To think I spent 15 months in Providence RI and didn’t visit this.
Mar 082008
Mar 052008
Well I tried and tried to get all the way through No Country for Old Men but about 20 minutes from the end a routine inner state check reported:
- faint aversion to pending violent action
- faint desire for pending violent action
- resultant scrunched up, induced anxiety
- foreknowledge that psychotic killer will kill woman -
- slightly stronger aversion to seeing that
- no other interest whatsoever in who kills who or how or who gets the money.
So I went forth into the daylight and bought a book for my son.
I browsed some reviews that night: Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. This is P. Travers in Rolling Stone who thinks that we would all have taken the money (and left the wounded man to die of thirst). I conclude that his fix on the people who share the planet with him is something less than rigorous.
There’s plenty more profundity-mongering around, but luckily you don’t have to go past Google’s first ten hits to find a drily unimpressed Stephanie Zacharek in Salon
Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and other stuff, which would be pretty boring if not for the occasional distraction of human life being snuffed out by cattle-slaughter devices.
For those who like camera angles, there are lots of camera angles.
Mar 022008
Why do American writers smarm up to readers who are not going to read their book? The question is prompted by Daniel Levitin’s This is your Brain on Music (Plume Books, 2007) a thoroughly recommendable book by a cognitive scientist.
The pitch for readership begins at the autobiographical introduction called – hold your nose – ‘I Love Music and I Love Science – Why Would I Want to Mix the Two?’ Throughout the book, there are illustrations from both popular and classical music, with the balance heavily in favour of the popular. Even this is not enough to keep Demos happy.
Modern composers such as Schoenberg threw out the whole idea of expectation. The scales they used deprive us of a resolution . . . thus creating the illusion of no home, a music adrift, perhaps as a metaphor for a twentieth century existentialist existence (or just because they were trying to be contrary).
Compare:
The brain extracts basic, low-level features from the music, using specialized neural networks that decompose the signal into information about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant environment, tone durations and the onset times for different notes (and for different combinations of notes).
There are lots of sentences like that – and a proper thing too, and a fascinating tale they tell. Is it likely that a reader who will persevere through the scientific explanations will swallow the rubbish about Schoenberg? Will need all the references to Sting and The Police? Now that I ask the question I see that the answer is yes.