, or point out the new musical ground he's covering... more generally, I think, I'm tempted to view him sub specie aeternitas. But to do this is to miss the point of the criticism of the cult of genius. That's not his game at all. He's a weird and intense guy, following his own star, being himself really seriously and thoroughly, and getting by doing it. His success is very human and loveable. One could imagine a post-capitalist world in which a million flowers bloomed all as unique and captivating as him - and almost all passing entirely but happily. I need to stop finding this so discouraging. It's not, it's just time.
19 Nov 2016. In response to this piece by Tim Williamson, shared by JL.
These fuckers are making such heavy weather out of something so simple. You can just say that 'heap' - and all these other 'vague' terms - don't have an absolute meaning out of some context, and/or that they can be variably instantiated. What do we *want* to say with a heap of twenty grains? "It depends what you mean by heap" - not on what 'heap' means, but on how strictly *you* are applying the term right now - or "well it's more of a heap than this heap of five grains, but less of a heap than this heap of a million grains", or "sort of". County councils and lawyers may need there to be some strict heap/not-heap line, but that's because of the nature of the legal system, not because of the nature of reality. Philosophers don't need to worry about where exactly they put the division.
Tim Williamson is by all accounts one of the major players in Analytic philosophy. It is astonishing that with all his expertise and with all he has gained from a long tradition of Analytic philosophy he is not able to answer a simple fucking question in a simple fucking way. It is a microcosm of the ill health of the tradition. Disgusting.
The very notion that a whole tradition could be so flummoxed by a heap of fucking sand that they have to try and introduce non-bi-fucking-valent logic. The mind boggles.
Ok I need to say a touch more - the reason this is an indictment rather than a reasonable mistake is because it shows how Analytic philosophers are constitutionally incapable of thinking about things in ways that aren't indebted to its understanding of the natural sciences, whereby concepts are instantiated absolutely. When it encounters non-scientific ways of understanding - as in heaps or personhood - it freaks out and tries to reduce it to a scientific understanding. It cannot resist the urge to treat the scientific approach as a universal hammer. It's childish, scientistic.
9 Nov 2016. I keep thinking of black people's lot in America before the Civil Rights Movement, at least as it's recounted by Morrison and Walker. The sort of life depicted as normal by these authors is one of hopelessness, of merely coping, of being cruel and selfish and inward-looking in order to keep sane. The inhumanity done by people who only have the energy and wisdom to look to the smallest bit of themselves, but the inevitability of that inhumanity under such pressure.
I fear now that the racism, xenophobia and hatred in society is so profound that in many ways, many people will be reduced to such a state. In a distant way, all of us, if political battles become unwinnable and all we can do is look to and love each other whom we trust, and leave evil be. It's a pathetic ambition but it's the despair to which I'm reduced. Far more meaningfully, though, is all the people who will be literally reduced to such a state: those who will suffer under profound and violent oppression.
Though there's the other side to this: surely a large part of the reason that people have voted as they have, yesterday and in Brexit, is that they were already in some such state of hopelessness. That's how I can explain to myself the vote. While this hopelessness persists as it does - and of course neoliberalism is what's at fault here - we will get many more such results. They will not always be channelled through the ballot box.
9 Nov 2016. My great fear is that this is only the beginning.
This resentment, anger, comes from the collapse of hope. Old ways of life crumble (under the Third Way), and this leads to anger and frustration, which in turn lead to hatred and scapegoating. These things lead to political actions that are against others: against foreigners, against those unlike oneself. But these actions are also self-defeating; to take the case of Brexit, it will lead to a further decrease in prosperity in Britain (immigrants are indisputably good for the economy), and so lead to an increase in hatred and scapegoating. This in turn leads to further stupid political decisions; the cycle continues. Soon we find ourselves not fighting over whether EU migrants should immediately be on the NHS - not over whether they should be allowed to permanent residents here - not over whether they should be allowed live here - not over whether they should be guaranteed free legal representation - but...
The solution has to be to prevent the decay altogether. Otherwise we are fighting an impossible battle: we are championing love to people who have ever less to love with. The trouble is, the decay is almost writ in the stars: the only reason the West is so wealthy is its history of aggressive imperialism. So how to counteract the decay? A certain sort of answer is available: an intelligent, internationally co-ordinated effort to universally increase living standards in an environmentally sustainable way. But this answer is a joke. May as well ask for a pony while I'm at it.
