et cetera

With the new academic year about to crash, this seems more than usually relevant.

For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8am to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.

From Alvin Toffler, “Vladimir Nabokov—A Candid Conversation with the Artful, Erudite Author of Lolita”, in Playboy, Vol. 1, January 1964, pp. 35-45. Reprinted in Strong Opinions, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1973. (Via the always wonderful Sentences).

Two questions:

1. Why call this either “candid” or a “conversation”, when it is well known that Nabokov demanded his questions be sent in advance, and then proceeded to read his answers from notecards—or simply handed the notecards to his interviewer?


2. Can the choice of Toffler to interview Nabokov be any more bizarre? Toffler?

I am not here concerned to enquire under what circumstances some of us might with advantage take a lesson from the cow. I have really no doubt that such exist.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica: With the Preface to the Second Edition and Other Papers, Thomas Baldwin (Ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, [1903] 1993, p. 96. (Via N. Moore presumably means to assert the existence of such lessons, though elsewhere he asserts the existence of cows, too).

In The Rest is Noise, Ross mentions (p. 182) the following “placard-like notice” appearing in the preface to the Ragtime movement of Paul Hindemith’s Suite ‘1922’:

Mode d’emploi – Direction for Use!!

Pay no attention to what you have learned in your piano lessons.
Do not consider for long whether you should play D# with the fourth or sixth finger.
Play this piece very ferociously, but keep strictly in rhythm like a machine.
Regard the piano here as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and treat it accordingly.

(This translation from Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century, Schirmer, New York, 1988, p. 289. Cited by Avior Byron, Schoenberg as Performer: An Aesthetics in Practice, PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, p. 64).

Now, Charles Bukowski was born in Germany and voraciously consumed classical music, so the title of his Play the Piano is almost certainly a nod to Hindemith:

These days there are lots of interesting things being done to pianos, and I’m glad to be getting back into New York early enough to hear this:

There are many useless ways to idle away time on the internet. And then there is this.

Roberto Bolaño would have had a lot of fun with this—

Scott Alan Carson, “The Stature and Body Mass of Mexicans in the Nineteenth-Century United States”, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 211-232.

Abstract
Data taken from nineteenth-century American prison records reveal that the statures of Mexicans born in Mexico declined, whereas the statures of Mexicans born in the United States increased. The body mass indexes of both Mexicans born in Mexico and in the United States, however, remained approximately constant throughout the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that even though the two groups shared a common background, their biological living conditions differed markedly.

Data

This list seems to leave off the occupation poet. But then, in which category would it go?

Over at Three Percent, Chad has been pushing Paul Verhaeghen for some time now. I had initially been very excited about reading Omega Minor, which sounded like a Pynchon-esque historical caterwaul, not least because Verhaeghen is by day a professor of psychology working on cognitive aging. In what free time did he manage to produce a more than six hundred page novel, in Flemish, and then translate it himself into English? (The still-green academic asked himself). After reading the excerpt available on the Dalkey Archive website, however, I became far less enthusiastic—this now sounded like just the sort of hyperbolic sex-crazed narcissism that has kept me away from John Updike. I still may read Omega Minor, out of curiosity—but in the meantime, I propose to establish a new award, to be irregularly announced right here:

The Et Cætera Awards For Best Use of The Expression “Et Cætera” Or Any Variant Thereof

Without further ado, I confer the first award on Michael Orthofer, for the first use in his review of Omega Minor.

Almost exactly a year ago, I noted the release of Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines. Now, in a stroke of genius, NYRB Classics is broadcasting the entire book through Twitter. (Insert commentary on the ever-shifting world of media here).

I am currently reading Alex Ross’s excellent history of twentieth century classical music, The Rest is Noise. In Chapter 5, “Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius” (an edited version of which is available online), Ross describes Sibelius’s descent into alcoholism by referring to a painting:

A widely discussed painting by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “The Problem,” depicted Sibelius drinking with friends, his eyes rolled back in his head.

