Orchestra Strikes in the Age of “Citizen Journalism”

Following the news about the current strike by the members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) reminded me of what it was like being a writer covering concert performances during the last such strike in my home town of San Francisco. That was an occasion when my colleagues and I found ourselves as loose ends, committed to covering concerts that we knew were not going to happen through the writing both previews and reviews. On March 13, 2013, contract negotiations for the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) reached an impasse that led to the musicians going out on strike. As the city’s primary outlet for print journalism, the San Francisco Chronicle did a reasonably admirable job of trying to collect the “basic facts” and align them with how they were being interpreted from both labor and management points of view. Those of us working through the Internet were not so lucky. SFS was quite industrious when it came to putting out press releases. However, because the Communications Department was part of the “back office,” the dispatches we received carried only a single point of view. On the other hand the musicians themselves had to be cautious about saying too much to anyone for fear of jeopardizing any interactions that were still struggling to take place.

In politics this comes down to what is sometimes called “owning the narrative.” When one side of a negotiation dominates access to the media, it can be very difficult for the other side to establish that it, too, has a narrative. The one thing that we in San Francisco knew was that the musicians did not want to disappoint their audiences. As a result they arranged to commit their own time to giving performances in venues other than Davies Symphony Hall, and writers like myself and some of my colleagues could pitch in to get out the word about when and where such performances would be taking place.

A little over three and a half years have elapsed since the SFS strike was settled after about half a month of time on strike. For those of us viewing the PSO strike from the other side of the country, it would appear that narrative ownership has achieved a more balanced state. PSO has a blog site, but it does not take the objective reader long to realize that the narratives on this blog are coming from management. In this case, however, there is also now a site called Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Within that site there is a STRIKE UPDATE division, which provides the musicians with the opportunity to present the narratives that they “own.” This means that readers “on the outside” can examine the numbers that have been released on the PSO blog and then read an item-by-item rebuttal from the musicians.

This is fine as far as it goes; but, as any number of philosophers (going all the way back to Socrates) have observed, “understanding” is almost never just a matter of “having the facts.” There are any number of reasons why opposing sides should be developing different narratives; and they cannot be reduced to trivial distinctions between haves and have-nots. The problem is that a fair amount of expertise is required to read either side of the story, not only for its “facts” but also for the implications and consequences that arise if those facts are accepted. Asking someone whose primary interest is in listening to the performance of music in a concert setting to untangle the knots of conflicting narratives is about as absurd as asking a labor negotiator to sit in for the striking concertmaster.

We are thus faced with the classical problem of an Internet that allows us to see more and understand less. Put another way, we, as detached observers, may have more resources that we can consult; but that does not imply that we know what to do with them. All we can do is watch from a distance and try to make sense of it all, possibly with input from those better informed than we are who also happen to have a certain degree of objective detachment. In other words, things are not much different from the way they are when the news sources are trying to report a delicate hostage negotiation. In this case, however, the hostages are the concert-going public.

Remembering More Than John Henken

Thanks to a post by Alex Ross to his The Rest is Noise blog, I found a link to the review John Henken wrote for the Los Angeles Times about an event at UCLA called An Evening With Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa. Henken's opening words, deliberately cribbing from Abraham Lincoln, were, "The world will little note nor long remember what was said." For those who had not attended the event, it took a while to figure out why this was the case. It had nothing to do with either Boulez or Zappa or, for that matter, the relationship between them. (Zappa had been a guest at IRCAM; and the Boulez Conducts Zappa CD is still available from Amazon.com.)

Rather, the key factor in the evening being as unproductive as it was can be attributed entirely to the moderator for the event, David Raksin. For the benefit of those who do not recognize this name, Raksin composed the theme song for the movie Laura, a tune of awesome sophistication that has yet to be surpassed on any film soundtrack. He was also a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly once said to him something like, "Your music for Laura was excellent. Why do you want to compose twelve-tone music?"

Sadly, Raksin always seemed to feel that he needed more "reputable" credentials; and that conviction probably haunted him throughout his life. Thus, he tried to approach Boulez as an equal and Zappa as some insignificant upstart. He also annoyed the audience by dismissing questions submitted for both Boulez and Zappa as not worth asking, thus provoking annoyed catcalls from said audience. To some extent Henken was right: What was said was not particularly memorable, because Raksin all but prevented anything of significance from being said.

On the other hand, in the spirit of one of Alan Kaprow's happenings, the evening was unforgettable. Fortunately, it was memorable for at least one reason other than Raksin's reprehensible behavior. That was the only occasion on which I ever saw Boulez smile; and, as might be guessed, the smile was in response to one of Zappa's off-the-wall comments.

