“You can’t handle the truth!”

A frustrated Anthony Fauci trying to explain logic to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (from an ABC7 Eyewitness News Web page)

The full text of an article from ABC7 Eyewitness News posted about an hour ago is short and bitter:

Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.

It comes after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions at a hearing last week about his role in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reading it immediately reminded me of the 1992 movie A Few Good Men. This involved the court-marshal of a Navy colonel performed by Jack Nicholson. A Marine had died as a result of the colonel’s action, but the colonel was convinced that he would be found innocent on the basis of rank. Fortunately, the prosecuting attorney, a mere lieutenant performed by Tom Cruise, persisted in presenting the court with the hard facts. He was successful enough to back the colonel into a corner on the basis of the colonel’s own evidence, which led to Nicholson’s most famous explosive delivery: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Now that Cruise is older and somewhat more “seasoned,” perhaps he will be cast as Fauci struggling to invoke science and logic in order to make a point to Republican senators!

News That's "Fit to Print?"

Kristi Noem at a news conference held at Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters this past Saturday (photograph by Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Associated Press)

Once again, I find myself wondering if reporting of "difficult situations" is more reliable coming from the United Kingdom sources such as The Guardian than from any of the "home front" sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/26/trump-administration-alex-pretti-shooting-statements 

Of “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” (again)

As I previously wrote back in 2019, this is a phrase famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Mark Twain cited it in Chapters from My Autobiography, where he attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli. While that attribution is questionable, it certainly does not undermine the semantic substance. Mind you, statistical results are only as good as the sample space from which they are computed, which is why willful distortion of the sample space will often (if not always) lead to “damned lies.”

Photograph from the article for The Guardian showing private jets at an airport in Arizona (provided by Associated Press photographer Ross D Franklin)

That said, when we are not yet halfway through the first month of the year, Oxfam has come up with a chilling statistic. I read about it this morning in an article for The Guardian by Rosie Peters-McDonald. Her first two sentences say it all:

The world’s richest 1% have used up their fair share of carbon emissions just 10 days into 2026, analysis has found.

Meanwhile, the richest 0.1% took just three days to exhaust their annual carbon budget, according to the research by Oxfam.

Peters-McDonald then goes on to add insult to injury:

Not only are the super-rich responsible for most carbon emissions, but they also invest in the most polluting industries. A billionaire carries, on average, an investment portfolio in companies that will produce 1.9m tonnes of CO2 a year – roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 400,000 petrol cars.

Now my guess is that many of these billionaires account on the belief that the “man on the street” neither knows nor cares about statistics. For better or worse, belief tends to be guided by “what television tells us;” and, sadly, too often television relies on that old line from the “Daily News” song:

Don’t try to confuse my mind with facts.

More often than not, the “human condition” relies on the preference of what we would like things to be, rather than what they are. My guess is that that “richest 1%” are well aware of these statistics. They probably even know better than to dismiss them as “damned lies.” Rather, they probably take comfort in the fact that the remaining 99% either just does not care or feels helpless about doing anything. I put myself in the latter category, since I know that this kind of writing is very unlikely to have much impact. Nevertheless, I feel that the least I can do is to make my opinions known “on the record!”

Has 1984 Finally Arrived?

Every morning begins with a review of incoming electronic mail followed by checking out the latest news feeds. I use The Old Reader, and one of my three sources for world news is Al Jazeera (which I also watch on television thanks to the YouTube app). This morning I encountered an Al Jazeera feed with the headline: "Trump admin orders Smithsonian museums to be reviewed for ‘Americanism.’" Naturally, this attracted my attention.