Just as with his earlier discussion of photographs of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern posing in the uniforms of the Austrian army, no associated image is contained in the glossy centre pages of the book. So I thought I would post some more information and images here, so that other people reading the book can easily see what Ross is describing (unfortunately I haven’t yet been able to find the army photographs online).

It turns out that The Problem is more frequently referred to under the Finnish titles Probleemi or Kajustaflan, and that it was in fact a draft for the later work Symposion. Here it is:

And here is the later work Symposion:

The other figures in the paintings are (left to right) the painter himself, the composer and critic Oskar Merikanto, the conductor Robert Kajanus, and Sibelius—while the drink on the table is DOM Benedictine. The second work is more carefully executed and less fantastical; but perhaps of most interest in the historical context is that the figures are less wildly drunk than darkly intense and brooding. Where in the first painting Sibelius is pale and wasted, and Gallen-Kallela snarling directly at the viewer, in the second painting the artists are represented as staring intently at the wings of Osiris, lost in philosophical reflection rather than drunken stupor. Gallen-Kallela’s eyes are completely sunken into shadow, while Kajanus holds a cigarette that looks like it will burn off in his hand. I wonder whether this was the painter’s response to the public controversy over the raw drunkenness depicted in the first painting, which was loud enough to result in Sibelius being refused loans—a painterly revision designed to reveal the real heart of the Symposion evenings superficially depicted in Kajustaflan.

More background on Sibelius’s so-called “Symposion Years” can be found here.

In the latest issue of the British Academy Review, there is an excerpt from Robin Dunbar’s 2007 Joint British Academy/British Psychological Society Lecture, appearing under the title “Why Humans aren’t just Great Apes” [PDF]. The article begins with Dunbar recapitulating his famous argument for his eponymous number, complete with the following, lovely, table.

The number ~150 was initially obtained by noting the relationship between brain size and social group size in different primate species and extrapolating for humans (measuring the scale and nature of human social networks is obviously extremely difficult—or at least it was before Facebook—and so there remains much dispute about whether the number is accurate).

But what is it about brain size that enables the formation of larger social networks? Dunbar speculates that the difference concerns what he (misleadingly) calls theory of mind—the ability to form concepts of the intentional states of others (the label is misleading because there is an ongoing debate in philosophy and cognitive science concerning whether this ability is in fact underwritten by anything resembling a theory. Elsewhere, Dunbar has argued that there are also correlations between memory capacity and other structural properties of human social groups).

Call first order intentionality the possession of an intentional state directed towards a non-intentional state of affairs, and then (n)–order intentionality the possession of an intentional state directed at an (n-1)–order intentional state (whether in oneself or another). So for example, my belief that Paris is windy tonight is a first order intentional state, while your belief that I believe that Paris is windy tonight is a second order intentional state, and so on. Dunbar reports research showing that two-thirds of humans are only capable of fifth-order intentionality or below, while three-quarters of us are only capable of sixth-order intentionality or below. So far, so interesting (Dunbar does not mention the heated contest over the existence of chimpanzee theory of mind, the result of which would presumably have significant ramifications for his thesis—hopefully the full lecture, still forthcoming, will elaborate).

But then comes exactly the sort of fanciful leap we have come to expect from evolutionary psychologists. And I quote:

Consider the case of the audience watching Shakespeare’s Othello. They have to believe that Iago intends that Othello imagines that Desdemona is in love with Cassio, an activity involving four levels of intentionality. However, notice that, at this point, the kind of story they are dealing with is not especially demanding (or, for that matter, particularly enthralling). Why should Othello care if Desdemona fantasises about Cassio? The bottom line of everyday life is that very few of us would be anything but mildly bemused by such a trivial phenomenon, and the story would end there as a dull narrative. What gives Shakespeare’s play its bite is the fact that Iago is able to persuade Othello that Cassio reciprocates Desdemona’s feelings, thereby creating a romantic triangle and raising the stakes high enough for all of us to be gripped by the drama (especially when, with the benefit of spectator-sight, we are aware of Iago’s scheming plan). At this point, of course, the audience is having to work at fifth order intentionality, and is thus at the natural limits for the great majority of the population.