Swimming in Repertoire

One of the unforeseen consequences of my having made the move from IT research into writing about music is that I seem to have built up a voracious appetite for repertoire. As I learned from reading Leonard Slatkin's memoir, Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, such activity is one of the cornerstones of a conservatory education, at least at places like Juilliard, which Slatkin attended. It presumes that a comprehensive knowledge of music requires the broadest possible account of what has been documented, preferably coupled with devoting time to both recordings and performances to account for what has been made from those documents.

The good news is that I can pursue this activity through both attending as many performances as my schedule (and personal endurance) will allow and following up on opportunities to write about recordings. As of the beginning of March, I shall have been writing for Examiner.com for six years. That was preceded by building up my writing chops through several years of blogging, initially casual and progressively more and more serious. I have thus been evolving out of the state of a "passive consumer" for about a decade, perhaps to the point that repertoire now constitutes the medium of my existence, rather the way in which water does for a fish.

Every now and then someone will ask me how I retain it all. The fact is that I don't; and, at my advanced age, I am less and less likely to do so as time passes. I sometimes joke that I now depend on Google when my memory is failing, meaning that I write as much as I can "into" Examiner.com simply to make sure that Google will help me when I need it.

On the other hand I still make it a point not to take notes during a performance. Paying attention to writing down something means you are not paying attention to your auditory channels, and I simply will not abide by that latter option. Besides, human memory is not a file cabinet. It is an ongoing process of recollection. Just looking at a printed p program seems to be enough to set the wheels of that process in motion. What it yields provides the substance of what I write, and anything that does not emerge from that process was probably not worth writing about anyway.

I thus find myself in a somewhat complex and possibly tenuous relationship with both knowledge and memory. Exercise is as fundamental to maintaining that relationship as physical exercise is in maintaining the health and fitness of my body. (Because the latter is not particularly demanding on mind, I often use it as an occasion to begin to rehearse the thoughts that will find their way into writing.)

Does this protect me against lapses of memory when I need to recall something? Not at all. However, I think it does help me to sharpen my skills as a writer, even when mind is not always up to summoning up the specific memories I need or want.

Will I be able to keep this up indefinitely? I have no idea. Nevertheless, back when I was writing dance reviews as a student, I got to know Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. She kept at it to the very end. One night she wrote up the performance that she had just attended, went to bed, and died peacefully in her sleep.

Myopic Elitism

According to a post on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times, the next TED conference will be a one-day gathering to ponder the question: "What is the best Broadway can be?" This seems like a vivid example of our inability to look into the past beyond a distance of 24 hours. Here we have one institution that used to be a ritual celebration allowing corporate elites to rub shoulders with "the best and the brightest" hand-picked by Richard Wurman deciding to ponder another institution, which, over the course of about a century, has deteriorated from a major form of popular entertainment to an evening (or matinee) spectacle that only the elite can afford. The good news is that dramatic creativity has plenty of outlets in far more modest settings across this country; but, in that world of market-based thinking that I bemoaned yesterday, creativity is no longer of interest to those in power unless it can be converted into economic value.

Believe None of What you Read?

Something fishy may be going on in Robert F. Worth's article, "The Pillars of Arab Despotism," in the latest issue of The New York Review. This piece is, in part, a review of Juan Cole's latest book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East. Worth clearly does not buy Cole's arguments, but I have to wonder whether he is more interested in grinding axes, rather than defeating propositions. For one thing he describes Cole as "a prominent liberal blogger and scholar of the Middle East." Worth himself is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, writing his own book about the Arab Spring and its aftermath. This is a sufficiently reputable establishment that one wonders whether or not Cole's description was intended as a swipe at Cole for not having more legitimate credentials. Worth's biographical statement also describes him as "a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine." At the very least there is a distinctive odor of one writer whose work holds up through the editing process disparaging another who lives in the world of unedited blog posts.

This is the new world the Internet has made. Back when I was part of the evangelical promotion of "knowledge management," I remember that one of the slogans was, "We are drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge." Actually, we are drowning in opinions; and we lack any kind of "life preserver" for determining which of those opinions have any warranted substance.

The BBC Tries to Diagnose the US Government Shutdown

From time to time, the BBC News Web site runs articles under the rubric called Viewpoints. The basic idea is to take a critical issue a source out a wide variety of perspectives on the state of play. I am not sure that the BBC always does a good job of providing a representative sample of opinions, but there is still value to the exercise.

Yesterday afternoon's Viewpoints article was based on the question "Is American politics broken?" For the most part the contributions were reasoned, reflecting a variety of points of view. If definitely was more informative than listing to Washington Journal this morning on C-SPAN, which simply alternated between Republican and Democratic congressman accusing each other of bad behavior. Therefore, what I enjoyed the most from the BBC article was a break from the partisan ping-pong provided by Iwan Morgan, who runs the programs at the Institute of the Americas, which is based at University College in London.

