Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Earthquake
We just had a small earthquake. Hope it wasn't a foreshock!
Update: it's not a foreshock. It's not on the San Andreas, and the fault is only capable of ~5.6 quakes, which this was [except we didn't feel more than a rumble because we are ~20 miles away]
Update: it's not a foreshock. It's not on the San Andreas, and the fault is only capable of ~5.6 quakes, which this was [except we didn't feel more than a rumble because we are ~20 miles away]
Chucricket
Chuckwalla woke up extra early this morning. I went in to check on her, and she pointed to the wall and told me there was a cricket there. She wasn't scared, just excited that there was a cricket in her bedroom!
There wasn't a cricket there.
So I tried to put her back to sleep but she kept on telling me there was a cricket on the wall.
So I checked again, and I noticed that there was a shadow coming from a street light passing through the top of a crib. It cast a long horizontal shadow with a very abstract insect-looking silouette--complete with 3 blocky legs--onto the wall. A cricket.
So I turned on the light and showed her that there was no cricket, it's just a shadow. She was a little disappointed but satisfied.
I wonder what being 20-months-old is like. The world must seem very different! I'm glad she knew the word for cricket and the concept of shadows, because otherwise I never would have been able to get back to sleep [I nearly didn't anyway].
There wasn't a cricket there.
So I tried to put her back to sleep but she kept on telling me there was a cricket on the wall.
So I checked again, and I noticed that there was a shadow coming from a street light passing through the top of a crib. It cast a long horizontal shadow with a very abstract insect-looking silouette--complete with 3 blocky legs--onto the wall. A cricket.
So I turned on the light and showed her that there was no cricket, it's just a shadow. She was a little disappointed but satisfied.
I wonder what being 20-months-old is like. The world must seem very different! I'm glad she knew the word for cricket and the concept of shadows, because otherwise I never would have been able to get back to sleep [I nearly didn't anyway].
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
I wish I had known what was going on when Edward Abbey's drunken and highly illegal wake was held per his request in Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson. I wouldn't have gone [I was 6. I wouldn't go now either.] but it was likely little more than a short hike from our house at the time, and it would be a nice memory to have.
I won't say much about this book. Ed Abbey is brash, manly, serene, enlightened, hilarious, gentle, ignorant, brave, humble, loud, brilliant, passionate, misguided, visionary, articulate, well-read, witty, opinionated, zany, compassionate, and most of all downright daft.
Solitaire is a superb book. It makes you feel, laugh out loud, get angry, become enlightened, scratch your head, and hopefully go outside. It is also a very important book.
If you haven't, read it.
Edward Abbey
I wish I had known what was going on when Edward Abbey's drunken and highly illegal wake was held per his request in Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson. I wouldn't have gone [I was 6. I wouldn't go now either.] but it was likely little more than a short hike from our house at the time, and it would be a nice memory to have.
I won't say much about this book. Ed Abbey is brash, manly, serene, enlightened, hilarious, gentle, ignorant, brave, humble, loud, brilliant, passionate, misguided, visionary, articulate, well-read, witty, opinionated, zany, compassionate, and most of all downright daft.
Solitaire is a superb book. It makes you feel, laugh out loud, get angry, become enlightened, scratch your head, and hopefully go outside. It is also a very important book.
If you haven't, read it.
Life of 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + 4/13 - ...
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
I had to read this book because I needed some fiction to balance my literary diet. And I heard it was great. A story about a shipwrecked Indian boy spending 227 days afloat in a life boat on the Pacific ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger for company has to be good. Even if it is semi-allegorical and/or fableized.
But I was pretty disappointed.
It's not that the book didn't deliver the promised fun shipwrecked-with-a-man-eater excitement. It's just that the rest of the book was terrible. The book comes in three parts: A long-winded and dry prelude which lasts nearly a third of the book; the shipwreck and survival section, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the book; and the cadenza, wrapping up loose ends and applying a good Hollywood ending.
