Errol Morris and David Dunning

There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

Errol Morris talks with David Dunning about the Dunning-Kruger effect and “unknown unknowns”:

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma (New York Times)

A related post
The Dunning-Kruger effect

Sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson

In honor of his sixty-eighth birthday yesterday: sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson. Several are new to me. Brian Wilson and Thomas Pynchon?

Forty years apart

Where do songs come from? Listen:

Canned Heat, “Going Up the Country” (1968).

Henry Thomas, “Bull Doze Blues” (1928).

Hear?

Canned Heat

My son Ben and I traveled to the delightfully-named city of Effingham, Illinois, to see Canned Heat yesterday afternoon. Canned Heat: as in “Going Up the Country,” Monterey Pop, Woodstock. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, since 1968 or so. (Yes, I was a blues geek.¹) Canned Heat was to my mind the most adventurous, innovative blues-rock group of all, largely because of the musical abilities of Alan Wilson (guitar, harmonica, vocals), whose often-psychedelic reimaginings of pre-war acoustic blues took the band far beyond the more usual blues-rock territory of twelve-bar Chicago blues.

Canned Heat is still a group thanks to the dedicated stewardship of drummer Fito de la Parra, who joined in 1967. He’s been there ever since, through the deaths of three original members (Wilson, Bob “The Bear” Hite, and Henry Vestine) and several later ones. Also playing yesterday: Barry Levenson (guitar), Dale Spalding (bass, guitar, harmonica, vocals), and Larry Taylor (bass, guitar, vocals). Taylor was with Canned Heat from 1967 to 1970 and has played on and off with the group ever since. If you think you recognize that beard: Taylor often plays with Tom Waits.


[Larry Taylor, Dale Spalding, Barry Levenson. June 19, 2010.]


[Larry Taylor. June 19, 2010.]


[Fito de la Parra. June 19, 2010.]

Songs played: “Bullfrog Blues,” “On the Road Again,” “Time Was,” “Fine Little Mama,” “Amphetamine Annie,” “Going Up the Country,” “Future Blues,” “The Story of My Life,” “So Sad (The World’s in a Tangle),” “Sugar Bee,” “Let’s Work Together,” and “Woodstock Boogie” (or at least something with similar lyrics). The musical highlight: Larry Taylor’s comprehensive bass solo on the final boogie. The other highlight: stepping up into an RV after the set to meet the musicians and get autographs.

Canned Heat tours and plays everywhere. We saw the group at a birthday celebration for a motorcycle dealership, Legacy Harley-Davidson. (Bikers and blues geeks alike are fans.) The group’s next stops: Texas and Montana. Then it’s two months in Europe. Take care on the road, Canned Heat.

If you’ve ever wondered: the name Canned Heat comes from Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues” (1928), a song about the dangerous pleasures of drinking Sterno.

[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Further reading
Canned Heat (Official website)

Related posts
Alan Wilson
Hooker ’n Heat

¹ Still am.

(Thanks, Ben, for making the trip with me.)

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy, February 10, 1957.]

That’s my dad, James Leddy, and me. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.

Charles Mingus defies bomb threat

Charles Mingus, New Haven, Connecticut, 1972:

“Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music. If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’”

The occasion was a concert at Yale University to raise funds for a department of African-American music. When a bomb threat came in, Mingus alone refused to leave the theater and played Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” one of his favorite pieces for solo bass, as Ellington (and everyone else) stood outside the open doors. Quoted in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s May 17, 2010 New Yorker essay on Ellington and race.

A plucky, smart cashier

She was fumbling a bit to get the groceries into the string-bag: “My Tetris skills aren’t working today.”

Namaste, typewriter

The Telegraph reports that the Indian government is saying goodbye to the typewriter:

Over the next few days the last typewriter will be taken from India’s government offices and replaced by the computer, bringing to an end an era that lasted for 80 years. While computers have been gradually replacing typewriters in even the most remote parts of the country, the machine was still used to test the typing skills of aspiring job applicants. The government has decided to do away with such an anomaly.

The article goes on to note that the typewriter has been removed from the list of goods in India’s Wholesale Price Index, “joining other archaic items such as pagers, sewing machines, hair oil and outdated brands of ‘Indian Made Foreign Liquor.’”

India’s government offices finally say goodbye to the typewriter (Telegraph)

A related post
NYPD typewriters (Still in use)

The Odyssey, not a novel

In a Wall Street Journal blog, Alexandra Cheney reports on Wednesday’s Odyssey/Ulysses reading in Manhattan:

Last night Stephen Colbert, Marian Seldes, Barbara Feldon and Stephen Lang, to name a few, found themselves in front of a sold-out audience reading from both Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, the theme being the parallels between the two landmark novels.

The Odyssey has been called the first novel (for its complexities of character and narrative), but it is not a novel. It is an epic poem. Ulysses, that’s a novel.

Perry Mason and John Keats

The trial is over. The murderer — who did the deed on Halloween — confessed in the courtroom. Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street sit in Mason’s office:

MASON (examining a Halloween mask)
    From the religious vigil of All Hallows’ Eve to
    murder: Halloween’s come a long way.

DRAKE (as if reciting poetry)
    Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and
        sepulchres.

STREET (a bit surprised)
    Paul, you’re reciting poetry.

DRAKE (innocently)
    Am I?

MASON (as if reciting poetry)
    But strength alone is like a fallen angel: trees
        uptorn,
    and darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and
        sepulchres.

DRAKE (as if surprised)
    Hey, whaddaya know? Keats.

From John Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry” (1816):

But strength alone though of the Muses born
Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,
And thorns of life; forgetting the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

You can watch this scene from “The Case of the Dodging Domino” (1962) at YouTube.

*

May 5, 2020: John Rabe writes to point out the presence of the word burrs in the passage from Keats. “I wonder,” John writes, “if that’s what caught the scriptwriter’s eye.” And I wonder how I didn’t see the word when I made this post.

Mason (Raymond Burr) stops reciting just in time to avoid a wildly meta moment.

[This post is for my friend Rob Zseleczky, who may be happy to know that you can still find Keats on television these days.]