Leonard Bernstein delivering his Norton Lecture at Harvard University using Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major as an example. The lectures are available from your public library in a DVD set called The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein.

I pretty much killed myself the night before last, staying up all night to finish The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I’ll have some thoughts about that book later, but I still need to process it a bit more.

What I’ve been obsessed with at work during my semi-unsanctioned browsing time is the plethora of responses from scientific plenipotentiaries to Edge.org’s annual question for 2012: What is your favorite deep, beautiful, or elegant explanation? The responses include Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference, Boscovich’s Explanation Of Atomic Forces, and are uniformly thoughtful and written with insight and passion.

I always find it fascinating to listen to people that have the magic combination of passion, expert knowledge of their field, and the old fashioned gift of gab. Becoming specialized in a field changes the way you look at your field, and the way that you see the world, and that change in perspective can be hard to communicate to other people. That gives it extra power when it does succeed. The responses really deserve to be read together as a piece, but to give you a taste of the flavor of the writing, here’s the punchline to the entry on Eratosthenes:

Eratosthenes brought together apparently unrelated pieces of evidence—the pace of caravans, the Sun shining to the bottom of a well, the length of the shadow of an obelisk—, assumptions—the sphericity of the Earth, its distance from the Sun—, and mathematical tools to measure a circumference that he could only imagine but neither see nor survey. His result is simple and compelling: the way he reached it epitomizes human intelligence at its best.

Was Eratosthenes thinking concretely about the circumference of the earth (in the way he might have been thinking concretely about the distance from the Library to the Palace in Alexandria)? I believe not. He was thinking rather about a challenge posed by the quite different estimates of the circumference of the Earth that had been offered by other scholars at the time. He was thinking about various mathematical principles and tools that could be brought to bear on the issue. He was thinking of the evidential use that could be made of sundry observations and reports. He was aiming at finding a clear and compelling solution, a convincing argument. In other terms, he was thinking about representations—theories, conjectures, reports—, and looking for a novel and insightful way to put them together. In doing so, he was inspired by others, and aiming at others. His intellectual feat only makes sense as a particularly remarkable link in a social-cultural chain of mental and public events. To me, it is a stunning illustration not just of human individual intelligence but also and above all of the powers of socially and culturally extended minds.

The question and answers made me think about the concept of elegance as well. It’s an interesting concept; the dictionary definition refers to concepts that are both aesthetic (graceful, tasteful, dignified, restrained) and more objective (precise, neat). And I can think of few adjectives that so easily describe both people and completely abstract concepts with little deviation in meaning.

I thought I’d share a couple of classical pieces that I think are elegant. Although all of them are among my favorite pieces of music, this is a different list than favorites, or greatest, or most beautiful.

• J.S. Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita for Violin No. 2. Bach manages to take very limited materials: a descending chord pattern, a single melody instrument made of four strings, and manages to spin it into a 15 minute monster that has managed to stay one of the hardest pieces in the violin repitoire since it was written around 1720.

Saw the new Beauty and the Beast 3D rerelease tonight. I don’t have any special thoughts about the movie, as it has always been one of my favorites. I was a little too young to see it in theaters, however, and it did remind me that even now with high definition televisions and movie players the theater experience is something special.

It also made me think about Howard Ashman, the composer of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and a beautiful soul. His tragic young death of AIDS on the eve of Beauty’s release is covered in the excellent 2009 documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty. We can never know what movies we’re missing if the dream team of Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, and the Disney Animation team were able to continue.

From the Downton Pawnee tumblr.

Andrew Sullivan linked to a couple of different articles trying to explain the (unexpected?) popularity of Downton Abbey in the United States. For Newsweek, Simon Schama makes the case that the show is a snob-ridden piece of Hallmark-y tripe:

There are many things wrong with the Republic in 2012, but when historians come to write its chronicle they will notice that the country was gripped by the clammy delirium of nostalgia. Tea Partiers ache for what they imagine to have been a tricorny country, all innocent of the Monster Government. Politicians and radio ranters sell the credulous on an American paradise before “socialism,” in the wicked shape of Social Security and Medicare, ever came to be. And folks who might have better ways to pass their time have been falling like grouse to the gun before the mighty edifice of Downton Abbey. Deprived of a wallow in the dry-martini and bullet-bra world of Mad Men? Not to worry, Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery. It’s a servile soap opera that an American public desperate for something, anything, to take its mind off the perplexities of the present seems only too happy to down in great, grateful gulps.