Sadly, when I first clicked the headline to upload the article, I saw only that headline, the subheadline, and a photograph. All this took place on my Firefox platform. Fortunately, I also keep a Safari window on my desktop, which had no trouble providing a complete account for the URL. Ironically, once I saw the full text on Safari, it also appeared on Firefox! Is Big Brother trying to stick his nose into the news we choose to follow, or is the Al Jazeera Web site just clunky? Enquiring minds want to know! 😠

A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

Today the Opinion section of the Al Jazeera Web site ran an article with the primary headline “Learning to trust the internet again” followed by the secondary headline “Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.” Given the recent beating that the very concept of truth has been taking, not only in the domain of politics but also, more recently, in that of health care, one might think that this article would be a breath of fresh air. Then the reader may proceed below those headlines to discover that the author of the article was Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia twenty years ago. So the article amounts to a “birthday party” for Wikipedia with Wales as the Master of Ceremonies.

Those who read this site regularly know that Wikipedia has been a valuable tool for me. Where music history is concerned, the best resource in English remains what is now The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is now available through the Oxford Music Online Web site. However, that site is not available without charge for general public access. My own ability to use it comes from the fact that I can get into the site once the San Francisco Public Library Web site has validated the identification code on my library card. As a result, I almost never provide hyperlinks into the Oxford site, since I prefer not to lead my readers into a paywall.

Instead, I provide hyperlinks into Wikipedia. When it comes to nuts-and-bolts data about composer biographies and lists of their compositions, I have rarely been disappointed. Indeed, in accounts of more arcane topics, such as the diversity of tuning systems, I have been just as satisfied; and, where ethnomusicology is concerned, it would not surprise me if Wikipedia was a better source than Oxford. My guess is that these assets of Wikipedia are due to a great abundance of contributors, probably consisting of graduate students and junior faculty members, that have been writing such content for other reasons and then appreciate being able to upload it to a site for the benefit of others. As one reads the Al Jazeera article, one quickly realizes that this is the world that Wales wanted Wikipedia to sustain.

However, it is important to acknowledge what Wales took (and continues to take) to be Wikipedia’s greatest asset:

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and that means that hundreds of thousands of people are also involved in the integrity of protecting the knowledge that we find on it.

While this may be true of the global community of music scholars, we all know that they amount to a rather small minority of the community of “citizen editors” that sustain Wales’ project. The fact is that, as recently as 2008, Wales’ ideal vision was taking a serious beating.

In February of that year, Mary Spicuzza wrote an article for SF Weekly, which was published in print as “Wikipidiots” and can still be found archived on the SF Weekly Web site under the title “Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco.” By way of endorsement, I wrote an article of my own on this site in which I offered my own take on Wales’ idealization of “citizen editors:”

While it is true that Plato tried to enhance the readability of his dialogs by providing his “characters” with (often contentious) personalities, I doubt that he would have appreciated the extent to which the discussion of entries in a would-be encyclopedia that has become a major Internet resource has assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!

Hopefully, at least some of my readers were able to observe that my hyperlink pointed to a Wikipedia page!

To be fair, things have improved since then; so I have no desire to rain on Wikimania 2021, Wales’ “all-virtual celebration” of the efforts of all those writers and editors that contributed content on a strictly voluntary basis. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the current century has emerged as one in which marketing has prevailed over truth in ways that those of my own generation could not have imagined, let alone anticipated. Wales’ ideal is one of “a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers;” but, in the “real world,” the very concept of “informed action” is on life-support and has been for longer that we would like to admit. So, while I can thank Wales with providing me with a tool that has become essential to my current work, I am more than a little skeptical that his ideals will be realized.

Is Facebook Asking the Right Questions?

I just finished reading a BBC News post entitled “Facebook reveals most-seen posts are inane questions, not politics.” The story itself begins as follows:

After being accused of spreading right-wing content, Facebook has revealed that its most-viewed posts include asking if sugar goes with spaghetti.

Its first-ever report on the contents of people's news feeds in the United States focuses on how many people see a post rather than any other measurement.

The good news is that, at the very least, this counts as an attempt to clear Facebook of any accusations that is has become an instrument for “politics by other means” (or, perhaps, the more activist proposition, “revolution by other means”). The bad news is that they may have engaged inadequate analytic techniques to arrive at questionable conclusions. The fact is that people were bombarded with “things to see” long before Facebook added to the bombardment.