Morgan argued that "American politics is working exactly how the founding fathers intended." In other words the current situation was simply a demonstration of separation of powers in action. He then observed that the Founding Fathers had not anticipated the extreme polarization of views that characterizes the current situation.

This is a good point. The prevailing culture of the Founding Fathers believed that "reasonable men may differ." Differences were resolved by compromise. The process was frequently painfully arduous. However, it resulted in a Declaration of Independence that was approved unanimously and a Constitution that was ratified by all thirteen of the existing colonial territories (which then became "states of the union").

This culture no longer prevails. Facilitated by the Internet, every individual is entitled to voice an opinion as loud as possible. Whether or not that opinion may be reconciled with others through reason depends less than how many followers one can muster through Facebook or Twitter. As a result, the American political system has become a deformed dog with lots of little tails all trying to wag it. If I may continue that metaphor, the energy that goes into wagging all of those tails requires so much metabolic energy that, because the dog never gets a break to eat, it will probably starve to death.

The culture of the Founding Fathers emerged from a (relatively new at the time) practice known as the "Republic of Letters." Writing letters had become a medium through which "reasonable men" could share their opinions across great distances. I remember Internet evangelists preaching that the Internet would launch a "new generation" of the Republic of Letters. It didn't happen.

It didn't happen because the Republic of Letters was not simply a matter of "content exchange." It involved a community of participants who but both mental and physical effort into the acts of both writing and reading. Rather than cultivating a new generation of such a community (as Usenet did in the pre-Internet days), the technology of "social software" not only destroyed and remnants of the community but made it virtually impossible for a new such community to arise. As a result, we are now in a terra incognita that the Founding Fathers could not possibly have imagined, meaning that not only are political practices broken but so, too, are the mechanisms for repairing them.

Illicit Reading

Apparently, The New York Times Book Review, once the most austere section of that newspaper's Sunday edition, it planning a Sex Issue for the coming weekend. I was struck by the following sentence on the paper's Web site today promoting that issue:

A select group of writers, including Nicholson Baker, Alison Bechdel, Rachel Kushner, Geoff Dyer and Jackie Collins, will share their memories of the first illicit thing they ever read. They describe the mixture of fear, shame, elation and pure raw nerves they felt reading something without the endorsement of parents or teachers.

What struck me about that "select group" is that I could care less what any of them have to say on this matter.

On the other hand, here behind my own little public megaphone to the world, I have no trouble picking up that bait, since I remember my first experience very vividly. For that I can thank the city of Philadelphia and the management of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Those were the people who decided to pull Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer from the shelves of all of their library collections.

My guess is that, if you ask anyone who lives in Philadelphia, they will tell you that one of the best things about the city is that it is a short train ride to New York. Therefore, I figured that the best way to find out what all the fuss was about was to get on that train. I had no trouble finding a bookstore to get a copy. I even remember starting to read it on the train ride back to Philadelphia. I even remember that the Grove paperback (which I still have) had, as a preface, "The Greatest Living Author" by Karl Shapiro. I knew who Shapiro was because one of his poems was included in the American Literature collection used for junior-year English at my high school. If this was someone my high school respected, I should read what he had to say.

Shapiro excited my desire to read Miller for myself with a single sentence:

Let's assemble a bible from his [Miller's] work … and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes.

The result was that my "first contact" with Tropic of Cancer was more one of solemnity that of any "mixture of fear, shame, elation and pure raw nerves." All that seemed to signify was that an authority I was willing to accept had declared Henry Miller to be an author that mattered, and it did not take me long to appreciate the warrants behind that declaration. Yes, the book was raw: nasty, brutish, and not particularly short. I seemed quickly to find my own pace for reading about his squalid conditions; so I never felt a need to slam the volume shut and shout, "Enough already!" The book had a pace that was missing from many of the books that I had been forced to read as part of my studies. As a result, reading the book was definitely a "first," but not because it had been declared illicit. Rather, it was my first contact with an author who really took the idea of writing as a craft seriously; and that is probably why, in my own reading experience, solemnity prevailed over all of those baser reactions from which the Free Library of Philadelphia had tried to protect me.

I should point out, by the way, that I did not feel particularly revolutionary at the time. Once I was within the Philadelphia city limits, I kept the book safely tucked away in its simple paper bag, the same bag I would have received had I purchased a copy of Anna Karenina. Then, when I got back to my parent's house, I gave the book its own MIT book cover. (This all happened during the summer after my freshman year, when I had my first summer job doing programming for a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.) That book cover has been gone for some time, but the Black Cat paperback itself is still on my bookshelf as part of the Henry Miller collection.

See, the major impact that came from reading Tropic of Cancer was an intense curiosity to read more of Miller's work. To this day I still prefer Tropic of Capricorn, primarily because it has more of a sense of humor. Above all, however, I like his essays, particularly when he writes about neglected artists, as he did for the two volumes of his Air-Conditioned Nightmare series. As I have previously observed, that collection includes the best essay about Edgard Varèse I have read by any author. Perhaps, after all, there was an element of "pure raw nerves" to Miller's writing, since it was only through that quality that he could get to the essence of Varèse's work so astutely.

