Noteworthy, I think, that neither this Becca Rothfield review of The Geography of the Imagination nor John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction to the new edition give you any real sense of what it’s like to read Guy Davenport. Nothing does that except … reading Guy Davenport.
In which I explain what I did on the first day of a new class – and then go on a wild-eyed rant against Spotify.
Systematic theology? I don’t need no stinkin' systematic theology – I have Joe Mangina’s “Figural Graffiti,” in forty-nine rhymed couplets. Seriously, when people ask me what my theology is, I’ll show them this.
ADD revisited
On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. We paused to talk a bit about the musical language of late Romanticism, about Rachmaninoff’s gift for lush melody, etc. Then I played them this:
Hard to believe it was composed by the same man, isn’t it? But (I suggested) that’s the difference between a young Russian composer in 1901 — he wrote that concerto when he was 27 — and a middle-aged Russian composer living through overwhelming political turmoil and world war. In time of desperate need Rachmaninoff, not a churchgoer, turned to the liturgical and musical inheritance of Orthodoxy to make sense of his world, to begin the long healing that would be necessary.But the healing didn’t happen. Russia was further broken by the war, then entered the long nightmare of Bolshevik rule, and Rachmaninoff became one of many exiles. In some ways he never recovered from this experience. Many years later, while living in California, he lamented his inability to compose music: “Losing my country, I lost myself also.” (Exile versus homecoming — one of the themes of my class.) But the All-Night Vigil remains, for me, one of the transcendent works of music. Rachmaninoff himself thought it perhaps his best composition.
But I have another motive in having my students listen to this music, which is to get them to listen to music. People these days, especially but not only young people, have music on all the time, but that’s not the same as listening to it. Indeed, as Ted Gioia and Damon Krukowski have documented repeatedly, Spotify — and pretty much all my students use Spotify — positively wants its users to unlisten, to merely have music on in the background, in part because that allows the company to shift from actual music made by human musicians to AI-generated neo-Muzak. The tiny amount that Spotify pays musicians is already shameful, but it’s too much for a company that doesn’t have a workable business model, so the best way to limit costs is to cut human musicians out of the game altogether. But this will only work if Spotify can habituate its users to empty, mindless schlock, made up of endless variations on the same four chords.
I’ve made it a classroom practice in the last year or so to indulge in theatrical rants against Spotify, which is fun for me and for my students. They argue with me and I denounce them, all in good humor. But for all the smiles, I am quite serious. Spotify is creating in millions and millions of its users a new kind of Attention Deficit Disorder, not one that has them jumping from one thing to another, but rather has them in a kind of vague trance state. Spotify is like soma from Brave New World in audio form. And to be in such a state is to experience a deficit of attention, an inability genuine to attend to what one is hearing.
So one of the things I am doing in this class, and will be trying in other classes, is to get my students to spend five minutes listening to music. I forbid digital devices in my classes, so they just have their books and notebooks in front of them — they can of course be distracted from the music, but it’s not automatic, not easy. If listening is the path of least resistance, then maybe they’ll listen. I’ve started with five minutes, but I hope to work our way up to longer pieces. My dream — and alas, it is but a dream — is, one Holy Week, to sit together with my students and listen to the single 70-minute movement that is Arvo Pärt’s Passio.
This $100 million gift to Spelman College ought to be praised to the skies. The megarich need to direct their money towards institutions that can seriously benefit from it. Giving money to Harvard is like giving money to Microsoft.
John Gruber – aka @gruber – on a theme I discussed yesterday, the difference between Apple’s view of the Mac platform versus iOS/iPad: “Developer uncertainty regarding the viability of selling Mac software is the last thing needed for a platform that is already facing a dearth of new original native software. Apple doesn’t have to make a platform-destructive money-grab policy change to ruin the Mac. They can ruin it simply by planting the seed of doubt that they might.”
Robin Sloan says of me, “Alan can make anything sound terrific, when he loves it,” which is one of the best things anyone has ever said about me. I’m not even sure it’s a compliment, but I like it anyway. (And I hope Robin reads Cahokia Jazz, which really is wonderful.)
What Dracula is
If, as some think, deepfakes will become undetectable, that just might force a long-overdue reckoning with our reliance on online “information” and “evidence.”
I added some links, fixed some bad links, and generally updated things at my home page.
I think DHH is right about Apple.
Lazy day.
DHH is exactly right: Apple has become too powerful, and with that power has come a sense of entitlement, and with that sense of entitlement has come a shortsighted pettiness and vindictiveness. I don’t want to support such a company, in part because I don’t have the bandwidth to go full Linux at the moment, but in. Larger part because, while I don’t want to support Apple, I do want to support the amazing developers who have created the software that makes my Mac a joy to use: people like Bare Bones, Panic, and Rogue Amoeba.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that all three of those developers are either exclusively or primarily focused on the Mac as opposed to iOS, and it’s with regard to iOS that Apple has behaved most despicably. So maybe the best approach for me is to try to go all-in on the Mac and avoid iOS — a move I’ve long been tempted to make anyway.
Also: I just realized that I first wrote about using Linux twenty-two years ago. If breaking from the Mac was hard then, it’s nearly impossible for me to contemplate now.
Just discovered that Terrence Malick, Marilynne Robinson, and Joni Mitchell were all born in November 1943.
Origen may … have been the first church father to study Hebrew, “in opposition to the spirit of his time and of his people,” as Jerome says; according to Eusebius, he “learned it thoroughly,” but there is reason to doubt the accuracy of this report. Jerome, however, was rightly celebrated as "a trilingual man" for his competence in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and Augustine clearly admired, perhaps even envied, his ability to “interpret the divine Scriptures in both languages.” […] But it seems safe to propose the generalization that, except for converts from Judaism, it was not until the biblical humanists and the Reformers of the sixteenth century that a knowledge of Hebrew became standard equipment for Christian expositors of the Old Testament. Most of Christian doctrine developed in a church uninformed by any knowledge of the original text of the Hebrew Bible.
Whatever the reasons, Christian theologians writing against Judaism seemed to take their opponents less and less seriously as time went on; and what their apologetic works may have lacked in vigor or fairness, they tended to make up in self-confidence. They no longer looked upon the Jewish community as a continuing participant in the holy history that had produced the church. They no longer gave serious consideration to the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament or to the Jewish background of the New. Therefore the urgency and the poignancy about the mystery of Israel that are so vivid in the New Testament have appeared only occasionally in Christian thought, as in some passages in Augustine; but these are outweighed, even in Augustine, by the many others that speak of Judaism and paganism almost as though they were equally alien to "the people of God" — the church of Gentile Christians.
Surely this de-Judaizing is the most important (and troubling) way in which the era of the early Church Fathers differed from the Apostolic beginnings of the Church. It is fascinating to contemplate an alternate history of Christendom in which Jews and Christians remained in regular conversation and debate.
Something I often think, prompted tonight by seeing Jamal Murray (6'4") standing next to Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid (both 7'0"): If you’re an NBA guard, you spend your working life around people who make you look tiny, but then everywhere else you’re an unusually large person. The contrast must be weird.
Damon K: “A positive, progressive change to this system benefiting more people is not going to come from the top - that is what these latest facts and figures illustrate above all. It is up to the rest of us to find a way to make streaming technology work for the majority of musicians. At UMAW, we have been developing a plan to bring more streaming income to more recording musicians, and we will be going public with details very soon. Support us when we do. And join us if you can!”
The mysterious Roman dodecahedra.
A wonderful collection of Milton Glaser book covers.