We might do well to think of the mechanisms behind Facebook posts the same way we think about advertising. We are all used to the high volume of advertising that we encounter through television. (There are other sources, such as billboards and newspapers; but my guess is that television advertising draws more attention, simply because it can deploy more attention-grabbing techniques.) Furthermore, the advertising business is not just about drawing eyeballs. It is a matter of drawing the right eyeballs in the interest of getting “the mind behind the eyeballs” to take some desired action (usually buying something, whether you need it or not).

In that context the concept of “most-viewed posts” is a relatively meaningless metric; and rank-ordering the posts themselves according to that metric is even more meaningless. Indeed, even the question of passing a post to others may not be that significant. The more difficult question to deal with is whether acts of reading and sharing lead to actions being taken that have nothing to do directly with reading and sharing.

In other words Facebook needs to be addressed on the same turf as the question of whether the storming of the Capitol building was the result of deliberate incitement. This is a complex question that cannot be answered by simple bean-counting. It is not so much about “spreading the word” as it is about how persuasive those words are and if they are persuasive enough to lead to action.

My guess is that there are no analytical tools for identifying such persuasion, not among Facebook resources or anywhere else. Those in the business of advertising may have a richer qualitative understanding of human nature, but they probably know better than to reduce that understanding to quantitative metrics. The best we can do in the face of a possible crisis is ask, “How did we get into this mess?” Where the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex is concerned, the House of Representatives tried to address this question. Whether or not any useful results will arise is still up for grabs.

Meanwhile, we should be as careful with Facebook’s accounts of its own analyses as we are in taking any television commercial to be verifiable truth.

Uninformed Thoughts about the Nasdaq Index

I have gotten into the habit of using the Apple Stocks app to track significant indices in the United States, Europe, and Asia on a daily basis. (I review my own portfolios on a monthly basis based on statements provided by my broker.) As I write this, the Nasdaq index is at 117.33. This is the highest it has been since the index peaked at 118.67 on February 4!

Let's not kid ourselves. No stock index is a measure of "value." At best the level of an index can be taken as a level of confidence or, perhaps more specifically, willingness to trade. Why should that willingness be higher for the Nasdaq portfolio than it is for the S&P 500? Since I am not in any way an expert on these matter, my best conjecture is that Nasdaq holdings represent businesses that can function with much, if not all, of the employees working from home. Nasdaq reflects companies that "push bits," one way or another, rather than build houses or manage grocery stores.

In other words, while it might be easy to promote Nasdaq as a sign of recovery, the basis for computing the index value may not be a statistically significant indicator of the health of the overall economy.

Is Failed Crisis Management Evil?

Once again I feel a need to comment on an article that just appeared on the Al Jazeera English Web site:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-banality-evil-200505075710643.html

This article draws upon the concept of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hanna Arendt in her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. The authors of the article, Catherine Rottenberg and Nira Yuval Davis, explain Arendt’s terminology as follows:

She invoked the term to describe how Eichmann, a key bureaucratic functionary of the Nazi party, carried out his technocratic duties without questioning their purpose.

I find it somewhat ironic that this perspective can be traced as least as far back as the Crucifixion, at which one of the last “words” of Jesus was “they know not what they do,” suggesting that those killing him could still deserve forgiveness.

Rottenberg and Davis then try to make the case that the banality of evil can also take place “through the carrying out of bureaucratic tasks in an incompetent and negligent way.” For me this recalled the old joke that, if stupidity were a crime, it would be impossible to build enough prisons for the criminals. Even so, I think that Jesus was a bit too forgiving of those that “know not what they do,” particularly when they have embraced ignorance as a matter of conscious choice. In this case the conscious choice is one of viewing market value as the only relevant social value, relying only on the numerical calculations that determined market value without allowing for any other factors, many (most?) of which are not quantitative, to enter the calculus.

Max Weber saw the problem with such prioritizing. He argued that it would bring about two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom. The first of these should be clear enough: The very meaning of “value” as been so distorted that we have become a world population for which no other value is realistically conceivable. One may then recognize loss of freedom at least at the level of no longer having the freedom to think for ourselves about what we value. Even deeper is the issue that only those that command significant financial resources are free to make choices about what factors impact the world in which we live, whether that world is suffering a plague or just losing its icecaps.