Is the Social Network Sociopathic?

Chris Matyszczyk had a field day today with his Technically Incorrect blog for CNET news. The title of his post was "Does Facebook prolong heartbreak?;" and, as might be expected, the post was all about an affirmative answer to that question. The basic argument is that Facebook has a tendency to remind you of things you would prefer to neglect, one reason being that it has no way of marking certain links in a social network as leading to an emotional minefield for someone at one end of that link. To be fair, there is probably a good chance that any function capable of making such marks is not Turing-computable; but I think that just makes the point stronger. Those of us who continue to caution against unintended consequences continue to be in the minority, even when those consequences may be sociopathic.

However, while Matyszcyk's post may add fuel to one of my favorite fires, I have to be skeptical about its conclusions. The problem is that Matyszczyk's source for this post happens to be an article on Mail Online, the online service provided by the London Daily Mail. While the Daily Mail may have better claims to legitimacy that, say, the National Enquirer, I am not convinced it is that all much better. This particular story was filed by "DAILY MAIL REPORTER," which strikes me as a red flag that protects any particular individual from taking the rap for bad (or, worse yet, libelous) information.

The primary source then turns out to be Sir Nigel Shadbolt, who has never had any problems in accepting the burden of authority by publishing under his own name. The fact that he spends much of his time drinking Semantic Web Kool-Aid is his own affair. The point is that, because I know about his professional reputation, I am in a better position to assess my skepticism of his assertions than I am when confronted with an anonymous source.

I would, however, observe that Shadbolt is one of the co-founders of the Web Science Research Initiative. His co-founders are Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall, and Daniel Weitzner. Having voice criticism about the IBM "service science" initiative in the past, my reaction to "Web science" is basically "more of the same." Just as "service science" tried to factor the social dimension out of acts of providing service, I fear that "Web science" may have a similar objective. This is likely to have no effect on any general awareness of unintended consequences and may even reinforce those determined to believe that such consequences do not signify.

Fortunately, since my own presence on Facebook is kept to a bare minimum (and that only because it is required for some Examiner.com communications), I do not think I need worry about any new threats to my own sense of psychological well-being.

Bringing Some Lens Cleaner to the Rose-Colored Glasses

This morning Technology Reporter Jane Wakefield filed a story on the BBC News Web site with the headline "Tomorrow's cities: What's it like to live in a smart city?" Overlooking the fact that this involved little more than fantasizing that probably belonged in the Entertainment department, rather than Technology, this turned out to be the world seen through three sets of rose-colored glasses, one by Julia Michaels, an "Author and blogger" living in Rio de Janeiro. As a result of those credentials, I did some background checking and discovered that Wakefield's piece of fluff was actually a followup to the one she wrote last month entitled "Tomorrow's cities: Do you want to live in a smart city?" That article also read like a Chamber of Commerce pitch for Rio, leading me to write at that time about how those rose-colored glasses had so efficiently managed to obscure any view of the favelas in that city. The other contributors to the new piece were Anthony Townsend, Research Director at the Institute for the Future, and Carlo Ratti, Director of the Sensible City Lab at the MIT Media Lab. Wakefield could not have picked a better collection of three blind persons (noun out of deference to Michaels) groping at an elephant that happens to be virtual, rather than physical.

Ironically, if Wakefield really wanted to speculate about smart cities of the future, she would probably learn far more by reading some good fiction, rather than interviewing self-promoting evangelists. From that point of view, the absence of any mention of E. M. Forster comes across as an act of willful ignorance. "The Machine Stops" raises any number of issues concerned with how things can go wrong with technology that was initially conceived and built to improve the quality of life. This cautionary tale is even more relevant now that This cautionary tale is even more relevant now that some of Forster's predicitions are beginning to come true. If the BBC is going to provide reports about technology, the least they can do is screen their reporters for myopia.

The Clash of the Fetishes

It appears that Andrew Ross finally wrote something on his The Rest is Noise blog that prompted me to get out my flame-thrower. The good news is that I put in solid effort into my contrary position, resulting in an article for my Examiner.com national site. However, having taken that position, I realize that it may be situated in a broader context.

The "something" in question consisted only of a single sentence:

Wouldn't it be great if the media were covering significant new works by living composers, instead of reporting the discovery of an exceedingly minor piece by Beethoven?

The crux of my Examiner.com article involved pushing back against what I felt was an unfair attempt to conflate musicology (the discovery of a new Beethoven manuscript) and music criticism.

