The Fredösphere

Speaking as a Lutheran, I'm thrilled by the enthusiam shown by the general population in celebrating Reformation Day. (But what's with all the costumes?)   In honor of the day, here's 95 Theses:



Here's more.

Labels: Antipope, fun, Religion, Renaissance, VideoClip

By way of Terry Teachout, it's Frank Lloyd Wright appearing on What's My Line:



I have nothing profound to say on the subjects of architecture, the death of the middlebrow (one of Terry's pet subjects) or, surprisingly, megalomania.  Instead, I'd just like to point out those amusing little sequinny-buttony things the producers added as decoration to the perimeter of the female panelists' blindfolds.  A little detail no one would even think to use today.

Labels: Architecture, Culture, VideoClip

The black swan strikes: out of the blue, everybody's talking math at me all of a sudden.

Barnes & Noble interviews Neal Stephenson at length, and the links that come with it are very good. Neal's new novel Anathem is all about an alien world where the cloistered monks devote themselves to science and math, not religion. Neal's friend (David Sutz of the Seattle-based ensembles Tudor Choir and Cappella Romana) created chant music inspired by pi, quadratic equations, you know--all the usual math-type stuff. I especially commend to your (freely-downloadable) listening pleasure the "Thousander Chant" with it's contrabass throat singing. Whoa.

Neal creates a special playlist for each novel he writes. I've tried a corresponding trick; I used photos of classical ruins to inspire the composition of some severe chant-like vocal music; the result was a little too ruinous, I'm afraid, and I've never tried that trick since. The intersection of choral music and SF: it's my blog's great theme, and Neal Stephenson is singing it.

Next, we find out about the musical importance of the number 5 as we wander down an Overgrown Path. We'll also meet Pythagoras and the Golden Mean while we do.

Oh, and that business about the swan? Daniel Wolf has the musical connection.

Finally, today a friend emailed me a Newsweek article about certain countries good at producing girls who are high achievers in math. The author concludes math ability is culturally determined, and in a beautiful expression of self-parody, says she's going to "scream" if she hears anyone talk about "hard-wired" brains ever again. I invite everyone to go to the very convenient website of International Mathematical Olympiad results and spend a few minutes with the data as I did. The obvious conclusion you will reach is that boys continue to dominate, and if girls are surging (even if only in select countries) then the effect is subtle. Maybe the metaphor we're looking for is "firmware."

Labels: Choral, sci-fi, vocal

Banjo player Eddie Adcock underwent brain surgery to correct a hand tremor that interfered with his ability to play his instrument.  He was awake during part of the surgery and--as was necessary to locate the relevant nerves--played his banjo during the operation.  Now, sign me up for the other operation, the one that fixes the technique of banjo players who never practiced.

What's that?  You demand to see video?  Here you go:



(Hat tip Cronaca.)

Labels: OldTyme

Technology Review has reprinted a sad little SF story by the late, great Algis Budrys called The Distant Sound of Engines.  Here's more about the author.

Labels: sci-fi

Something big is coming to the Fredösphere soon, something at that magical place where science fiction and choral music intersect.  Keep watching this space.

Meanwhile, I had no idea Pagan Roman sun worship and Catholicism were practically the same thing.  You people don't tell me any of the cool stuff!  Furthermore, a robot keeps watch over the Pope.  Who is one.

Labels: Antipope, fun, SoundClip

I see my evil plans to utterly warp my children's minds with piano lessons will bear--probably already have borne--fruit:

[I]f you look at a brain, either in life with an MRI, or later, you can't tell whether it's the brain of a genius or a fool, or whether it's the brain of a visual artist or a literary artist, but you can look at a brain and say, "that's probably the brain of a musician"--because musical training and involvement in music enlarges various parts of the brain: the corpus callosum (the great band which goes between the two cerebral hemispheres); parts of the auditory cortex; parts of the cerebellum; parts of the frontal lobe cortex. There are striking changes which can occur within a single year of musical training, and these are changes which are really visible to the naked eye, at least if one knows where to look. So the power of music to alter the brain is very, very striking.

Oliver Sacks, interviewed by Terry Gross. Hat tip to A Cappella News.  There's lots more where that came from; Sacks is the The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat guy, and he takes us into that territory again.

Labels: Keys, SoundClip, Synaesthetes

Somebody's seen significant parts of the Watchmen movie and liked it a lot.

Eve Tushnet's impressionistic take on the book was my first (and, come to think of it, still my only) encounter with serious Watchmen criticism and hints at layers I didn't notice.  Must.  Read.  Watchmen.  Again.

Here are some nibbles:

Characters even present more than one opposing worldview within the book, while remaining believable, consistent characters. Jon's affirmation of the worth of an individual human life, when he speaks with Laurie on Mars, conflicts with his remote, utilitarian acceptance of Veidt's scheme at the book's climax; but both these moments feel like they came from the same character, a being shifting between Jon Osterman and Doctor Manhattan. Rorschach's denial of any intrinsic meaning to the patterns and suffering in life, in his speech to Malcolm, is more obliquely in conflict with his actions at the climax (in which he seeks to uphold an absolute vision of justice that implies conformity to a preexisting, objective pattern), but again both moments feel utterly true to life.

[...]

The pirate comic is the most obvious example of linkage. It doesn't function in Watchmen's plot as "The Mousetrap" does in "Hamlet," but it does or should affect readers' understanding of Veidt's plan and the role of hope in the book. The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter's crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book's greatest destruction.

Tushnet links to a couple of posts at "Unqualified Offerings" whoever that is.  One is interesting in light of the political season we are in (here in the USA).  Alan Moore is strongly anarcho-communist; maybe it would be fair to call him a neo-trotskyite.  That's my understanding, anyway.  A reader writes in:

I found your comment that Watchmen "as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible" to be interesting for two reasons. Mostly, I'm a leftist myself (most would say "far leftist") and my initial reaction to Watchmen was that it was a critique of the left from the right. Veidt is clearly one of those on the far left who would be willing to do anything at all to avert war. Rorschach, on the other hand, is clearly of the right wing and is also clearly the story's ultimate hero. I thought that his final words about "one more body in the foundations" was a particularly telling comment about many leftist's view of what it takes to achieve peace. More than that, I saw it as a comment on the Soviet Union's bloody purge policies.

...and the blogger replies:

Me, I think Moore sees both the despicable and admirable aspects of Rorshach and regards him, mostly, with fascinated horror. But respect. (Rorshach is damned clever, and can be droll.) I think it's a deliberate irony that Kovacs turns out to be right about so much that is going on.

Exactly.  Rorschach's conservativism is a highly truncated kind (and maybe more to the point, his humanity is truncated) and Moore knows that.  Rorschach's heroic role in the story is unconventional and equivocal to say the least.

Labels: Culture, GraphicNovel, movie