I prefer not to pass judgment on whether those that have brought about loss of meaning and loss of value are evil. In this sort of a mess, nothing will be gained from finger-pointing. On the other hand, we might do well to recall what was written in our Declaration of Independence after the one sentence that so many of us know by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It that context, perhaps we should view to prioritization of financial resources as an act of usurpation against those self-evident truths. By all rights, such Government could be overthrown by the electoral processes already in place; but, as we have seen over the last decade, the “meaning” of those processes is yet another manifestation of Weber’s loss-of-meaning syndrome.

That particular loss may well lie at the heart the mess in which we are stuck, and it remains to be seem if there are enough people that still respect valid meaning with the power to get the population as a whole out of that mess.

Google Responds with Half a Loaf

Readers may recall Tuesday's post documenting an account in which a post to an anti-Semitic blog received a page rank second only to a Wikipedia article. According to an article by Barbara Ortutay in the Business Report section of this mornings San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to do something about this. They will deploy a new process under which those reviewing search results will see a flag classifying the article as "upsetting-offensive." Such a flag will also be taken into account in recalculating the ranking of the article.

It would appear that Google has also recognized that such flagging cannot, at least at present, be automated. So the search for articles that need to be flagged will be assigned to human being known as "quality raters." Admirable as this may be, all quality raters will be contractors. In other words Google does not see the work they do as significant enough to assign it to full-time staff. Mind you, we all know about how contractors have become "the new labor force;" but were quality of results is concerned, one would have thought that this would have been a core priority. If it does not, then just what is important to Google these days?

Attacca Quartet Explores Music by Michael Ippolito on their New Album

This Friday Azica Records will release its second album of performances by the Attacca Quartet, whose members are violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee. As usual, the album has already been assigned a Web page on Amazon.com, which has been set up to process pre-orders. The title of the album is Songlines; and it consists of four compositions by Michael Ippolito, all of which are less than ten years old.

Azica’s first recording of Attacca came out in March of 2013. Its title (following the case conventions on the cover) was fellow traveler: the complete string quartet works of JOHN ADAMS. While Adams himself has endorsed Attacca’s performance of his music, I must confess to finding it a bit disconcerting to encounter the adjective “complete” applied to a composer who is still alive (particularly when the age of that composer is so close to my own)! Furthermore, if we take “string quartet works” to include music involving string quartet and orchestra, then the album overlooks “Absolute Jest,” which was first performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet performing with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) conducted by SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. (It would have been simpler, and more accurate, to say just “string quartets!”)

Nevertheless, it is worth dwelling on the “fellow traveler” part of the title, since Songlines seems to have been a product of such fellow travelers. Last year Attacca was named Quartet in Residence at Texas State University of Music, where Ippolito is currently Assistant Professor of Composition. So, at the very least, Ippolito and Attacca are “fellow travelers” in academic life. Nevertheless, all of the compositions on this album predate the arrival of Attacca at Texas State in 2016. (The group was formed in 2003 when all four members were students at the Juilliard School.)

This recording was my “first contact” with both the ensemble and the composer. I feel necessary to begin with a sort of disclaimer when it comes to the general topic of new music for string quartet. Those who follow this repertoire probably know that San Francisco is the “home base” of the Kronos Quartet; but it is also a city that enjoys a generous number of more recently-formed quartets that share Kronos’ interest in exploring and presenting new repertoire, often motivated by commission. To highlight two particularly appropriate examples, Friction Quartet celebrated its fifth anniversary this past September; and the Thalea String Quartet, which is currently quartet-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was featured as a “next generation” string quartet during KRONOS FESTIVAL 2017 at the beginning of this month.

