Alan Jacobs

Jul 20, 2016 ∞

the limits of our mourning

Robert Macfarlane and Adrian Cooper write,

It is still shocking to read that 46 per cent of ancient semi-natural woodland in the UK was either destroyed or replaced with conifers between 1933 and 1983. Individual trees were killed by being pierced with large ‘Jim Green’ injectors containing ‘2-4-5 T’ (a derivative of ‘Agent orange’), or by the hacking of billhook-wounds into which Ammonium Sulphamate crystals were rubbed. Yet the visual and historic loss during those notorious “locust years” is abstract to many of us, to those who didn’t grow up in those woods, through those times. The same can be said of elm, as Rackham (again) pointed out: “Since the last Elm Disease a new generation has grown up to accept the absence of big elms as normal.”
Can we only mourn what is known to us, lost in our lifetime? Is that really how far our empathy and anxiety stretches?

I think these are powerful questions, indeed the right questions to ask, and I completely endorse Macfarlane and Cooper’s advocacy for the natural world of Britain. But I just wish there were more people who could think this way about our moral and spiritual inheritance (which, rightly understood, includes political culture as well, I am moved to say after two nights of the Republican convention).

Are there ways to make vivid to us the rich inheritance that our parents and grandparents lost, or gave away? Not everything that our ancestors believed, but the best of it? Or “can we only mourn what is known to us, lost in our lifetime?” My kingdom for historical imagination. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.

Jul 19, 2016 ∞

Mac status update

Last year, when I upgraded from Yosemite to El Capitan, my MacBook’s wi-fi stopped working. I could occasionally connect to the internet, but only for a few minutes at a time. However, if my connection stalled out and I needed it desperately, I could turn the wi-fi off and turn it back on and get maybe 90 seconds of connectivity.

So I went back to Yosemite, only to discover that on Yosemite, on this computer anyway, Bluetooth doesn’t work at all. That’s a problem for me because (a) I often use the computer with an external monitor and a wireless keyboard, and (b) I listen to a lot of music through a Bluetooth speaker.

So I had to choose between wi-fi and Bluetooth.

As a result of all this, when the Sierra beta came out I decided to give it a try. Good news: wi-fi works! Bluetooth works!

However, now my machine won’t reliably connect to my external monitor. Ah well. Can’t win ’em all. But things have been bad enough for the past year or so that I call this an improvement.

Jul 18, 2016 ∞

Angkor Wat

This transformation of legend into fact has been a theme of the LiDAR surveys. Angkor's huge population is described in temple inscriptions and reports written by Chinese travelers who visited the city during the 12th century reign of King Suryavarman II, who built Angkor Wat. But historical sources are often exaggerated or incomplete. Plus, it was difficult for Western researchers to believe that the Khmer Empire's great city was home to almost a million people, dwarfing European cities of the same era. Now, such facts are impossible to deny.

— Annalee Newitz

Jul 17, 2016 ∞

playing Todd

I think Todd Rundgren is one of the great pop songwriters, and it occurred to me recently that I’d like to learn to play a few of his songs on the guitar. “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference” is one of his loveliest tunes, so I thought I would try that. I did my usual googling for tablature, and (it doesn’t always work out this way) quickly found a very accurate one.

Turns out that to make my way through this one little pop song I have to be able to play seventeen chords. And some of them are kind of peculiar — the sort that sound wrong until you play the next chord and go “Oh right.”

This tells me some things. The first thing it tells me is that the song was almost certainly written on the piano, and indeed it would be much easier to play on a piano, should one actually know how to do that. (Ahem.)

But it also tells me that as a craftsman of songwriting Todd is kind of a freak. My shoulders sagged at the thought of negotiating seventeen different chords in around three minutes, so I went through the song to see if some of them could be simplified or eliminated: sometimes a careful and thorough tablature-writer includes transitional chords that can be left out with little harm to the song’s integrity. But not in this case: every one of those chords was necessary, and changing or eliminating any of them yielded a significant loss of musical nuance and texture.

I think the writing of catchy pop songs — even really complex and musically sophisticated ones — came too easily to Todd. A couple of years after Something/Anything? he wrote a song called “Izzat Love." Give it a listen. It’s a super-super-catchy little number. But as the song goes along it keeps getting faster, not dramatically but noticeably — and then after less than two minutes you hear a sudden squeal as Todd hits the fast-forward on the tape deck. It’s unsettling, Todd’s contempt for his own facility; as though he’s telling us Do you see how easy this shit is? God, I’m sick of it. It’s time to do something else.

Jul 17, 2016 ∞