But, in putting this story together, Shakespeare himself has to go one level higher than his audience, to sixth order: he has to intend that the audience believes.... I suggest that this might explain why the capacity to enjoy good literature is a widespread human universal, but the ability to compose good literature is not—storytelling demands social cognitive competencies that are beyond the normal range for the great majority of the population. Thus it is that, when we sit down to write those novels we have so long aspired to write, our natural limits at fifth order intentionality constrain most of us into writing dull narratives.

This is nonsense. There is no reason to think that the dullness of narrative corresponds to the level of intentionality required to understand it. There is no reason to think that the difficulty of writing literature varies with the levels of intentionality contained within the text. Indeed, writing non-narrative forms of literature is just as difficult as writing narrative—if not more so (to Dunbar, it appears that literature is equivalent to social storytelling). Moreover, Dunbar’s theory entails, absurdly, that comprehending a sixth-order narrative is about as difficult as writing a fifth-order one, and so on down the hierarchy.

There is more, but I am bored. Before offering more ridiculous pseudo-explanations of literature and the literary imagination, evolutionary psychologists should turn their carefully selected brain-modules to the question of why we are so much better at producing than evaluating explanations—and, more to the point, why they are themselves so often so clueless about the arts.

(By Erik Satie, via UbuWeb)

An artist must regulate his life.

Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.17 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.)

Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.19 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.

I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.

My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely.

I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

Ian Jack, the editor of Granta and chairman of the judges, admitted: “His agent wrote to me saying he was a cross between Milan Kundera and Woody Allen, which made me not want to read him.”

Fiachra Gibbons, “Obscure unpublished novelist joins the elite”, in The Guardian, Monday 6 January 2003.

(Thirwell’s latest book looks very interesting).

I wonder to what extent the history of western musics is an outline of people’s deteriorating ability to listen.

Jeph Jerman, Sound Diary, 8 January 2000.

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with Harper’s, and I like very much that the brief biographical note appended to the article does not mention The New Yorker.

An aside.
One of these days I will write a long essay here about Harper’s and The New Yorker, explaining why Harper’s is clearly superior, flawed though it is by the omnipresence of Lewis Lapham’s imperious ego.

Another aside????????.
Lazily entering the phrase “new yorker” into my browser search bar just now, I forgot that I had it temporarily pointed at the OED, and discovered that the second possible disambiguation there is:

B. adj. (attrib.). Found in or characteristic of the magazine The New Yorker (founded 1925), noted for its urbane and sharply observed view of American life.

Followed by the following quotes:

1934 Fortune Aug. 75/1 No advertising man is believed, by the editors, ever to have understood a New Yorker joke. 1948 Hearst’s Internat. May 175/1 Literary critics and editors of other magazines are always referring to ‘The New Yorker style of writing’. 1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 4/2 He surveys the established Old Guard.., the new ‘realists’.., the New Yorker School. 1992 New Yorker 3 Feb. 65/1 (advt.) The design is distinguished and very New Yorker: Eustace Tilley-patterned endpapers.

(A search for “harper’s” results in the suggestion to try harping, vbl. n.)

End asides.
One of the most remarkable sections of the article is a passage briefly enumerating the stories of the bodies this couple has found. The following is a small part of this:

Chad and EJ over at Three Percent have been hyping the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño to the point where I have been unable to resist going off to read something about his work. Most interesting to this unreconstructed lover of massive novels is news that his giant, posthumously published novel 2666 is about to appear. Together with Jonathan Littel’s Les Bienveillantes, this must be one of the most anticipated translations of the year.

An excellent introductory essay on Bolaño’s work is Natasha Wimmer, “Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives” [PDF], from which the following quotes are extracted.

According to his mother, he taught himself to read when he was only three, and he wrote his first story when he was seven, about some chickens who, to the consternation of the other barnyard animals, fall in love with a duck.

Together with his best friend, Mario Santiago, the Chilean poet Bruno Montane, and their few dozen followers, Bolaño disrupted the readings of poets whom they held in contempt, shouting out their own poems.

“The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was enormous, though only a little greater than that I felt for marginal literature”.

“Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot long when erect”.

Links to reviews of The Savage Detectives are available over at Complete Review. I think I’m going to have to read this once I am done (finally) with The Recognitions and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Hail the summer. More here when.

Some favourite recent searches that have landed people here:

• whirled music from corrugated tube


• this thought is not mine


• why sport?


• petty anonymous writer


• anonymuncule


• first chicken

Last night I was very fortunate to see a performance of work by Ha-Yang Kim at Roulette.

The first piece, Metasmatter, was performed by a mixed sextet comprised of piano, flute, violin, cello, bass clarinet and percussion. This is a wonderful eclectic piece clearly influenced by jazz and Balinese music, and was performed with much exuberance by the assembled musicians.

The second piece, not listed on the original program for the evening, was a performance by Kim and percussionist Nathan Davis, who have frequently worked together as the duo Odd Appetite. They played Sotong, a small and delicate work of Kim’s, originally scored for theatre, involving a loop of cello recorded and repeated through guitar pedals coupled with delicate melodic counterpoint on cello and metal percussion instruments.

Sotong

The third piece was a debut performance of Threadsuns played by the Flux Quartet, who announced Kim as their newest member. This was easily the highlight of the evening. The piece is in three movements. The first movement is a bracing, discordant rush of halting themes that reminded me of the filmic soundscapes—Decasia and Gotham in particular—of composer Michael Gordon—which indicates something of the magnitude of the sound the quartet was able to generate. The second movement is a restrained and subtle exploration of microtones and harmonics, a frail echo of the first movement, as if we were standing amid the final ripples of a wave smashed against the walls. The third movement is a gradual extraction of the melodic core of the themes hinted at in the earlier movements, culminating in a beautiful unrestrained outpour of sound ascending to the climax. Like all of the work performed, the piece as a whole exhibited a pure blend of traditional Eastern and contemporary Western musical influences, and a perfect balance of traditional and experimental lines of musical heritage. In introducing the piece Ha-Yang described the origin of the title in Paul Célan’s Fadensonnen, and how the piece represented for her a vision of the sun as a symbol of wholeness in contrast to the fractured nature of the contemporary world—and it is natural to superimpose the image of a fitfully rising sun over the work as a whole.

(William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 700).

Kim’s debut record Ama was released last year by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and we can only wait patiently for a recording of Threadsuns.

Somehow it slipped through my radar, but the monthly music bible otherwise known as Wire underwent a recent website renovation that included the launch of the weblog Mire. It’s just what you would expect from a magazine with the self-described intent to “wage war on the mundane and the mediocre”—in the first few months there have been posts on the degeneration of the vocabulary of art criticism, a link to a rare Dopplereffekt live set, and the only accurate review of the new Portishead album I have seen anywhere online (there’s a similarly scathing companion piece in the latest print issue), to wit:

As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas: devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation to the ‘hauntological now’ of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its sell-by date.

As they say at Boomkat, who gave the album a characteristically hyperbolic review (they have to sell records after all): Essential.

The long bare corridor was brightly lighted and empty, until a young man with a thin face, a slightly crooked nose, and a weary expression which embraced his whole appearance, passed them. —There, there’s the guy who was working on this, he’s one of the writers. Hey, Willie… But the weary figure went on. He was carrying two books, one titled, The Destruction of the Philosophers, the other, The Destruction of the Destruction. He rounded a corner away from them muttering, —Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 734.

Willie, a figure glimpsed on the fringes througout the novel, is widely interpreted to directly represent Gaddis himself. This is the last appearance he makes. The corridor is in a television studio, and the project referred to is a television series called The Lives of the Saints. The books he is carrying are English translations of Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (تهافت الفلاسفة) by Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī (ابو حامد محمد ابن محمد الغزالی) and Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (تهافت الفلاسفة) by Abdul Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd (أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد), more frequently translated as The Incoherence of the Philosophers and The Incoherence of the Incoherence respectively.

Christopher J. Knight, William Gaddis, and Tom Smith, “The New York State Writers Institute Tapes: William Gaddis”, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 667–693.