This posed a difficulty when it came to listening to Ippolito’s music. The problem was that all five of the selections on this album suggested that the composer had been listening to too many Kronos recordings. This is probably a warped perception. However, it highlights the fact that, while there is, indeed, far more diversity to the string quartet repertoire than Kronos has covered, it was unclear that Ippolito had established a a voice that is distinctively his own in this genre. His biographical statement in the accompanying booklet suggests that he has cultivated a substantial catalog that includes orchestral writing, as well as chamber music; but, even across this single album, there is a sense that he has not explored very far beyond the bounds of a relatively limited comfort zone.

To be fair, this may be an occupational hazard in the world the Internet has made. Results of creativity are often subjected to almost immediate distribution on a global scale, meaning that just about anyone interested in “new music” has opportunities to explore far more than (s)he can handle. The downside to all this is that we run the risk of becoming a society in which the superficiality of “consumption” tends to trump the slower-paced culture of attentive listening. It used to be that universities provided sanctuary from market-based thinking that cares about little more than efficient production to satisfy consumption; but the “inconvenient truth” is that a university run by such market-based thinking often ends up questioning whether or not a music department provides “value for money.” In such desperate times my personal feelings about Ippolito’s work as a composer seem to pale against more serious questions concerned with whether or not our society is willing to view him as productive member.

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Have the Brutes Won?

Back on February 22, 2015, this site warned that "political discourse" had become as much of an oxymoron as "central intelligence" (the punch line to an article entitled "Dignifying Stupidity with a Response"). If I had a time machine, I would probably use it to revisit myself on that date for the pleasure to delivering that old line, "You ain't seen nuttin' yet!" One capable of detaching enough to view this whole situation from a sober distance can probably conclude that, where voters are concerned (not only in the United States but in just about any country in which elections are held), powerful rhetoric as reduced the strength of logic to less than zero (negative because there are now sufficiently large blocs among the electorate who see logic as a sign of a path to be avoided, hence Michael Gove's declaration that voters "have had enough of experts").

In this context, an Opinion piece by Jeff Sparrow posted this morning on the Al Jazeera Web site is a depressing sign of just how bad things have become. Taking Keith Olbermann as a case in point, Sparrow makes the case that the left is now resorting to the same pandering techniques that worked so well for Donald Trump. (He calls this technique "anti-Trump Trumpism.") As might be expected, he does not approve of this phenomenon, recalling the old adage that fighting fire with fire just gets more things burnt. Unfortunately, Sparrow never tried to take on Gove's claim or its implications, the most important of which is that rationality no longer has any currency.

Can rationality be restored? Barack Obama believe that this can be achieved at a grass-roots level. Start with small like-minded communities; and eventually they will grow. I would like to embrace his optimism. Perhaps I have to, because irrationality has become such a global phenomenon that seeking refuge is no longer an option.

Nevertheless, I still seem to be able to turn to cynicism when no other refuge is available. In that vein I need to share my reflection on the photograph that headed Sparrow's article:

This is an anti-Trump protest held in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The enlarged image on Al Jazeera will show that the concrete stela behind the letter "C" has the name "Bulfinch." That is there to commemorate Charles Bulfinch, the architect who designed the State House. Today Bullfinch is much less known than his son Thomas, whose last name became closely associated with the collection of myths of different cultures. The cynic in me is tempted to give this photograph the caption "Bulfinch's Mythology!"

Will the World Economic Forum Have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment?

The television channel for BBC World Service News has begun to run self-promoting advertisements about its coverage of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This year’s gathering will begin on January 17 and will last for four days, meaning that it will probably conclude around the time that Donald Trump will be taking the Oath of Office for President of the United States on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Those who have followed this site for several years known that it has pulled no punches in writing about this event in the past. In 2014 it went as far as to compare Davos with Prince Prospero’s fortified castle from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death;” but Davos seems to be far more insulated from harsh (if not deadly) realities than Prospero’s castle. Even when the Forum invites the likes of Joe Stiglitz, it has been clear that the gulf between inviting a participant and paying attention to him/her continues to entail an unscalable width.

Still, one has to wonder how the rich and mighty have been so successful at maintaining their oblivion. Will their gambits continue to work in an age when Great Britain voted to secede from the European Union and the United States voted Trump to succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States? Think of the mileage the Brexit leader Michael Gove got out of his declaration that his followers “have had enough of experts.”