I'm surprised that many people got through the first third. I'm pretty thick skinned about plotless writing; I devour Jared Diamond and Edward Abbey. But this still tested my mettle. The problem is that Yann Martel tries his hand at pursuasive writing, completely forgetting that he's writing a novel and that he is a novelist. I itallicized that last sentence because that is all he appears to be. His arguments are so ludicrous; filled with naive generalizations, ignorant statements, and some of the worse logic I've ever seen in copyrighted publication. He just has no idea what he's talking about, but he still talks about it, Krishna only knows why.
The first and third segments have a bit of dialog. I had to put the book down occasionally during these parts and check the front cover just to make sure I hadn't accidentally started reading a George Lucas book [a classy literary reference if I've seen one]. The dialog was impressively contrived and laborious. I often pondered whether the author was trying to create a nightmarish world of stilted communication in order to do something the English professorial types would have fun with. But I decided against that. I think Yann Martel just lacks any subtlety at all, and doesn't really care whether his characters seem real.
On the issue of subtlety, I think that the lack of it destroyed an otherwise cute and gratifying surprise ending. Throughout the book the author felt need it to pound into our heads every time he did something he thought was clever, and the ending was no exception. He leaves nothing of the nearly-perplexing and interesting ending to the imagination. After being bludgeoned repeatedly throughout the book with banal psuedoreligious pandering, the reader deserves a gentle, subtle, thoughtful ending.
I grant fiction writers almost infinite freedom to stretch credulity with the setup of the plot. What's the fun of fiction if they can't? So I have no bones to pick about the fantastic nature of the story itself, it is the book's main draw. But I did find Yann Martel's extensions and details so outrageous that it detracted from the story. I think he intended the book to have a "choose for yourself" type ending, like K-PAX, but unlike K-PAX one of the possibilities is so impossible and fantastical that it isn't an option. So you're forced to choose the other option [and if you missed the choice, he has a clunky dialogue that forces you to interpret it this way]. It's just not fun, it leaves the reader with no space for imagination or intrigue.
So, I don't know what all the fuss is about. The book is fun-you should read it-but the claim on the back of my edition that Yann Martel is the "greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties" is absurd. I'm not sure that he's the greatest author born in 1963 in Salamanca with the surname of Martel, but I'll need to do some more research before I can say that for sure.
Yann Martel
I had to read this book because I needed some fiction to balance my literary diet. And I heard it was great. A story about a shipwrecked Indian boy spending 227 days afloat in a life boat on the Pacific ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger for company has to be good. Even if it is semi-allegorical and/or fableized.
But I was pretty disappointed.
It's not that the book didn't deliver the promised fun shipwrecked-with-a-man-eater excitement. It's just that the rest of the book was terrible. The book comes in three parts: A long-winded and dry prelude which lasts nearly a third of the book; the shipwreck and survival section, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the book; and the cadenza, wrapping up loose ends and applying a good Hollywood ending.
I'm surprised that many people got through the first third. I'm pretty thick skinned about plotless writing; I devour Jared Diamond and Edward Abbey. But this still tested my mettle. The problem is that Yann Martel tries his hand at pursuasive writing, completely forgetting that he's writing a novel and that he is a novelist. I itallicized that last sentence because that is all he appears to be. His arguments are so ludicrous; filled with naive generalizations, ignorant statements, and some of the worse logic I've ever seen in copyrighted publication. He just has no idea what he's talking about, but he still talks about it, Krishna only knows why.
The first and third segments have a bit of dialog. I had to put the book down occasionally during these parts and check the front cover just to make sure I hadn't accidentally started reading a George Lucas book [a classy literary reference if I've seen one]. The dialog was impressively contrived and laborious. I often pondered whether the author was trying to create a nightmarish world of stilted communication in order to do something the English professorial types would have fun with. But I decided against that. I think Yann Martel just lacks any subtlety at all, and doesn't really care whether his characters seem real.
On the issue of subtlety, I think that the lack of it destroyed an otherwise cute and gratifying surprise ending. Throughout the book the author felt need it to pound into our heads every time he did something he thought was clever, and the ending was no exception. He leaves nothing of the nearly-perplexing and interesting ending to the imagination. After being bludgeoned repeatedly throughout the book with banal psuedoreligious pandering, the reader deserves a gentle, subtle, thoughtful ending.