I see no way out of a slow decline into anarchy, or civil war, or mass persecution.
9 Nov 2016. More good news: the problem with the EU ref wasn't that it was a referendum rather than done through the channels of representative democracy. Such stopgaps against demagoguery and domination exist abundantly in the US system, with its primaries and its Electoral College. That didn't stop people voting as if they were flailing wildly in the death-throes of suffocation. Rest assured that the real problem here is that when people are being suffocated, they will flail wildly, and that Britain would have done something such as vote for Brexit regardless.
I wonder where it will stop.
29 Oct 2016. I realised today that, to my surprise, I know all but three bars of Ravel's first valse noble et sentimentale by heart. (Which is not to say I can play it at all fluidly, let alone musically! Alas for not having a piano except when I return to the parents'.) This is significantly more progress than I've made with the C Minor WTC I fugue. This is interesting: the Bach, on its face, is a good deal simpler than the Ravel with its eight-note(+!) unanalysable chords and mad leaps. But of course it's not really simpler at all. This is partly because it's a fugue, and so you have three independent voices rather than one voice plus support and embellishments. But it's also, I think, because Bach's harmonic imagination is actually more sophisticated than Ravel's. Even Ravel's! --But yes: Behind all the chromaticism, the Ravel is mainly fairly simple movements: chromatic ascents, I-V progressions, etc. Playing the Bach, it sometimes feels like it changes key in a substantial sense every crotchet, and it has these crazy melodic intervals that sound so natural that I keep trying to play standard intervals instead. Keeping my head atop this is more than I've been able to do.
Which is all just to mention yet another way in which Bach's music is not a human's but angels'.
5 Oct 2016. Undertale turned a year old last month, and it was wonderful how the birthday was celebrated by this profusion of new covers of its extraordinary soundtrack, many of them really pretty good. But this one, for me, takes the cake. It reminds me of something that struck me as really... era-defining about that game.
Undertale - uh, light spoilers from here on in - is astonishing in all sorts of ways. It uses tone to profoundly wrongfoot the player, it's got great music, its world-building and philosophical outlook is tearifyingly wise, it has a delightfully light touch with its tradition... But these are all, as it were, standard ways in which great art is great. I think that if, in a hundred years' time, we look back on Undertale as being really groundbreaking for anything in particular, it'll not be for these things, but be for how it uses its language.
What I mean is - well consider how novels, etc., normally make their language sing. It's always to do with this... poetry, this way of making language declaim. It always strikes me as Shakespearean, confident, eloquent as we use that term to talk about someone's ability to hold forth at a dinner party. And so, it's always a conservative way of using language. Poetry is old, it's rich white men who always give the best after-dinner speeches, etc. And as it's conservative, so it's becoming more and more irrelevant.
I can sort of think of some artists - DFW, Murakami, maybe - who've tried to do something different; perhaps they're legitimate predecessors, but something about that connection jars. (Maybe Scott Pilgrim is a legitimate predecessor.) Also there're obviously plenty of artists who've disclaimed interest in making language sing - BE Ellis, any Hollywood film - but then they're just inferior artists. Artists who've taken how we speak on FB and in text, though - and this includes how we use emoji, punctuation, allusion, humour, etc. - and who've taken our (deliberate) hesitancy and awkwardness, and made that eloquent *on its own terms* or *in its own spirit*, rather than by shoehorning it into the eloquency of The Canon - that is something I've not seen before Undertale.
This is apparent in this song, first in the ridiculous declaiming of the wingding-speech (that so fabulously matches the double-tone-ness of how wingdings are used in the game), and second in how the shy and awkward spoken interludes are given the dignity or (a) being repeated outside the original context of the game - as if they're bons mots that we quote like we quote Shakespeare - and (b) by being spoken *as* awkward and shy. Imagine quoting Shakespeare like this! "You know, as Hamlet says, 'man, heh, sometimes I feel like my uncle's, I dunno, kind of a jerk?'" And for that to be profound and eloquent? In Undertale it's so: that form of expression is chosen not only because it's a 'realistic' representation of speech in a certain culture, but because it's the best way of saying that thing.
What Toby Fox is doing is nothing short of giving voice to a Lebenswelt more or less for the first time.
[comments] Ok, this needs some immediate clarification/emendation.