Davos has traditionally been the venue in which the rich and mighty get to drink from the deep pool of expertise and then go forth with their policies refreshed. The reality, however, it that, being all-too-human, they only listen to observations that reinforce opinions and strategies that they already have, which is why someone like Stiglitz can only survive by realizing that he is fighting a losing battle.

So the question to ask is whether or not those “wise men of Davos” can sustain a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment and recognize why so many people around the world chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the motto, “Good riddance, 2016?” Do they view Gove and Trump as nothing more than “outlier” points on whatever multidimensional landscape currently feeds their econometric models? Alternatively, has the “echo chamber” effect of social media combined with fallacious attempts to extract knowledge from Google snippets so numbed their capacity for decision-making that they do not even realize that the “wise men” epithet can only be read sarcastically? My guess is that Davos will continue to provide the cloud of ignorance that has nurtured its denizens for many years. The raison d’être behind the venue’s isolation may well be that it supports deep thinking by insulating attendees from the hassles of day-to-day life; but history has taught us that it is just another echo chamber where world leaders in both business and politics can reassure each other that they are all making wise decisions without worrying about how well those decisions mesh with down-to-earth reality.

Hearing, Listening, and Ducks: Tracking Down the Source

Yesterday I wrote about my frustration with Google in trying to track down the source of an often cited quote by Igor Stravinsky:

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

This morning it occurred to be that a source of that frustration may have been my decision to use Google, rather than Google Scholar; but it turned out that this purported “scholarly tool” was even less useful than “mainstream” Google. As a result, my only recourse was to follow through on the promise I made to go over to the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) in search of Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. As is frequently the case with scholarship (at least as I was trained to practice it, realizing that it may well be pretty much a lost art by now), this turned out to be a good-news-bad-news affair. Fortunately, the good news significantly outweighed the bad.

Before getting into the specifics, however, I need to observe that being directed to Walsh’s book turned out to be a matter of dumb luck. For those who did not follow yesterday’s narrative, I only learned about it when I added “Craft” to the search keys for the online SFPL catalog, assuming that the text came from one of the many conversations that Stravinsky had with Robert Craft that were subsequently transcribed and published. In fact Craft had nothing to do in this particular case; but, because Walsh’s book is so thorough, Craft’s name appears in it with great frequency!

The text actually came about thanks to Deborah Ishlon, publicity director for Columbia Records. Columbia saw Stravinsky as a “property” and was determined to have him direct, or at least supervise, the recording of all of his compositions. This resulted in a fancy box of vinyls entitled Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971: The Edition (a rather arrogant subtitle, when you think of it, particularly since it was far from complete), which eventually found its way to a 22-CD collection. This was followed in October of 2015 by a 57-CD box set entitled Igor Stravinsky: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. Both of these were notorious for prioritizing the visual over the auditory; and there have been sources that have suggested that Columbia’s treatment of Stravinsky was pretty much on the same level as how the label handled Thelonious Monk … a road paved with good intentions that led you-know-where!

The good news was that Ishlon was also interested in capturing Stravinsky’s thoughts about making music. Thus, according to Walsh, she ended up tape recording a conversation of her own with Stravinsky (without any appearance of Robert Craft). Walsh observed that Stravinsky probably informed Ishlon in advance of the questions he wanted to answer. Nevertheless, Walsh was struck that the text consisted entirely of Stravinsky speaking English, in contrast to the Poetics of Music lectures he had given at Harvard, which had to be translated.