Irin Carmon posits that the show’s popularity resides in an idealization of the class system and a portrayal of noblesse oblige on the part of the “upstairs:”

“I actually think it’s a lot like ‘The West Wing,’” Steve Jacobs, a political communications strategist and a fan of the show, told me. “Lord Grantham is the platonic ideal of an English aristocrat, just like Jed Bartlet was the platonic ideal of an American president. The very fact that Grantham and Bartlet are so good and selfless is, to me, an indication that they’re not meant to be completely accurate depictions of their real-life counterparts.” Even if a democratically elected president differs in earned legitimacy from an earl, both involve a Great Man shaping history. As Max Read, a writer at Gawker, says of the analogy, “Both shows suffer from operating under ideas of politics/history that focus on the individual actor rather than the system. So the nobility and selflessness of Bartlet and the earl justify the systems in which they work … It’s a very classically conservative notion of history.”

Kathryn Hughes interprets the show as a reflection of British social anxieties, and places the show in a line of historical class dramas:

The show’s values of cohesion and cooperation promise to be challenged by the war’s fallout. But they remain Downton Abbey’s guiding ethos. There may be disruptions looming (socialism, feminism, the small matter of international carnage), but if the classes just pull together, total breakdown may be avoided. The creator and chief writer of this careful and approving dramatization of a social unity that depends, paradoxically, on social separation is Julian Fellowes, who was recently made a Life Peer—which means he becomes Lord Fellowes, although his son will not inherit the title—and sits on the Conservative side of the House of Lords. Fellowes is too canny an operator to say out loud that he wishes we could return to the good old days in which the story is set. But as season two approached its close in Britain, there was no getting around an increasing sense of the show’s nostalgic longing for an age of what we might call consensual paternalism. Which is all very well, of course, as long as you’re the one on the right side of the social divide, the side that decides whether it feels like being benign to those less favored than itself.

Obviously I cannot speak for all viewers of the show, and I am certain that there are plenty of them who watch it for the pure spectacle of costume drama, but none of these perspectives quite gets at why I like the show. I agree that the show generally positions the Earl of Grantham as a pure actor in an opressive system, and that the show draws some of its power from societal shifts that are happening right now, but I think it’s entirely too superficial to dismiss the show as nostalgia for a time past.

http://seg.sharethis.com/getSegment.php?purl=http%3A%2F%2Fmatteilar.wordpress.com%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost-new.php&jsref=&rnd=1326914289114Most period films have to deal with the moral conflict produced by societal differences between our time and the period depicted. Films can sidestep those questions, either by depicting characters as evil because their time was “evil” (think Braveheart: William Wallace is our enlightened, educated, modern hero, but 13th century Englishmen are mostly evil because they’re 13th century Englishmen), or by idealizing the past and not engaging with the question at all. But most honest films do deal with it one way or another, even if not successfully. And clearly Downton does idealize its main characters. But I think this is a deliberate strategy to highlight the brutality and suffocation of the system they operate in.

The Mad Men comparison is apt. A big difference, of course, is that Don Draper and most of the characters on the show are clearly portrayed as extremely flawed people even in the context of their time. This makes it a better show than Downton, however where they come together is in detailing the lives of a class of people who are going to be absolutely rocked by the social changes that will affect them in the coming years. Just like the social unrest of the late ’60s that invisibly permeates Mad Men, so does the period between wars permeate Downton. And that’s where the idealization of this group of people that inhabit the system becomes a real driver for pathos. Whether or not this class system has value (and personally, I do think the show could come down harder on the side of the “or not”), these people are going to have their lives completely upended, and all of the norms that they have internalized through their lives are going to be called into question. Even these people.