Ironically, yesterday I was typing up notes I had taken after having read an essay by Theodor W. Adorno entitled "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening." Basically, the "fetish-character" amounts to taking a consumerist stance on music experiences (including concerts as well as recordings), thinking in terms of the exchange-value of commodities rather than any strictly subjective use-value. From this point of view, Ross might accuse me of fetishizing the newly discovered manuscript, while I would retaliate by accusing him of fetishizing the performance of "new works by living composers." In other words you get to choose the fetish for which you pays your money!

Truncation Games

Fortunately, Yahoo! News can also be a source of amusement in its campaign to encourage Max Weber's dire forecast of a society in which meaning has been lost. Consider the following item (on the same page as the blog post about the bar following the stock market) on the MORE FROM YAHOO! NEWS list this morning:

In appeal to swing voters, Romney offers a more centrist mes … The Ticket - 2 hrs 27 mins ago

Yes, that is a truncation; the ellipsis shows it. It is clear that the last word is "message." I just wish that the character count had allowed the second "s" be be included!

Yahoo!'s Latest Attack on Semantics

I have to confess that curiosity drew me to the headline "Inventive Bar Uses Stock Market Approach to Price Drinks" in the NEWS FOR YOU list on this morning's Yahoo! News site, even though I was pretty sure that, compared with the breaking story about our sending troops into Jordan, it would not really qualify as "news." It didn't. As a matter of fact, it did not even come from an accredited news source. Rather, it was a post to the Trending Now blog, managed by Yahoo! News.

The icon for this blog sports the subtitle "The news you need to know." I suppose that, if there were some interesting economic analysis about coupling the price of drinks to stock market behavior, I might need to know that, in case it had an impact on how I managed my own portfolio; but analysis was clearly not the order of the day. For that matter, neither was "now." When I read this post, it was eighteen hours old. That hardly counts as "now" in Internet time. If high crimes and misdemeanors against semantics were a capital offense, Yahoo! would be facing the prospect of spending time in the big house!

A Pleasantly Surprising “Opera Bump”

Having recently written about the “opera bump” effect on my Examiner.com page view numbers, as observed through Google Analytics, following my Examiner.com article about the Grand Finale of the Merola Opera Program, I was pleases to see the same effect kick in on my national page in a slightly unanticipated way. I say “slightly unanticipated” because the article really had nothing to do with opera. However, it did involve a visit by both conductor Nicola Luisotti (Music Director of the San Francisco Opera) and soprano Leah Crocetto, previously an Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera, to the Berlin Philharmonie, for a performance that I decided to attend and review “virtually” through the archives of the Digital Concert Hall. Crocetto was Luisotti’s soprano soloist for his interpretation of Francis Poulenc’s setting of the Gloria text from the Mass, which he performed along with an account of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 100 symphony in B-flat major (his fifth).

Because of the backgrounds of these two performers, I included “Opera” in the Related Topics list I am supposed to provide for each of my articles; and that seems to have given the Page View Gods reason enough to smile on me!

John Cage Takes on the Opera

I once heard a (self-proclaimed) "expert" on blogging declare that, if you wanted to get page views for what you write about music, your should write about opera. Since I am in a position to write for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of page views (which, on Examiner.com, translates into revenue), I tend to ignore that kind of advice. However, the analyst in me likes to look for evidence that will either warrant or refute any such claim.

Sure enough, my Examiner.com article about the Grand Finale of the Merola Opera Program rewarded me with a nice bump in my numbers. However, as fate would have it, that "popular" offering took place the night after sfSound gave one of their John Cage programs in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church. This happened to be an all-instrumental affair that demanded a fair amount out of the sympathetic listener; but those true to their sympathy were more than duly rewarded. Since Cage's 100th birthday is now a little more than a week away (September 5), I was curious as to how attention to Cage would fare in comparison to attention to "sure-thing" opera. According to the latest numbers from Google Analytics, Cage has not been doing badly. He is in second place, but the difference is narrower than I would have expected.

I find this encouraging, since I can remember the days when Cage was anathema to any "right-thinking" (yes, those are scare quotes) concert-goer. His music may rarely (if ever) prompt those stirring cheers of "Bravo!," without which (apparently) opera singers cannot survive. On the other hand those who take their listening seriously now seem inclined to take Cage seriously as well, perhaps more seriously than they might take (just to choose an arbitrary example) Vincenzo Bellini!

The Google Initiative to Make the World a Better Place

Faithful to the conviction that technology can solve all problems, Google has launched an online initiative to take on what has begun to seem like a pandemic of violence as a preferred alternative to discussion and deliberation.  At least this seems to be what Dana Kerr reported last night in a post to her Internet & Media blog for CNET News.  The basic idea seems to be that, if you bring together people like “a former violent jihadist from Indonesia, an ex-neo-Nazi from Sweden and a Canadian who was held hostage for 15 months in Somalia,” alternatives to violence will emerge, will be implemented, and will be embraced around the world.  The above quote comes from a blog post by Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, which is supporting this initiative.