You might think that what Undertale does is something like, reveal how well millenials or computer nerds or whoever speak, when they speak as well they might, and also reveals that they don't then speak in the backwards-looking way that most artists have made their subjects speak.
I've said that I've never seen this before - but that's not quite true, and what I want to modify.
First, as I briefly noted, there're artworks such as Scott Pilgrim, and I reckon that's doing something similar with regard to basically the same culture. But that's a small crowd.
More significantly, giving distinctive and authentic voice to a Lebenswelt is not, in those general terms, new at all. In a way it's the aim of all art. It's obviously what's going in, e.g., Homer, Flann O'Brien, Aaron Copland, Georgia O'Keeffe, bebop, Steve Reich. So I could row back and say that I only want to say that 'Undertale' is giving voice to its culture for the first time. But I don't quite want to row back that far. Because I think that in literature, this backwards-lookingness really is the law for just about everyone, and I include the likes of Joyce, Toni Morrisson, DFW, and Art Spiegelman in this. So Fox is not just doing for millenials what Joyce did for the Irish; he is doing something even more radically new.
23 Sep 2016. Submitted the Ph.D. thesis this afternoon. By rights, Clare should be taking me out for a very long night; but instead, if all the years of studying art and philosophy have done nothing but allow me to say five true lines about my best friend, they will have been worthwhile.
'Phenomenal Woman,' Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
16 July 2016. I didn't know much about this magazine before downloading this really interesting and often great mixtape, but it looks like it's the 'prove that we're cool' wing of U.S. academy/conservatory music.
There's some really good stuff on the mix - Quartet for Sax, the Goodbye the Band piece, Green Yellow Green Red, Two Windows, Symmetry stood out at me - and everything on it is good, in the sort of minimal sense of competent, professional, serious. It's also very interesting to see that the academy has turned entirely from atonality, and has begun to take aesthetic cues from rock/pop. Extended techniques are also used with the maturity that comes from this sort of stuff finally now being standard fare.
But goddamn it's so establishment! Every artist/composer has a slick website, just a *little* quirkiness, just a *little* arrogance. The WASPness oozes out between every note. Where's the urgency!? Who here would die for their music?
I've been listening to BBC Radio 3's avant-garde radio show 'Late Junction' this week too. I love the irony that the music on that show is not just something to which you'd give an 'A' grade in a Master's programme, and which sounds like it's written to get that grade; the Beeb is fighting for our life.
7 July 2016. This is what happens when your statesmen are trained by philosophers:
"[A] certain athlete had hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and Pericles, Xanthippus [his slandering son] said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that 'in the strictest sense' ought to be held responsible for the disaster."
(Plutarch's life of Pericles, p. 105 of the Loeb)
20 June 2016. HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET: I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET: I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
23 Jan 2017. [twitter thread about how Nazis are like vampires, the correct political reaction to whom is violence.]
23 Jan 2017. I felt somehow vaguely anxious about or dissatisfied with the Women's March Against Trump in London today, in spite of the massive turnout and obvious unalloyed goodness of its ideals. I don't know whether this article gets at my concerns, but it certainly gets closer than I can otherwise get.
13 Jan 2017. This is a facinating piece, and very good. I've been wondering a lot about work recently (no doubt catalysed by being an unemployed and lazy recently-ex-student), and this (US-centric) piece makes some important points about the cultural idolisation of 'hard work' that were new to me.
The increasing computerisation of most jobs means that soon - in perhaps fifty years - the vast majority of present jobs won't exist, and its rapidity means that (unlike with agriculture at the start of the twentieth century) they can't be replaced. (Which is one reason for the continuing effects of the financial crisis.) But - as Keynes predicted and as John Quiggin recently argued should still be thought feasible (link below) - the notion that we need to or should work as much as we do is getting well past its due date.
Livingston's piece wouldn't differ, but its focus is elsewhere: about the racism involved in the ideology of the long working week, and about the need to restructure - urgently - how to think about grounds of self-worth and maturity absent the age-old structure of work.
I would like it to have said more about the narrowness of the conception of work he adopts. As a philosopher whose friends are mostly artists, I don't really even consider 9-5 jobs typical examples of work, and certainly they're unlikely to be helpful archetypes. I'd be curious to see if the vocational attitude to work stereotypical of artists and clergypeople would offer a good way of reconceptualising work.
