Tag: music

Jerry Garcia on heroin and Brexit

I think often of an interview with Jerry Garcia that I read in 1987, when the Grateful Dead had rebounded and gone back out on tour following Garcia’s brush with death: A combination of diabetes and heroin addiction had landed him in a coma, and for a while it wasn’t clear if he would ever be able to play guitar again. Anyway, the interviewer asked him directly about his addiction, and he said (approximately; I don’t have the original text) “You come to drugs with your problems. And after a while the problems fade away, and it’s just you and the drugs.”

And similarly Brexit. Britain came to Brexit with lots of serious problems: housing shortage, inequality, underfunded health service, declining influence in the world and uncertainty about what global role it should or could aspire to. Brexit doesn’t solve these problems, but they’ve faded away. Now it’s just us and Brexit.

Pierre Menard and Jack Malik

I very much enjoyed the new film Yesterday, a romantic comedy with a crudely drawn science-fiction premise — What if The Beatles never existed, but one lone musician still remembered their songs — but I felt disappointed at how philosophically tame it was. At various points perplexing questions are raised about the authorship of the Beatles songs in this alternative reality.

One of my favourite short stories is Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote“. In Borges’s best pseudo-academic prose it recounts the life of French author Pierre Menard, whose most important (and least known) works are “chapters nine and thirty eight of the first part of Don Quijote, and a fragment of chapter twenty-two”. The life project of Menard, it seems, was to write a modern Don Quijote. Not to write a new version of the novel, and not to copy the original, but to write the same novel, from a modern perspective. That is, he wants to lead himself, through his intellectual and life experience, to write the same words that Cervantes wrote three and a half centuries earlier. The narrator then proceeds to analyse Menard’s Quijote, and compare it to Cervantes’s version. The (very serious)’ joke is that the words are identical, but the interpretation is radically different, because of the context in which the words are being written. Continue reading “Pierre Menard and Jack Malik”

A law was made a distant moon ago here…

As we know, from the esteemed chronicles Lerner and Loewe, in Camelot

The winter is forbidden till December

and exits March the second on the dot.

By order summer lingers through September

In Camelot.


Not to be outdone, the British House of Commons has ordered that the departure from the EU, that will happen in just over two weeks, shall not happen without a deal. Right after voting resoundingly to reject the only possible deal.

The magic continues!

Tom Lehrer on academic spam

One of the weirdest phenomena engendered by the tawdry incentive structure of academic publishing is the academic spam that we all get, such as this invitation that I just found in my inbox:

Dear Prof./Dr. D. Steinsaltz:
As Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Statistics in Medical Research. I am pleased to invite you to join our editorial board member team or reviewer board team.

Esteemed researchers are invited to join the editorial boards of excellent journals, and it is a mark of prestige that they put on their CVs, etc. This is vaguely formulated like such an invitation, but then goes on with

If you are interested to be the part of the journal as member in editorial or reviewer board then please send your CV along with photograph.

making it clear that they have no idea who I am, and they’re just spraying out these invitations to all and sundry. It’s part of the fungal growth of journals needed to meet the needs for publications to fill other people’s CVs for their academic hiring and promotion. The best part was that this flattering invitation was closed off with a dutiful unsubscribe notice “If you wish not tor receive any such communication in future.” (Which also gave a taste of the standard of writing and editing expected for this journal.)

It reminded me of this line from Tom Lehrer’s outro to the song “Alma” (on the album That Was the Year that Was):

Not long ago I received a letter which said: “Darling, I love you, and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself.” Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope, and saw that it was addressed to Occupant.

Self-deconstructing clichés: US Supreme Court edition

Part of an ongoing series.

From a report on recent Supreme Court oral arguments about partisan gerrymandering:

Breyer pointed out that all the tests “have slight variations on different themes”

The whole point of “variations on a theme” is to communicate that they are fundamentally the same, with some superficial differences. There is one theme, and all the distinct versions are slight “variations”, What does it mean to be “variations” if they are all on different themes?

For other entries in this series see here, here, and here.

Closing time

Leonard Cohen is dead. Not an untimely or tragic end. But an end.

I never felt like he knew the secret of life. Not even that he knew reasons for hope. But maybe that he was pointing out something head intuited about how to live without hope. (Now may be a good time to go back and read Camus…)

I’ve been listening to his music a lot in the past few weeks. It suited my mood and, I thought, the mood of the times. I first encountered the song Everybody Knows in the soundtrack of the 1990 film Pump up the Volume, and was so impressed by it that I followed the credits to find out who was responsible for the song. Leonard Cohen. Never heard of him.

In those pre-amazonian days it was not an easy matter to find an unknown recording. I went to several record stores before I found a greatest hits CD, which give me my first hearing of Suzanne, So Long Marianne, Who By Fire, and so many more. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. Whereas people argue about whether Bob Dylan’s songs are poetry, with Leonard Cohen it’s not entirely clear whether his songs are really songs. And it’s clear that he was never sure himself, and he always seemed somewhat abashed by the fact, but as long as people thought they were, and wanted to hear him sing them, he’d oblige them.

I eagerly went to share my discovery with a fellow graduate student and folk music enthusiast. I played Suzanne for him. From the first bars he said, “That’s Leonard Cohen. He’s Canadian.” My friend was Canadian. I had no idea that there was such a gap between US and Canadian pop culture experience. I’ve since learned that Cohen has been hugely famous all over Canada and Europe, particularly the UK, since the 1970s.