For my part I tend to subscribe to the Zen precept that he who tries to change the world can only make matters worse.  Thus, while I have no quibble with Winston Churchill’s declaration that “jaw jaw is better than war war,” I believe that serious problems require serious deliberation.  Thus, before I take this Google initiative seriously, I would like to see it run a gauntlet of some healthy skepticism.

I was a student during the Sixties, so I have had my own previous exposures to those who expressed strong beliefs through violence.  I thus was drawn to a production by a local theater company called Riot, which left a strong mark on my own thinking.  On the surface the piece was staged as a panel discussion.  The premise was that, while reasonable minds may differ, those differences can be resolved by honest efforts at dialog.  Beneath the surface, however, the result was anything but reasonable.  Dialog led to greater divisiveness as each participant became more entrenched in his/her personal convictions;  and, at the risk of trivializing the production, the result was that riot triumphed over reason.

This is actually a very familiar narrative.  The story keeps popping up in different settings based on different events, but the punch line never changes.  One of the more popular voices to repeat the story has been Yasmina Reza with her play God of Carnage, now given a much larger audience through Roman Polanski’s film, titled simply Carnage.  However popular the narrative itself may be, it probably keeps recurring because so few people get the message:  Before bringing together people of radically opposing opinions, it is more important to think in terms of how communication breaks down than it is to ask how technology can broaden the forum in which communication takes place.

Such breakdowns are almost always difficult to analyze.  Often they arise from data points that are too easily dismissed as either irrelevant or insignificant.  However, communication is a complex social system;  and we should think about that complexity they way we think that the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can trigger a tornado in Kansas.

Let me, therefore, consider one possible butterfly.  As Jürgen Habermas has observed, the success of a communicative action can sometimes depend critically on the specific words that are exchanged.  In this context we should consider the very name of the Google Ideas initiative:  Against Violent Extremism.  This is admirable, but we live in a world in which names get reduced to acronyms.  In this case the acronym is AVE.  This happens to be a Latin word that was used for greeting when the language was still a living one.  More specifically, it was a standard greeting among the military, often used specifically in reference to Caesar.  To be thoroughly blunt about it, it was used in the same context that the Nazis used “Heil, Hitler!”

Now, the fact that our own culture has become one that is ignorant history should not lead us to assume that all other cultures enjoy that ignorance.  There is thus a good chance that many who might otherwise be interested in participating in dialog will be put off by what amounts to “linguistic provocation” before the conversation even begins.  That will be when the butterfly flap triggers the tornado vortex;  and, as was the case in the Riot play, destruction will ensue.

Remembering What I Read

The Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño died in 2003.  About all I know of him came from articles written about him in The New York Review.  I was therefore surprised to see that, this past Thursday, he had a post on NYRBlog.  I had heard jokes about Facebook presences living on after death, but I had not expected to find a leading author writing from beyond the grave.

The post turned out to be a piece entitled “Scholars of Sodom,” taken from Chris Andrews’ translation of The Secret of Evil, due to be published by New Directions on April 17.  At the very least the post has made me curious about the book, since the text of the post seems to be an almost unclassifiable exercise in writing.  The first part is a “mind’s eye” description of V. S. Naipaul “strolling through the streets of Buenos Aires,” which amounts to two paragraphs of what is probably deliberate textual wandering.  The second part seems to imply that the first part was the beginning of one of Bolaño’s writing projects that never went anywhere.  The project appears to have been a reaction to several of Naipaul’s essays about Argentina;  and, as the bottom of the post observes and provides hyperlinks, three of those essays appeared in The New York Review.

Bolaño’s text is concerned primarily with Naipaul’s disgust for Argentina.  The source of that disgust seems to be Naipaul’s conviction that sodomy is “an Argentinean custom” (Bolaño’s choice of words).  Bolaño explores the path that may have led Naipaul to this conclusion and then asserts that the premises at the source of that path are nothing more than fabrications.

My initial reaction was that Bolaño had composed a clever piece of metafiction in an effort to defend (retroactively) Argentina against Naipaul’s attack.  He even injects himself into the fabric of this metafiction by observing that “Not even a Chilean” would have written “a critique as devastating as Naipaul’s.”  Upon further reflection, however, I realized that this is a more general text that cuts to the dangerously tight coupling between discrimination and raw hatred.  The fact is that, with surprisingly little variation, one could have written the same text about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its relation (both cause and effect) to anti-Semitic thinking.

For this reason I decided that this is a text to be remembered, which brought me into a serious confrontation with my current struggles to manage my own memory.  These days when anyone asks me about a point of fact in something I have written for Examiner.com, I reply that I rely on search engines (mostly Google) to remind me of just what I have written in the past.  In other words, if I want to remember something, I have to make sure that I create a trace of it that some search engine will be able to recover.  I have previously written about how I use PowerPoint to provide me with “the moral equivalent of 3 x 5 cards,” that I can use to copy out passages I have read that I want to remember, as well as my own observations about such passages.