CM: Gaddis never graduated. Apparently, there was some incident, and he had to leave school.

de K: The story I heard was that he was at the Hygiene Department, being measured or weighed or examined or something. And he was either smashed, or very, very angry about something. Anyway, he jumped out of a second-story window onto the street. And he was, I think, cashiered from the college for that reason. He was very, very depressed and angry, I think, at the time. He didn’t like being in college in the middle of the war.

“Ormonde de Kay talks about William Gaddis in an interview with Charles Monaghan”, The Gaddis Annotations, 24 December 1993.

Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers, Published for the US Sanitary Commission by Hurd and Houghton, New York, 1869, p. 235.

Liane Schmidt, Baudouin Forgeot d’Arc, Gilles Lafargue, Damien Galanaud, Virginie Czernecki, David Grabli, Michael Schüpbach, Andreas Hartmann, Richard Lévy, Bruno Dubois and Mathias Pessiglione. 2008. “Disconnecting force from money: effects of basal ganglia damage on incentive motivation”, in Brain, Vol. 131, No. 5, May 2008, pp. 1303-1310. [DOI]

Abstract. Bilateral basal ganglia lesions have been reported to induce a particular form of apathy, termed auto-activation deficit (AAD), principally defined as a loss of self-driven behaviour that is reversible with external stimulation. We hypothesized that AAD reflects a dysfunction of incentive motivation, a process that translates an expected reward (or goal) into behavioural activation. To investigate this hypothesis, we designed a behavioural paradigm contrasting an instructed (externally driven) task, in which subjects have to produce different levels of force by squeezing a hand grip, to an incentive (self-driven) task, in which subjects can win, depending on their hand grip force, different amounts of money. Skin conductance was simultaneously measured to index affective evaluation of monetary incentives. Thirteen AAD patients with bilateral striato-pallidal lesions were compared to thirteen unmedicated patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), which is characterized by striatal dopamine depletion and regularly associated with apathy. AAD patients did not differ from PD patients in terms of grip force response to external instructions or skin conductance response to monetary incentives. However, unlike PD patients, they failed to distinguish between monetary incentives in their grip force. We conclude that bilateral striato-pallidal damage specifically disconnects motor output from affective evaluation of potential rewards.

First Paragraph. In 1981, a 25-year-old businessman became dramatically inactive following encephalopathy caused by a wasp bite. The patient would spend hours lying awake on his bed, asking no questions and expressing no interest in anybody. When stimulated, however, he was able to perform complex activities, such as playing high-level bridge. This was the first description of a syndrome characterized by a lack of self-initiated behaviour with preserved expression of motor and cognitive abilities when externally driven (Laplane et al, 1981). Here, following Laplane and Dubois (2001), we term this syndrome ‘auto-activation deficit’, although further cases received various names, such as ‘athymhormia’, ‘psychic akinesia’ and ‘reversible inertia’ (Luaute and Saladini, 2001; Habib, 2004). Typically, these patients do not complain about their situation and do not feel bored, frustrated or depressed, even if they correctly acknowledge that their behaviour has radically changed. When asked about what they think, they may say that their mind is empty or blank. When receiving good or bad news, they may show appropriate emotional reactions, but without external stimulation they rapidly return to their habitual neutral state. Brain scans have revealed that such a syndrome is due to bilateral lesions of the striato-pallidal complex (Laplane et al, 1989).

A Brief Note on Methodology. Regarding skin conductance as a measure of desire, the authors write that “skin conductance, which has been shown to reflect autonomic sympathetic arousal (Bauer, 1998; Critchley, 2002) [...] is considered in our case to reflect affective evaluation of the monetary incentives”. However, given the coarse nature of the instrument and the existence of a wide range of distinct studies in which it has been taken to measure other psychological variables, we certainly cannot rule out the hypotheses that it reflects in this case the subject reacting not with desire for the monetary “incentives”, but instead with fear, anger, stress, startlement, or sexual arousal. Indeed, who among us has experienced the dull blankness of mind induced by such wasp bites?

Children are rarely still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes together.

Sir Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, Methuen, London, 1908, p. 278.