According to the footnote that Walsh provided, the transcript of Stravinsky’s encounter with Ishlon now resides at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (foundation) in Basle. It is unclear just how long this document is, but Walsh’s book reproduces six paragraphs. These are worth reading in their entirety, at least for my own benefit, if not for the curiosity of others:

To be a good listener you must acquire a musical culture, as in literature. You must be familiar with the history and development of music, you must listen. The person with the subscription ticket for concerts, he is not necessarily a musically cultured person. He is musical only because the music is performed in front of him. To receive music you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music; you must feel that it is something you need. Some let the ear be present and they make no effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

The larger the audience, the worse. I have never attached much importance to the collective mind and collective opinion. You can imagine what collective opinion looks like. Especially in America, they like to speak and work with masses. But music is not a moral activity, to render the masses more happy. Music cannot deal with such things. Music never was for the masses. I am not against masses. But please do not confuse the value of the music which is addressed from ear to ear with the value of music addressed from one ear to a million ears. That doesn’t mean for millions, but for each of the millions. Don’t make the mistake of merely multiplying.

No audiences are good anywhere, but the major level, the best musical level, is that of the Germans. They have a higher level of listeners because of their musical history and musical culture. You can think how it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The people who listened to music were much more learned; music was for them a language which they knew well. They knew not only by passive listening but by active playing. Everybody played—harpsichords, organs, flutes, violins. They had the habit of music played with their own hands, not only by ears. Now we hear music by the gramophone. This gives maybe more people a connection with music, but the result is not the same because the passive is not the active.

Accustomcy to music is a fact with which we have to count. We think that very difficult works like all the last works of Beethoven are better understood now. No, people are simply more accustomed to them. It isn’t that they understand better. People are not shocked by dissonances. Otherwise, why should we write them? And shocking really means striking. To be merely shocking is vulgar. It could not be the legal goal merely to be shocking. Music should be striking.

A composer thinks about the audience, but not primarily. If you think about audience, you don’t think about your work. You think about a reaction which will come from certain things. If the audience is yourself, that is quite different. To be yourself the audience is difficult; it is difficult to multiply yourself. To become an audience by imaginary multiplication does not give you new value.

Where is music going? How can we see the direction? Even going very high we can see very little. The higher we go, the less we see, because we are far away. If we are very close we see only a part of the mountain. We can judge about some facts. But to draw a conclusion is another thing. We can never be absolutely right.

That pretty much covers the good news side of the day’s efforts.

However, Walsh’s footnote also specified that a “substantial excerpt” of this text was included in Memories and Commentaries, a book published by Faber and Faber in 2002 that lists both Stravinsky and Craft as authors (in that order). This is basically a “greatest hits” volume of material that had first appeared in the five books that Craft compiled based on his conversations with Stravinsky: Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1958), Memories and Commentaries (1960), Expositions and Developments (1962), Dialogues (1982), and Themes and Conclusion (1972). Note that the title Memories and Commentaries appears twice, each identified by a different abbreviation in Walsh’s bibliography. The abbreviation in Walsh’s footnote refers to the 2002 edition, but the page number he provides makes no sense. Unfortunately, that was the volume I found on the shelf at the San Francisco Public Library. I now have the card catalog number for the 1960 volume and will have to make another trip to find it (hopefully without having to walk through the rain)! Meanwhile, having the larger body of text that was excerpted for inclusion in Memories and Commentaries is definitely a step in the right direction!

Post-Truth Invades My Turf

It has been a while since I went on a rant about Jonah Lehrer. The last time I indulged was when I decided to take on an excerpt from his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. The result was a post to this site entitled  “Performing Precise Research with Blunt Instruments.”

I suppose that one of the symptoms of the post-truth era is that you cannot keep a sloppy researcher down. This afternoon I found myself reading the “Igor Stravinsky” chapter from Lehrer’s more recent book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. This turned out to include an analysis [sic] of Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring;” and, by the second page of the chapter, I was already fuming over the inaccuracies and misconceptions in Lehrer’s efforts to try to describe the riot that took place when this ballet was first performed. His basic point was that, in the due course of time, mind usually figures out how to make sense of what first strikes it as disturbing noise; but Stravinsky himself made that point much better in his Poetics of Music lecture. (Lehrer even quotes a significant excerpt from that lecture. He credits Stravinsky but neglects to mention the source.)