Now it seems that I am using blogging as yet another extension of memory.  For this particular text, it seemed more important to reflect on Bolaño’s virtual blog post with a blog post of my own, which would probably get indexed by Google very shortly after I publish it.  This struck me as the best thing for me to have done;  and so, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s conclusion to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I have and this is it.

Audiophilia is not for Music Lovers!

Once again Steve Guttenberg has put up a post on his The Audiophiliac blog on CNET News that reminds me that “audiophilia” has absolutely nothing to do with listening to music (at least within Igor Stravinsky’s semantics for the verb “listen”).  Here is the opening of Guttenberg’s post:

For me a great hi-fi doesn't necessarily have to be the best sounding one.

It's more about a sound that draws me in. One CD or LP leads to the next, and I don't want to stop to eat, read, go to bed, or watch TV. A great hi-fi is one that lets the music cut loose.

My guess is that the last sentence has more to do with “good vibrations” than music.  Indeed, as the post rambles on, I realized that Guttenberg was more interested on those vibrations from Jimi Hendrix and the Doors (the examples he cites) than with the fact that those guys were performing music.  In other words what draws one into Hendrix is not the sound but rather his whole approach to performing that yields the sound as a byproduct.

It would not surprise me if, within a decade, neuroscience will know enough about the pathway from the inner ear to the cerebral cortex to model how we respond to different kinds of sounds.  This may even lead to a new “listening device” that will be able to tweak all of the right neurons without ever having to worry about the physical demands of bandwidth.  Should this happen, I suspect that such a device will keep Guttenberg happy for the rest of his life.  Those of us who are more serious about listening as a significant factor in our bodily behavior will probably be happy to have him out of the way!

Incremental Reading about Steve Jobs

Whatever anyone may say about Walter Isaacson’s biographical treatment of Steve Jobs, we have definitely observed some interesting reading habits since the release of the book.  I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one should not write seriously about any book until one has read it in its entirety.  I learned that lesson best while reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.  I was full of enthusiasm throughout the early chapters of the book.  You might even say that I read it on the edge of my seat, anticipating the chapters in which he would spill out the hard data from which he drew his awe-inspiring conclusions.  Well it turned out that everything he had to say about data could be found in a single footnote, in which he revealed that his conclusions were based primarily on self-observation while under the influence of mind-altering substances.

Isaacson is the last author I would accuse of such deceptive concealment of data.  However, now that blogging has replaced journalism, we have been flooded with no end of look-what-I-just-read blog posts, all based on isolated passages in the book;  and, to make matters worse, some of them seem to be showing up as “news articles” in daily papers.  Now regular readers know that I sometimes do this sort of thing with my own reading on this site, but I never try to pass it off as newsworthy.  In general I do it when I am reading a particularly complex source, and trying to write about what I have been reading helps me to come to a better understanding.  I doubt that I would approach a biographical text the same way, unless it was a biography I already knew very well and the text was providing new insights or perspectives into my past knowledge.  What, I wonder, will these tidbits-about-Jobs-seekers do when they finally get to the end of Isaacson’s book?  Will any of them take the trouble to say anything about the “long view” of either Jobs’ life or the book’s account of it;  or will such topics be beyond the scope of their attention span?

Why There is not Always "an App for That"

Ken Hess put up a post to the Virtually Speaking blog on ZDNet this morning with the provocative title “Why desktop computing failed.”  I suppose one could reduce the entire piece to the following motto:

The desktop is dead;  long live the app!

Here is a more reasoned statement of the basic argument in Hess’ own words:

Applications, not the OS, is where it’s at. Who cares to interact with the operating system for anything other than to run applications? I do but I’m a computer guy. But, if there’s an app for that, I want to use it. I can’t think of any reason whatsoever, under normal circumstances, for ordinary users to interact with the operating system. Sure, some of us techie-types like to mess with the OS but for most people, it’s just not a need.

Now, granting that blogs are there for all of us to vent our opinions, my basic conclusion is that, like just about any other technology wonk, Hess assumes that anything he says for himself applies to all users.  In other words he is a typical example of why those of us who just want to get our work done never seem to avoid running afoul of the computer systems we use.