I would also like to know how this stuff can be connected to the fresh momentum behind the Universal Basic Income campaign. Because if we can't all work (or work all the time, or work the hours that would alone give us enough money to live by), then something needs to fill that gap financially, not just morally.
Quiggin's piece
15 Dec 2016. Godfrey-Smith makes some true but well-known points about the decline of music as a profession - there is basically no money in it any more, far less than can sustain a livelihood for any but superstars (we know!) - but his solution is frustratingly - indeed, ineffectually - modest: 'People! Buy more music!'
Yeah sure we should buy more music if we can afford to, particularly when it will help people out (young artists, experimental artists). But the deep problem is (all together now) capitalism. It is not only musicians who're struggling to make a living, and asking other people who're also struggling to make a living to help out musicians is to put pressure on those already feeling the most pressure. Better to look at how wealth can be redistributed so that musicians - or anyone else! - don't have to struggle to meet the minimum wage. Better to look at how work can be restructured so that musicians can do what they love while also having a reasonable income.
14 Dec 2016. The trouble I have with criticism of 'the cult of genius' is that there are a few people, such as Bach, who just straight up are geniuses, with all the quasi-religious defiance of comprehension that people find so annoying about genius-talk. But to put Bach at the centre of an understanding of music or art is nevertheless going to be distorting: the rest of us are so far from him that he's just not helpful as a model.
This occurred to me this evening because I saw Bernhard Schimpelsberger in the Rich Mix Centre. It was a great gig. Schimpelsberger is doing some really fun and interesting things with percussion, most notably in mixing Indian rhythms with the rock/jazz drumkit and its idioms. (Though my favourite thing about tonight was his kick drum that he pitch-shifted with his left foot like one can do with timpani. It was tabla-like, but still with that low unpitched kick.) But...
The temptation is so strong to say: 'it's good, but I wouldn't buy the CD', or give it a star rating, or wonder why he's not more widely known, or point out the new musical ground he's covering... more generally, I think, I'm tempted to view him sub specie aeternitas. But to do this is to miss the point of the criticism of the cult of genius. That's not his game at all. He's a weird and intense guy, following his own star, being himself really seriously and thoroughly, and getting by doing it. His success is very human and loveable. One could imagine a post-capitalist world in which a million flowers bloomed all as unique and captivating as him - and almost all passing entirely but happily. I need to stop finding this so discouraging. It's not, it's just time.
19 Nov 2016. In response to this piece by Tim Williamson, shared by JL.
These fuckers are making such heavy weather out of something so simple. You can just say that 'heap' - and all these other 'vague' terms - don't have an absolute meaning out of some context, and/or that they can be variably instantiated. What do we *want* to say with a heap of twenty grains? "It depends what you mean by heap" - not on what 'heap' means, but on how strictly *you* are applying the term right now - or "well it's more of a heap than this heap of five grains, but less of a heap than this heap of a million grains", or "sort of". County councils and lawyers may need there to be some strict heap/not-heap line, but that's because of the nature of the legal system, not because of the nature of reality. Philosophers don't need to worry about where exactly they put the division.
Tim Williamson is by all accounts one of the major players in Analytic philosophy. It is astonishing that with all his expertise and with all he has gained from a long tradition of Analytic philosophy he is not able to answer a simple fucking question in a simple fucking way. It is a microcosm of the ill health of the tradition. Disgusting.
The very notion that a whole tradition could be so flummoxed by a heap of fucking sand that they have to try and introduce non-bi-fucking-valent logic. The mind boggles.
Ok I need to say a touch more - the reason this is an indictment rather than a reasonable mistake is because it shows how Analytic philosophers are constitutionally incapable of thinking about things in ways that aren't indebted to its understanding of the natural sciences, whereby concepts are instantiated absolutely. When it encounters non-scientific ways of understanding - as in heaps or personhood - it freaks out and tries to reduce it to a scientific understanding. It cannot resist the urge to treat the scientific approach as a universal hammer. It's childish, scientistic.
9 Nov 2016. I keep thinking of black people's lot in America before the Civil Rights Movement, at least as it's recounted by Morrison and Walker. The sort of life depicted as normal by these authors is one of hopelessness, of merely coping, of being cruel and selfish and inward-looking in order to keep sane. The inhumanity done by people who only have the energy and wisdom to look to the smallest bit of themselves, but the inevitability of that inhumanity under such pressure.