Truth be told, however, I am less annoyed with Lehrer than I am with Google. This morning I was trying to track down the source of a Stravinsky comment that I have frequently cited:

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Basically, Google kept pointing me at Web pages that were full of clever quotations, none of which offered up anything about source (or, for that matter, context). A PDF file of Lehrer’s chapter was one of the few search hits that promised to provide useful background. However, as may be guessed from the above, Lehrer was no better at crediting the “duck” source than he was in acknowledging Poetics of Music.

Eventually I realized that the source could well have been one of Stravinsky’s conversations with Robert Craft. So adding Craft to the Google search got me to Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. An Amazon search got me to just the right page, which provided far more context for those sentences than I had dared imagine. Unfortunately, while I could get the chapter number and the footnote number, I could not read the footnote itself. (Thanks, Amazon!) Fortunately, the book is in the San Francisco Public Library; so I should be able to settle the source question tomorrow morning!

A Must-Read for the Election Year

I have long believed that you learn more about the world by tracking who is advertising what than from any of the more conventional sources of polls and analyses. It is therefore worth noting that the current (September 29) issue of The New York Review has a full-page advertisement placed by Princeton University Press. That, in itself, is not unusual for this particular periodical; but only one book is being advertised, Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit. For those with weakened memories (perhaps in the manner Nicolas Carr discussed when arguing that Google is making us stupid), following the hyperlink on the book's title will reveal that it first appeared in January of 2005 and quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list maintained by The New York Times. The only thing that suggests that this is a recent advertisement, rather than a time warp going back over a decade, is the note at the bottom that this title is being marketed as an e-book.

Larger that the image of the book itself, the ad presents a single quote from the text:

Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

This is clearly a message for today. Princeton University Press has decided to use advertising as a means of entering the discourse over the coming election. The only problem is that they are preaching to the choir. Indeed, however penetrating that single sentence may be, its association with Princeton University Press will probably blunt its impact where its lesson is most needed. Nevertheless, when we consider what we must now endure in what passes for news about the election campaign, it is nice to read such a refreshing now that we no longer have Stephen Colbert reminding us about truthiness!

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

Nine Cheers for ABC News

It is unclear how much accuracy of content really matters in a State of the Union address. Those who hear what they wanted to hear are happy. Those who heard what they did not what to hear are unhappy. Whether or not what either side heard is actually accurate no longer seems to be part of the equation.

In such a time in which communication seems to serve little more than contention, ABC News should be cited for at least trying to subject Obama's text to serious fact checking. To do this they broke the text down into nine issues and assigned each issue to a separate fact checker, presumably one experienced enough to understand the bigger picture and assess how (if at all) what Obama said fits into that picture. Needless to say, a project of this scope is beyond anything ABC is likely to broadcast. (Given the current state of media in this country, it is probably beyond anything PBS is likely to broadcast.) Recognizing that this material is better given a close reading, rather than television viewing, ABC News then created a Web page for the full analysis, complete with hyperlinks to each of the nine issues.

BBC News has a good reputation for using their Web site to dig deeper into analyses that will not easily "fit" their broadcasting on either radio or television; and it is good to see that ABC News has made a noble attempt to adopt that practice.

Truthiness at the Oscars

I see that all three of the films that I called out for truthiness have been recognized with nominations for Academy Awards. Both The Imitation Game and Selma are up for Best Picture, while Foxcatcher has a Best Screenplay nomination, At least the Golden Globes managed to let Manhattan, that grotesque distortion of life at Los Alamos during the development of the atom bomb conceived by WGN America, pass without notice. Those more interested in the reality of that situation (which was far more dramatic than the soap-opera narrative cooked up by WGN) may want to check out The Gallery, an area on The New York Review of Books Web site, which now has a collection of declassified photographs from Los Alamos posted by Jeremy Bernstein.

Another Movie Adopts Truthiness

Apparently, Selma has now joined those movies I discussed a week ago that had comprised the historical record for the sake of telling a more audience-appealing story. The bad news is that such historical distortion is about the worst thing that could happen at a time when racial tensions are on the rise, particularly where law enforcement is involved. The good news is that Elizabeth Drew used a NYRBooks blog post to set the record straight, but the other bad news is that only those willing to take the time to read and think about her text are likely to benefit from it.