To be fair, Schama acknowledges this point:

In the current series, historical reality is supposed to bite at Downton in the form of the Great War. The abbey’s conversion into convalescent quarters did indeed happen in some of the statelies. But if Fellowes were really interested in the true drama attending the port and partridge classes—more accurately and brilliantly related in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Isabel Colegate’s wonderful The Shooting Party—the story on our TV would be quite different. Instead of being an occasional suffragette, Sibyl would have turned into a full-on militant, carving, while incarcerated in prison, a “V” for “votes” on her breast with a piece of broken glass. Lord Robert, whose income from land and rents would have collapsed with the long agricultural depression, would be unable to service his mortgage and, subject to the estate duties imposed to pay for old-age pensions, would have to sell the place to a wheat baron from Alberta. And Matthew would be one of the 750,000 dead.

and I do think he has a point. Fellowes class affiliations should be called into question. And there’s plenty of time for the show to go on too many seasons, postponing the painful social change until nobody cares any more. But for now, that spectre of change, visible only to us, hovers over the show and I cannot wait for that other shoe to drop.

Illness last week means that I have quite a few links that I’ve been sitting on:

• A pretty heartbreaking piece by Daniel Wakin in the New York Times Magazine about the process of selling expensive instruments when the virtuosi who play them decide that it’s time to let them go. It delves into the heady emotion of making that decision, as well as the intricate interplay between the current owners, the desire to pass them onto musicians of high caliber, and the market forces that push these instruments outside the means of the musicians that would most be able to make use of them.
• Oliver Sava tried to write a piece for the A.V. Club about what makes a good all-ages comic book, but ended up writing an article defining all good all-ages media. It took me right back to those children’s books that have persisted in my memory, those that still give me pleasure today, and also took me back to a more uncritical time where I took so much pleasure out of just keeping my head in a book.
• Arizona is crazy fucking racist.
• One part of the origin story of Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent Quartet for the End of Time is that it was written while the composer was imprisoned in a Nazi detention camp. On An Overgrown Path takes a look at that story and finds that it’s a little more complicated than that. I was struck by what a fine line it is here between truth-telling and mud slinging. After all, what really is worse: incorrectly labeling Messiaen as a Vichy collaborator, or holding him up as a symbol of artistic resistance against Nazi oppression while he was a (by all accounts, low key) collaborator?
• Constant affirmation vs. earning praise. Good job in trying to change the status quo, but it’s stupid that this is an argument.
• The Atlantic has a slideshow and interview with one of the graphic designers that created posters for ACT UP to promote awareness of the AIDS crisis, which is where the header image comes from. I wasn’t that familiar with the posters, and I was shocked and refreshed by how honest and direct some of the messages. Gay activism has become less confrontational since then, I feel, and I just can’t imagine a major campaign with the text “One in every sixty-one babies is born [HIV positive.] So why is the media telling us heterosexuals aren’t at risk? Because these babies are black. Because these babies are hispanic.” In the realm of public health, it seems like we could use a similar campaign to outline the general population health benefits of things like the HPV vaccine.
• Alexis Madrigal has a piece up about how Radiolab is/has changed the sound/approach of radio broadcasters. First off, nothing that he says doesn’t also apply better to This American Life, a show that I think has more directly influenced the way that NPR news edits their segments, the subjects they cover, and the way they conduct their man-on-the-street interviews. Second, I really hope not. I don’t think the show dumbs down their science that much, and I appreciate their editing and sound design, but it drives me batshit crazy the ways that Krulwich and Abumrad play dumb when they’re interviewing their subjects and summing up information. It’s not that I disagree with the approach, I just think they need to be better at their jobs. It strikes me as patronizing, transparently false, and deeply annoying. /minirant
• For some reason, Caitlyn Flanagan is in my mental “treat with caution” file for writers, but she has written an absolutely brilliant piece on Joan Didion for The Atlantic. I may have more to say on this later, it’s quite good. For what it’s worth, I’ve always appreciated Didion for the way she writes about California.
• One of my friends, artist Lucy Bellwood, is offering two issues of one of her titles, Baggywrinkles, available for free on her website. Go check it out.