I fear now that the racism, xenophobia and hatred in society is so profound that in many ways, many people will be reduced to such a state. In a distant way, all of us, if political battles become unwinnable and all we can do is look to and love each other whom we trust, and leave evil be. It's a pathetic ambition but it's the despair to which I'm reduced. Far more meaningfully, though, is all the people who will be literally reduced to such a state: those who will suffer under profound and violent oppression.
Though there's the other side to this: surely a large part of the reason that people have voted as they have, yesterday and in Brexit, is that they were already in some such state of hopelessness. That's how I can explain to myself the vote. While this hopelessness persists as it does - and of course neoliberalism is what's at fault here - we will get many more such results. They will not always be channelled through the ballot box.
9 Nov 2016. My great fear is that this is only the beginning.
This resentment, anger, comes from the collapse of hope. Old ways of life crumble (under the Third Way), and this leads to anger and frustration, which in turn lead to hatred and scapegoating. These things lead to political actions that are against others: against foreigners, against those unlike oneself. But these actions are also self-defeating; to take the case of Brexit, it will lead to a further decrease in prosperity in Britain (immigrants are indisputably good for the economy), and so lead to an increase in hatred and scapegoating. This in turn leads to further stupid political decisions; the cycle continues. Soon we find ourselves not fighting over whether EU migrants should immediately be on the NHS - not over whether they should be allowed to permanent residents here - not over whether they should be allowed live here - not over whether they should be guaranteed free legal representation - but...
The solution has to be to prevent the decay altogether. Otherwise we are fighting an impossible battle: we are championing love to people who have ever less to love with. The trouble is, the decay is almost writ in the stars: the only reason the West is so wealthy is its history of aggressive imperialism. So how to counteract the decay? A certain sort of answer is available: an intelligent, internationally co-ordinated effort to universally increase living standards in an environmentally sustainable way. But this answer is a joke. May as well ask for a pony while I'm at it.
I see no way out of a slow decline into anarchy, or civil war, or mass persecution.
9 Nov 2016. More good news: the problem with the EU ref wasn't that it was a referendum rather than done through the channels of representative democracy. Such stopgaps against demagoguery and domination exist abundantly in the US system, with its primaries and its Electoral College. That didn't stop people voting as if they were flailing wildly in the death-throes of suffocation. Rest assured that the real problem here is that when people are being suffocated, they will flail wildly, and that Britain would have done something such as vote for Brexit regardless.
I wonder where it will stop.
29 Oct 2016. I realised today that, to my surprise, I know all but three bars of Ravel's first valse noble et sentimentale by heart. (Which is not to say I can play it at all fluidly, let alone musically! Alas for not having a piano except when I return to the parents'.) This is significantly more progress than I've made with the C Minor WTC I fugue. This is interesting: the Bach, on its face, is a good deal simpler than the Ravel with its eight-note(+!) unanalysable chords and mad leaps. But of course it's not really simpler at all. This is partly because it's a fugue, and so you have three independent voices rather than one voice plus support and embellishments. But it's also, I think, because Bach's harmonic imagination is actually more sophisticated than Ravel's. Even Ravel's! --But yes: Behind all the chromaticism, the Ravel is mainly fairly simple movements: chromatic ascents, I-V progressions, etc. Playing the Bach, it sometimes feels like it changes key in a substantial sense every crotchet, and it has these crazy melodic intervals that sound so natural that I keep trying to play standard intervals instead. Keeping my head atop this is more than I've been able to do.
Which is all just to mention yet another way in which Bach's music is not a human's but angels'.
5 Oct 2016. Undertale turned a year old last month, and it was wonderful how the birthday was celebrated by this profusion of new covers of its extraordinary soundtrack, many of them really pretty good. But this one, for me, takes the cake. It reminds me of something that struck me as really... era-defining about that game.
Undertale - uh, light spoilers from here on in - is astonishing in all sorts of ways. It uses tone to profoundly wrongfoot the player, it's got great music, its world-building and philosophical outlook is tearifyingly wise, it has a delightfully light touch with its tradition... But these are all, as it were, standard ways in which great art is great. I think that if, in a hundred years' time, we look back on Undertale as being really groundbreaking for anything in particular, it'll not be for these things, but be for how it uses its language.