Leonard Cohen’s words and music have accompanied my life ever since. With my partner of many years we bonded, early on, over noticing that we were sharing a snack of tea and oranges. A few years ago I was amazed that he had started producing albums and performing again. Beautiful new songs — the lyrics all his, the melodies mostly his collaborators, something he’s been doing since the 1980s. An unflinching openhearted reckoning with life and death, with the 20th century in all its horror and beauty. Religion, psychology, and eroticism. Jewish and Buddhist and Christian. Texts like

Show me the place, help me move away this stone.
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone.
Show me the place where the word became a man.
Show me the place where the suffering began.

and

I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot.
My father says I’m chosen,
My mother says I’m not.
I listened to their story
of the Gypsies and the Jews.
It was good, it wasn’t boring,
It was almost like the blues.

But I always come back to the Leonard Cohen lines I first heard:

Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows that he fight was fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
That’s how it goes.
Everybody knows.

Everybody knows the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody’s got this sinking feeling
like their father or their dog just died.
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
and a long-stemmed rose.
Everybody knows.

The NY Times has posted a link to a 1995 profile that includes this quote

I’ve always found theology a certain kind of delightful titillation. Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking. They’re not entirely unconnected. I mean, you can get turned on. One of the reasons that they’re both powerful is that they ignore a lot of other material and they focus in on something very specific. In these days of overload, it’s very restful to know, at last, what you’re talking about.

And maybe just one more verse of Everybody Knows:

Everybody knows that you love me, baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows that you’ve been discreet
but there’s so many people you just had to meet
without your clothes.
Everybody knows.

And from Closing time:

It’s partner found and it’s partner lost
There’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It’s closing time…

I swear it happened just like this
A sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss
The gates of love they budged an inch
I can’t say much has happened since
But closing time.

Dylan’s Nobel

I was just reading this article by Stephen Metcalf about why Bob Dylan shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I was surprised at how vehemently I disagreed. Metcalf writes: genius, sure, but not literature.

The distinctive thing about literature is that it involves reading silently to oneself. Silence and solitude are inextricably a part of reading, and reading is the exclusive vehicle for literature.

Ryu Spaeth at The New Republic writes

If the Nobel Prize in Literature wants to recognize a musician, then it should create an award for music.

I’m not sure if the Nobel Prize in Literature has enough of an independent existence that it can create a new award, but I understand the point. I just disagree.

It’s kind of weird the way the Nobel prizes have taken on this aura of pre-eminence, but the Nobel committees havethem have responded to this cultural role by expanding their remit. People win Nobel prizes in medicine for studying worms, in chemistry for things like DNA repair, in physics for solving equations, and in peace for stirring up trouble over human rights (or global warming). If literature is about what people do with words, then it must be about those who have done traditional things exceptionally well (and Winston Churchill must be included in that group) but also those who have expanded the possibilities of literary forms. Jean-Paul Sartre won the prize. So did Elfriede Jelinek and Samuel Beckett.

People complain that he shouldn’t win the prize because his texts aren’t exactly poetry. But maybe that’s the point. He opened up a new way for people to express themselves in language. The fact that the texts work their magic in alliance with music is not a detriment. No one ever said that Harold Pinter didn’t deserve the prize because his texts depend on actors to bring them to life.

Utility of the Devil

I very much enjoyed reading Richard Thaler’s book Misbehaving, on behavioural economics and his own role in its development. It occurred to me that the basic lessons of that soi disante science may be summarised by a variant on a famous Rolling Stones song:

You can’t always know what you want…

But if you don’t try, most of the time

You just might find you want what you know.

The Times racebaits

I mentioned before the peculiarly awkward and unfunny humour that bursts out in the Times when establishment interests are challenged (standing out particularly sharply in contrast to the usually professional and intelligent demeanour of that particular rag). Yesterday one of their columnists, Patrick Kidd, commented on Jeremy Corbyn’s first Labour Party conference speech. He noticed that two illustrious authors quoted in the speech were BLACK, and decided, giving him an appropriately racially charged metaphor for mocking the Reds:

It certainly felt as if he had taken us deep into the night with a series of unconnected riffs on a general jazz theme of “let’s be kinder to each other.” This was Jeremy Corbyn playing Miles Davis in the uncut version of Kind of Red, with contributions from Ben Okri on drums and Maya Angelou spanking the double bass.

One other point: I’ve noticed that lazy newspaper columnists have this trick of taking a stupid cliché that anyone would recognise as such — a disjointed speech is like jazz, ho hum, what is this, 1958? I think that’s when the Times was spreading fear of contamination by jazz-inflected, negro-influenced leftists, and youth contaminated by contact with racial inferiors — and inflates it to a shaggy-dog story with all kinds of extra detail and verbiage. Unless you’re SJ Perelman, it doesn’t become original this way, only more embarrassingly hackneyed.

“Serving the purposes of the Israeli apartheid and colonial regime”

The American Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu has been expelled from a Spanish music festival, for refusing to issue a statement in support of a Palestinian state. Apparently such loyalty oaths are required of suspect persons, such as Jews. His silence, they said, serves “the purposes of the Israeli colonial and apartheid regime”.

This buttresses the view that BDS has a significant dollop of antisemitism in its ideological matrix, even if not every BDS supporter is antisemitic (and not everyone motivated partly by antisemitism is entirely or even consciously motivated by antisemitism).

This takes me back to 2007, when one UK academic union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (since melded into the University and Colleges Union (UCU)) couldn’t find any more relevant challenge to higher education in the UK than a boycott of Israeli academics who do not “publicly dissociate themselves” from Israeli “apartheid policies”.

I immediately recognised a problem: What is the appropriate form for expressing such dissociation? And how would we test whether the self-criticism was sincere, or merely careerist dissimulation. After all, we wouldn’t want crypto-Zionists sneaking in to British universities and scientific conferences, infecting them with the taint of racism and colonialism. Leaping into the breach, I composed a form to enable the aspiring good Israeli to have his anti-Zionist bona fides tested and confirmed by the proper authorities.