If anybody didn’t catch last week’s episode of This American Life, “Mr. Daisey and the Factory,” you should listen to it right away. The episode is an hourlong excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one man show, The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs, a timely monologue about Steve Jobs and the working conditions in the factories in China that make most of the world’s electronics, from iPhones to Xboxes.

One thing that I was thinking about while I was listening to the episode was what it means, in this day and age, to be a prophet. Because Mike Daisey sounds like a prophet. I think we have a confused concept of what a prophet is, because the word is so close to prophecy. Clearly, the word comes from what a prophet does, but I think there is a big difference between prophecy and the message that the prophet delivers. I was reminded of the passage from the 2nd book of Ezekiel, where God comissions Ezekiel to deliver a message to the Israelites:

And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, [even] unto this very day. For [they are] impudent children and stiffhearted. I do send thee unto them; and thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD. And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they [are] a rebellious house,) yet shall they know that there hath been a prophet among them.

Our concept of prophecy has everything to do with visions of the future, reducing the prophet to a divine fortuneteller, but I think it’s clear that the role of this prophet has very little to do with warning about the future, and everything to do with recontextualizing today. Prophets are there as a destabilizing force; they demand that you consider the possibility that what you consider everyday life is actually the perpetration of a great evil. And because these prophets make us really look at the way that we live our lives–and because they see with long sight–it is in their nature to be hated by the power structure that feeds on the status quo, despised by the masses that have become used to the inertia that prevents change, and beloved by the generations that come after them.

I cannot say where Mike Daisey’s story leads, or what the end of the struggle that he is a part of is. Just as there have always been prophets, there have been false prophets, but I don’t think he’s a false prophet. I do know that I never would have sought out his monologue, or the information he uncovered if it hadn’t appeared on TAL. When his monologue first began attracting attention, I saw the title of the show, rolled my eyes, and closed the tab. I believed in the economic (now) conventional wisdom that as much as modern offshore manufacturing may pair 16th century beliefs about individual worth with 21st century labor management technology, the only thing worse than sweatshops for poor countries is no sweatshops. And I may still believe in that empirical argument. But Mike Daisey does force you to confront the fact that every cheap computer that you buy, every Xbox, every Apple device, is subsidized–made cheaper–by wear and tear on real people’s bodies. There’s a staggering quotation from his Chinese interpreter that Daisey uses to great effect, a quotation so perfect that I winced when I heard it, “You hear stories, but you never think it will be so much.”

Indeed. Listen to it.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

The Giffords shooting is one of those news events where I have a crystal clear memory of where I was when I heard the news and what exactly I was doing. I was at my high school’s Alumni Weekend. These weekends are heavily attended by the classes that graduated the two years before, with declining attendance thereafter as people become constrained by the larger tides of their lives. Usually the biggest pool of attendees comes from those with families in the area, or those who are attending school in the greater Los Angeles region.

I was in our school’s Commons, hiding out in the area where there was plentiful tables and chairs and internet access. There were two types of people there, a handful in all: social media junkies, like me, people for whom a couple of hours without access to Facebook and Twitter is an insurmountable burden; and type-A executive types for whom checking email and messages frequently is part of their job description. It was a pretty random group of people. There wasn’t anyone else from my class, the ties of the school the only thing we had in common.

And once I saw the story, I remember turning to the woman next to me, and asking her if she had heard the news about the congresswoman from Arizona. In that moment, it felt like one of those events for which I could invade another person’s solace. And I saw the look in her eye, like she had been thinking about the same things that I had. Thinking about whether this was the beginning of a long period in which people with guns could destabilize an entire nation, the beginning of the period in which law and order and the democratic vision would crumble under the power of a single madman. We had no knowledge of the shooter, only the knowledge that this was a time when things could go bad.