What I mean is - well consider how novels, etc., normally make their language sing. It's always to do with this... poetry, this way of making language declaim. It always strikes me as Shakespearean, confident, eloquent as we use that term to talk about someone's ability to hold forth at a dinner party. And so, it's always a conservative way of using language. Poetry is old, it's rich white men who always give the best after-dinner speeches, etc. And as it's conservative, so it's becoming more and more irrelevant.
I can sort of think of some artists - DFW, Murakami, maybe - who've tried to do something different; perhaps they're legitimate predecessors, but something about that connection jars. (Maybe Scott Pilgrim is a legitimate predecessor.) Also there're obviously plenty of artists who've disclaimed interest in making language sing - BE Ellis, any Hollywood film - but then they're just inferior artists. Artists who've taken how we speak on FB and in text, though - and this includes how we use emoji, punctuation, allusion, humour, etc. - and who've taken our (deliberate) hesitancy and awkwardness, and made that eloquent *on its own terms* or *in its own spirit*, rather than by shoehorning it into the eloquency of The Canon - that is something I've not seen before Undertale.
This is apparent in this song, first in the ridiculous declaiming of the wingding-speech (that so fabulously matches the double-tone-ness of how wingdings are used in the game), and second in how the shy and awkward spoken interludes are given the dignity or (a) being repeated outside the original context of the game - as if they're bons mots that we quote like we quote Shakespeare - and (b) by being spoken *as* awkward and shy. Imagine quoting Shakespeare like this! "You know, as Hamlet says, 'man, heh, sometimes I feel like my uncle's, I dunno, kind of a jerk?'" And for that to be profound and eloquent? In Undertale it's so: that form of expression is chosen not only because it's a 'realistic' representation of speech in a certain culture, but because it's the best way of saying that thing.
What Toby Fox is doing is nothing short of giving voice to a Lebenswelt more or less for the first time.
[comments] Ok, this needs some immediate clarification/emendation.
You might think that what Undertale does is something like, reveal how well millenials or computer nerds or whoever speak, when they speak as well they might, and also reveals that they don't then speak in the backwards-looking way that most artists have made their subjects speak.
I've said that I've never seen this before - but that's not quite true, and what I want to modify.
First, as I briefly noted, there're artworks such as Scott Pilgrim, and I reckon that's doing something similar with regard to basically the same culture. But that's a small crowd.
More significantly, giving distinctive and authentic voice to a Lebenswelt is not, in those general terms, new at all. In a way it's the aim of all art. It's obviously what's going in, e.g., Homer, Flann O'Brien, Aaron Copland, Georgia O'Keeffe, bebop, Steve Reich. So I could row back and say that I only want to say that 'Undertale' is giving voice to its culture for the first time. But I don't quite want to row back that far. Because I think that in literature, this backwards-lookingness really is the law for just about everyone, and I include the likes of Joyce, Toni Morrisson, DFW, and Art Spiegelman in this. So Fox is not just doing for millenials what Joyce did for the Irish; he is doing something even more radically new.
23 Sep 2016. Submitted the Ph.D. thesis this afternoon. By rights, Clare should be taking me out for a very long night; but instead, if all the years of studying art and philosophy have done nothing but allow me to say five true lines about my best friend, they will have been worthwhile.
'Phenomenal Woman,' Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
16 July 2016. I didn't know much about this magazine before downloading this really interesting and often great mixtape, but it looks like it's the 'prove that we're cool' wing of U.S. academy/conservatory music.
There's some really good stuff on the mix - Quartet for Sax, the Goodbye the Band piece, Green Yellow Green Red, Two Windows, Symmetry stood out at me - and everything on it is good, in the sort of minimal sense of competent, professional, serious. It's also very interesting to see that the academy has turned entirely from atonality, and has begun to take aesthetic cues from rock/pop. Extended techniques are also used with the maturity that comes from this sort of stuff finally now being standard fare.
But goddamn it's so establishment! Every artist/composer has a slick website, just a *little* quirkiness, just a *little* arrogance. The WASPness oozes out between every note. Where's the urgency!? Who here would die for their music?
I've been listening to BBC Radio 3's avant-garde radio show 'Late Junction' this week too. I love the irony that the music on that show is not just something to which you'd give an 'A' grade in a Master's programme, and which sounds like it's written to get that grade; the Beeb is fighting for our life.
7 July 2016. This is what happens when your statesmen are trained by philosophers:
(Plutarch's life of Pericles, p. 105 of the Loeb)
20 June 2016. HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET: I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET: I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.