I grant fiction writers almost infinite freedom to stretch credulity with the setup of the plot. What's the fun of fiction if they can't? So I have no bones to pick about the fantastic nature of the story itself, it is the book's main draw. But I did find Yann Martel's extensions and details so outrageous that it detracted from the story. I think he intended the book to have a "choose for yourself" type ending, like K-PAX, but unlike K-PAX one of the possibilities is so impossible and fantastical that it isn't an option. So you're forced to choose the other option [and if you missed the choice, he has a clunky dialogue that forces you to interpret it this way]. It's just not fun, it leaves the reader with no space for imagination or intrigue.
So, I don't know what all the fuss is about. The book is fun-you should read it-but the claim on the back of my edition that Yann Martel is the "greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties" is absurd. I'm not sure that he's the greatest author born in 1963 in Salamanca with the surname of Martel, but I'll need to do some more research before I can say that for sure.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Transcendent music
People have often asked me why my wife and I often limit ourselves to a narrow range of classical music. I've had a lot of trouble explaining this, so I want to try here.
First of all, these are some of the reasons that have been speculated for our choice of music, all of which are wrong:
1. We think it makes us smart
2. We think it makes us look smart
3. We have an elitist disdain for other music
4. We have a moral issue with other music
5. We haven't been exposed enough to other music
We both actually listen to and appreciate a wide variety of music. But we still keep on discovering that nothing reaches us like our music, particularly late romantic chamber. One of the reasons for this is a feeling that we have both arrived at independently, and describe in the same language. I'll try my best to explain from the bottom up:
There are many categories of "bad" music [of course judged by how it affects and reaches us]. I won't discuss this here, it should be fairly obvious what makes up the bulk of the inhabitants of these categories. And there are "good" music categories. Here are some examples of pieces and composers which might fit under various good categories, based on our tastes:
Merely good: most of Mozart. Schumann, most of Mendelssohn, Lizst, Chopin, etc. Almost anything you hear on a classical station is here or below.
Really good: most of Dvorak, most Beethoven, Stravisnsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, etc. I don't think we bother listening to anything below this category.
Spectacularly good: Mendelssohn quartet Op. 13; Ravel and Debussey quartets; Bach Cello suites; some Beethoven; Smetana quartet and Moldau, Dvorak serenade for strings, etc. This is a huge category considering how distinguished it is.
That much gooder [a.k.a. perfect]: Schubert late chamber and nearly all Brahms chamber. Grieg g quartet.
Most of the non-chamber music we listen to falls within the "merely good" to "that much gooder" categories and this includes non-classical music, what we listen to for dancing, and whatever else we have on our iPod.
This is pedantic.
The point is that there is great music everywhere, even music that rivals our holy "that much gooder" music.
But there is one more category that we have both arrived at without triangulation. It is transcendent music. This is music that breaks some invisible barrier and really deeply penetrates us. This is music which feels like it was written by God, and probably was. There are only certain passages in certain pieces which are transcendent in this way for us, and they hold a very special place in our lives. We both claim the most profound spiritual, emotional, and penetrating experiences with these passages. It's different than very, very good music; it is very, very good music with a divine touch. Here's what is transcendent for us:
Scattered passages of the Dvorak cello concerto, mostly in 1st and 2nd movement.
Brahms piano quintet in f, especially the B and D sections of the 4th movement [this trumps all for me, put me on a desert island with this and I'll die a perfected saint].
Schubert quintet in C, B section of the second movement
I want to stress that we dearly love and are passionate about other music. The second movement of the Ravel quartet, Schubert's Death and the Maiden 1st and 2nd movements, the opening sequence in Grieg's quartet in g, the first movement of Smetana's "From my Life" quartet, Brahms' piano quartet in g final cadenza and piano quartet in c 2nd movement climax and a huge amount more, Schubert's G quartet 1st movement, Bach cello suite #5 prelude. These are all the absolute pinnacle of human musical achievement. But the transcendent passages [of which there are few more] go beyond the pinnacle and enter into another realm for us. And the key is that these transcendent passages cluster mostly around late romantic chamber music. That's why we listen to chamber as much as we do. It doesn't hurt that the non-transcendent stuff is flappin' awesome also.