To be fair, I have to plead to being “a computer guy.”  On the basis of his brief biographical statement, I would say that there is a good chance that I was “a computer guy” before Hess was born;  but that has nothing to do with my current work activities.  Now I spend most of my time writing, and most of my writing work involves doing background research.  For me the great virtue of current technology is that I can be doing my research in tandem with my writing.  This means that my rough drafts end of being sort of like stream-of-consciousness diary pages (or laboratory notebook for those who think the concept should be more dignified) that play out hypotheses and then document the sources I invoke to support those hypotheses;  but I can do this because most (but not all) of those sources are in digital form, either on the Web or on my hard drive.  I still have a fair amount of heavy lifting to do when it comes to turning a rough draft into something worthy of the attention of my readers, but the act of composition has become much more dynamic for me.  For better or worse, I relish those dynamic qualities.

However, those dynamic qualities reveal the shallowness of Hess’ thinking, at least where my own work habits are concerned.  The fact is that, while many aspire to a world in which all we shall need is a Web browser that easily manages a collection of tabs, I require a level of interoperability that goes beyond such a simplistic worldview.  At the very least, digitization itself as part of what I do, mostly in the form of scanning with optical character recognition;  and, because I respect the constraints of copyright, I feel it necessary to confine all of my created digital forms to the privacy of my hard drive.  Similarly, I do a lot of reading;  and that involves a lot of note-taking.  I would not want my notes to reside anywhere except on that hard drive (and its backup server, which I still prefer to keep as a local device, rather than a cloud service).  Indeed, I do not want my rough drafts to reside anywhere other than locally.

My point is that I do a lot of things with a lot of applications, but it is not just about using those applications.  It is about whether I can depend on a useful level of interoperability among them.  That interoperability takes many forms, but almost all of them are supported by an underlying operating system.  Each application may be designed to allow the operating system to do its thing, but that is ultimately the point.  No application can ever be designed to anticipate all the possibilities of interoperability, but it can be designed to confirm to some set of basic functionality guaranteed by the operating system.  Take away that interoperability, and I would no longer be able to streamline my research practices to the extent that I have done so.

Having now made my point, I should also say that I agree with Hess’ indictment of “the fat and stupid operating system.”  It does not take an awful lot of functionality to support interoperability;  but the simplicity of such a foundation has not prevent most of the operating systems out there from becoming bloated with “features” (scare quotes intended) that are more likely to get in your way than facilitate your work practices.  On the other hand, as we all know from Microsoft Office, it is just as easy for an application to succumb to such bloat as it is for an operating system.

The bottom line, then, is that Hess chose the wrong target.  It is not the operating systems that have failed.  The failure lies with software developers (and probably their managers) who prefer to go after “the next cool thing” without ever taking the time to think about what users are actually doing and how those activities may be impacted (and usually impeded) by the narrowness of vision that plagues the development process.

Reinforcement from H. Allen Orr

It was comforting to see H. Allen Orr take on the pretentions to scientific thinking in David Brooks’ latest book, The Social Animal:  The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.  After all, in June of 2010, I had accused Brooks of being “occupied with cherry-picking take-away one-liners;”  so I really did not expect that his book would offer anything of substance.  Orr, on the other hand, is always informative and fun to read.  I decided that, even if I had my own reasons for ignoring Brooks’ book as a waste of time, I might still find a useful take-away or two in Orr’s review.

That take-away came sooner than I anticipated.  It was in the opening sentences:

Science has a lot of uses.  It can uncover laws of nature, cure disease, inspire awe, make bombs, and help bridges to stand up.  Indeed science is so good at what it does that there’s a perpetual temptation to drag it into problems where it may add little or even distract from the real issues.

I would like to think that this was a polite way of suggesting that Brooks would not know a real issue if it took a serious bite out of his tush;  but, when one writes for The New York Review (where the quoted sentences appeared), one needs a higher standard of civility than the norms of the blogosphere.

Nevertheless, Orr wastes little time in homing in on just how misguided Brooks’ efforts in this book are.  Furthermore, he makes his case with Brooks’ own words:

The French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses;  the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.

If this is how Brooks thinks about science, then it may be indicative of more than his own muddled perspective.  Science, after all, is now about winning or losing.  It is about formulating hypotheses and then testing them under controlled experimental conditions.  If a hypothesis is not consistent with the experimental results, it is not a “loser.”  The experiment provides new data that may inform us about the formulation of the hypothesis, the conditions of the experiment, or both.

That, of course, is “science in theory.”  The practice of science is another matter;  and, in the setting of how science has been practiced in this country for at least half a century, there is at least one domain in which there are winners and losers.  That is the domain of competing for the necessary funds without which “science in theory” cannot be practiced.  One wonders what the Enlightenment would have been like had “the republic of letters” been displaced by “the marketplace of ideas.”  Can you imagine Hume and Rousseau both having to go up against a Defense Department project manager, each armed with a massive PowerPoint presentation?  Rousseau would probably have retreated to writing more potboiler fiction, and Hume would probably never have left that merchant’s office in Bristol.

Come to think of it, The Social Animal happens to be structured as a fictional narrative, although I think that Orr is overly generous in comparing it to Rousseau’s Émile.