“God Only Knows”

The BBC Radio 4 show Soul Music now has an episode devoted to Brian Wilson and Tony Asher’s “God Only Knows.” There will be tears.

What I miss though: some discussion of the song’s musical features. And lyricist Tony Asher should be mentioned by name.

The Jazz Ambassadors

On PBS tonight, a new documentary about a U.S. State Department experiment in Cold War cultural diplomacy: The Jazz Ambassadors.

Donald Trump is not a jazz musician

From an Axios item:

Sources close to Trump repeat the cliché that he wants to run the White House like the Trump Organization — an unstructured family business where he woke most days unsure of what lay ahead, and ran his business like a series of jazz improv sets.

Such comparisons are an insult to improvising musicians, who know what they’re doing. They may be working from a set list (of “tunes”). Or they may be engaged in collective free improvisation. Either way, they’re always working with a high degree of sympathetic understanding, attentive to and responsive to fellow players.

I’ll quote something I wrote last year:

There is a marked difference between a resourceful, quick-thinking, practiced improviser and a would-be tough guy who flies by the seat of his pants. We should be careful not to equate improvisation with our president’s reckless bluster.

And by the way, in jazz it’s improvisation, not improv. Jazz is not a comedy club.

Current TV

As Elaine observed at lunch, “This is the sixth season of The Wire.”

[Context: NBC reported that federal investigators had a wiretap on Michael Cohen. The story was corrected to say that investigators were monitoring Cohen’s phone calls.]

Handwriting on display

Coming in June to the Morgan Library and Museum, The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Corrêa do Lago Collection:

For nearly half a century, Brazilian author and publisher Pedro Corrêa do Lago has been assembling one of the most comprehensive autograph collections of our age. . . . This exhibition — the first to be drawn from his extraordinary collection — features some 140 items, including letters by Lucrezia Borgia, Vincent Van Gogh, and Emily Dickinson, annotated sketches by Michelangelo, Jean Cocteau, and Charlie Chaplin, and manuscripts by Giacomo Puccini, Jorge Luis Borges, and Marcel Proust.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

No, chalk

I was listening to a colleague telling stories of his life. I left to go to a stationery store. Those black-and-white-and-yellow boxes: did they hold Eberhard Faber pencils? No, chalk, the owner said. And she began to tell me stories of my colleague’s life. I left to go to a meeting. A deposed provost stood before me: “We must keep our teeth clean.” He began to brush mine. “Eh or ann ow uh ai ow,” I said. And I left.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Eh or ann ow uh ai ow”: Get your hand out of my mouth.]

One space, two spaces

Matthew Butterick of Practical Typography looks at a research study’s claim that the use of two spaces after a period makes text more readable: Are two spaces better than one? Butterick’s answer: no.

*

May 6: The Washington Post has noticed the study and pretty much endorses its claim: “One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.” No mention of Matthew Butterick’s analysis.

Domestic comedy

“There’s no getting away from branding. We’re all like race-car drivers.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Context: Carhartt pants, Columbia fleece, New Balance sneakers.]

Common misspellings

From Oxford Dictionaries, a list derived from the Oxford English Corpus: the hundred most commonly misspelled words.

One of these words always throws me: idiosyncrasy. And when I saw it on the list, I thought, Oh, they’re using British spellings. But no, that’s how the word is spelled: idiosyncrasy, not idiosyncracy. Also spelled quirk.

Review: To Fight Against This Age

Rob Riemen. To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism. Translated from the Dutch by the author. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. 171 pages. $19.95 hardcover.

I was prepared to learn from and take heart from this book, which contains the essay "The Eternal Return of Fascism" and the allegorical symposium "The Return of Europa: Her Tears, Deeds, and Dreams," both first published in 2010. But I came away unimpressed by Rob Riemen’s thinking about fascism and how to oppose it.

In the early 21st century, the enemy, as Riemen sees it, is indeed fascism: he regards "populism" as nothing more than a euphemism for an array of political movements that worship power, feed on fear and ignorance, and long for "the return of an unattainable past." For Riemen, fascism is “mass democracy,” “the bastard child of democracy.” Yet he never explains the differences between democracy and its illegitimate offspring.

To defend against fascism, Riemen invokes values underlying “the European ideal of civilization”: “absolute spiritual values,” “spiritual absolute values,” “universal timeless values,” “absolute values such as truth, justice, compassion, and beauty,” values he sees as now lost in a chaos of subjectivity. Riemen thinks that without some transcendent basis for values, nothing is true, everything permitted. But what does it mean to call, say, justice or beauty an absolute value? And what do we say to those who equate justice with, say, amputations or beheadings? Those who lay claim to absolute values may be the most intolerant among us.

But Riemen gets into a deeper muddle: while he sees culture as the preserver of “all that is timeless and of spiritual value,” he also says that “because truth is absolute we have to be prepared for the changing shapes of truth.” Thus culture requires “being open to the new, searching for new forms that can stand the test of time.” In other words, truth is absolute and timeless, but its shape changes. What then is it that stands “the test of time”? Riemen would do well to consider the possibilities of contingency: we need not believe our values to be absolute and timeless to argue for them as useful and right. Indeed, how could we ever know that our values are timeless?

As for “the European ideal of civilization,” Riemen’s idea of European culture is selective and at times preposterous. Riemen’s Europe, the true Europe, is devoid of colonial and imperial ambitions, and has always had humanism as its “defining characteristic.” This Europe is no place for people devoted to everyday distractions and gadgets, those who “know nothing of the life of the mind or spiritual values.” Here Riemen sounds a bit like Ignatius J. Reilly.

And Europe, on Riemen’s terms, is unique among the cultures of the world, “‘because it tries to understand the deeper significance of being human.’” This observation is imparted in what Riemen calls “the true story of Europe,” told by a character in “The Return of Europa,” an old man named Radim (ostensibly a fictional character, though he seems to be Radim Palouš, a Czech dissident and philosopher). Someone had better tell the Gilgamesh poet and the Buddha that Europe beat them to it.

An alternative to this book that might lead to a better fight: Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017). Where Riemen dispenses platitudes (we must “live in truth,” “create beauty,” “do what is right”), Snyder offers pragmatic advice grounded in recent history: “do not obey in advance”; “defend institutions.” That kind of advice may prove more useful than platitudes.

Related posts
Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit : “Demagogues and charlatans”