1.7.2011. A beautiful day in the Northwest. Springwater Corridor Trail, Portland, Oregon.

• A typically glum and jaded former Seattleite bitches about Portlandia. Full disclaimer, I love June Thomas.
• re: that autism story I linked to a couple of days ago, the story behind the best NYT correction ever.
• My congressman (and I use the term loosely), Elton Gallegly of CA-24, is retiring. Great news. Maybe my majority-Latino district can finally get representation that doesn’t hate us. Hopefully SOPA will be the last in a long line of legislative defeats for the spineless, ambitionless backbencher.
• Still hung up on Nina:

In the last month or so, I’ve probably spend a full work week playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. For those of you who don’t play games, Skyrim is a fantasy genre based RPG (role-playing game). I’m not much of a gamer, but last year I got addicted to Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas and once I made the connection that Bethesda Studios was the developer of both games, I made sure I got a copy of the game.

Another thing that I’ve been occupied with during this last month is thinking deeply about what kind of person I would like to be, what kind of habits and disciplines I want to cultivate, those kind of questions that frequently preoccupy people in my stage of life. In the last few months I decided to confront head on some ongoing problems that I’ve been having with clinical depression and underlying emotional issues.

Where these two things come together is in the strange way that RPGs both allow us some escape from the limitations of our real lives, as well as express some immutable aspects of our own personalities.

One great project that looks at this aspect of games and virtual identity is photographer Robbie Cooper’s Alter Egos. The aspirational aspect of avatars is less pronounced in many of his portraits than those above and below, and you can really see a spectrum from those that model their virtual representations closely after themselves to those that model their avatars on what they most want to be.

And so I thought I’d take a look at my Skyrim character and consider what it might reveal about myself. My character (minus armor and other accouterments) looks more or less like the figure on the left:

The most notable characteristic about my character is that he’s an Argonian (or, as I describe him to other people, “one of the weird lizard guys”). In the world of Skyrim, Argonians are one of the “othered” groups that is furthest away from the Nords. I think the reason that I tend to pick characters that are far outside the normative image of the blond, male hero (my Fallout: New Vegas character was a mixed-race elderly woman) has a root both in my discomfort with that image (and the insecurities that I have about being compared to that standard) as well as some kind of desire to reduce the ambiguity of the privileges that I carry around with me. Both as a sexual minority and as a mixed race person, I will never be able to inhabit that norm, but I feel like I have to take responsibility for the fact that many of the signs that signal to others that I am apart from them–language and vocabulary, skin color, name–are hidden. On some level–and I appreciate how solipsistic this–I envy the lizard man, who will never be able to pass for anything but himself; anyone that accepts him accepting him on his own terms.

My character is a heavily magic reliant character, and I know this is an expression of both the pride that I take in my own intelligence and education, and the desire that raw intelligence would translate into an easier way of life. Magic, as intelligence, is an alternate measure of power independent of physical strength. I’ve relied–to different degrees at different times–all my life on that coping mechanism, that even though other people might be stronger, or scrappier, or faster, or better looking, I’m more intelligent. It’s a thought that has the potential to become poisonous, and it always comes with a corresponding doubt, or insecurity. James Agee expresses this thought well in his novel, A Death in the Family. Six year-old Rufus has stopped with his father at a bar after a movie, and his father is bragging to all of the patrons about how well his boy can read:

Rufus felt a sudden hollowness in his voice, and all along the bar, and in his own heart. But how does he fight, he thought. You don’t brag about smartness if your son is brave. He felt the anguish of shame, but his father did not seem to notice…

Intelligence, of course, does bring about great power and an easier life. But that’s intelligence paired with luck and hard work, and the power and leisure are indirect. By playing a magical character, I’m able to envision a world in which raw intelligence and talent can directly translate into power and wealth. It lets me defeat my enemies without defeating my own demons.

There are countless other things that I read into my character as expressions of myself, again either as myself or as my opposite. My character tends to just rush into situations, taking on dungeons far above my level just for the challenge, instead of the timidness and fearfulness that I see in myself. Like my character, I’m a sentimentalist, and tend to keep random junk well past my sell-by date. But I like to think that by letting my ego run wild in the game, I can open doors to myself that I couldn’t in life. Or at least that’s how I’m justifying the 40+ hours I’ve sunk into the game: therapy.

No posts today. Did laundry & cleaned my fridge & took care of business. Back tomorrow.