So we don't think music can make us smart. And we're not musical snobs or prudes. We just found a little patch of the transperfect and we can't get enough of it.
First of all, these are some of the reasons that have been speculated for our choice of music, all of which are wrong:
1. We think it makes us smart
2. We think it makes us look smart
3. We have an elitist disdain for other music
4. We have a moral issue with other music
5. We haven't been exposed enough to other music
We both actually listen to and appreciate a wide variety of music. But we still keep on discovering that nothing reaches us like our music, particularly late romantic chamber. One of the reasons for this is a feeling that we have both arrived at independently, and describe in the same language. I'll try my best to explain from the bottom up:
There are many categories of "bad" music [of course judged by how it affects and reaches us]. I won't discuss this here, it should be fairly obvious what makes up the bulk of the inhabitants of these categories. And there are "good" music categories. Here are some examples of pieces and composers which might fit under various good categories, based on our tastes:
Merely good: most of Mozart. Schumann, most of Mendelssohn, Lizst, Chopin, etc. Almost anything you hear on a classical station is here or below.
Really good: most of Dvorak, most Beethoven, Stravisnsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, etc. I don't think we bother listening to anything below this category.
Spectacularly good: Mendelssohn quartet Op. 13; Ravel and Debussey quartets; Bach Cello suites; some Beethoven; Smetana quartet and Moldau, Dvorak serenade for strings, etc. This is a huge category considering how distinguished it is.
That much gooder [a.k.a. perfect]: Schubert late chamber and nearly all Brahms chamber. Grieg g quartet.
Most of the non-chamber music we listen to falls within the "merely good" to "that much gooder" categories and this includes non-classical music, what we listen to for dancing, and whatever else we have on our iPod.
This is pedantic.
The point is that there is great music everywhere, even music that rivals our holy "that much gooder" music.
But there is one more category that we have both arrived at without triangulation. It is transcendent music. This is music that breaks some invisible barrier and really deeply penetrates us. This is music which feels like it was written by God, and probably was. There are only certain passages in certain pieces which are transcendent in this way for us, and they hold a very special place in our lives. We both claim the most profound spiritual, emotional, and penetrating experiences with these passages. It's different than very, very good music; it is very, very good music with a divine touch. Here's what is transcendent for us:
Scattered passages of the Dvorak cello concerto, mostly in 1st and 2nd movement.
Brahms piano quintet in f, especially the B and D sections of the 4th movement [this trumps all for me, put me on a desert island with this and I'll die a perfected saint].
Schubert quintet in C, B section of the second movement
I want to stress that we dearly love and are passionate about other music. The second movement of the Ravel quartet, Schubert's Death and the Maiden 1st and 2nd movements, the opening sequence in Grieg's quartet in g, the first movement of Smetana's "From my Life" quartet, Brahms' piano quartet in g final cadenza and piano quartet in c 2nd movement climax and a huge amount more, Schubert's G quartet 1st movement, Bach cello suite #5 prelude. These are all the absolute pinnacle of human musical achievement. But the transcendent passages [of which there are few more] go beyond the pinnacle and enter into another realm for us. And the key is that these transcendent passages cluster mostly around late romantic chamber music. That's why we listen to chamber as much as we do. It doesn't hurt that the non-transcendent stuff is flappin' awesome also.
So we don't think music can make us smart. And we're not musical snobs or prudes. We just found a little patch of the transperfect and we can't get enough of it.
The Best Widget
It's absurd that so much of critique in popular circles revolves around the best of something or other. How can anybody claim to judge the best book, actor, food, music, athlete, temperature, dog, linguine crunchiness, song, expletive, or friend? It's a compulsion born of lack of vision, objectivity, humility, and experience. I find it beyond reproach that anybody dares to proclaim that X is the best Y, no matter how passionately they feel it.
The Dvorak cello concerto is the best and greatest concerto ever written. And Jacqueline DuPre's recording of it is the best in existence. No argument possible. I'm not joking.
The Dvorak cello concerto is the best and greatest concerto ever written. And Jacqueline DuPre's recording of it is the best in existence. No argument possible. I'm not joking.
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