France
|
14603
|
United States
|
2923
|
Russia
|
1351
|
Germany
|
175
|
South Korea
|
113
|
Denmark
|
82
|
Ireland
|
81
|
China
|
59
|
Portugal
|
57
|
Canada
|
56
|
Friday, May 19, 2017
Casio RIP
I bought a Casio keyboard several years ago. It cost me maybe $40-$60 at a store that no longer exists, on sale. It had 66 keys, numerous sounds & countless features I would never use, but it had no dynamic control or sustain pedal so it wasn't responsive to my touch. Yesterday the mechanism that makes the F below middle C make sound gave way, some how, and I don't know how to take it apart or fix it.
It sat for a long time. I bought a jazz fake book (real books they call them now) and started to learn a song, but didn't get very far, and it sat for a long time. In August of 2015 pet-sitting at my girlfriend's house for a week, feeding the chickens, etc... I started to play her electric piano, an old Yamaha, and wrote my first song. I guess I had been looking at internet sites on jazz piano because I knew what a ii-V-I was, a tritone substitution, that you could substitute iii for I, for example, and that every chord in jazz was a seventh chord, and that you could further extend that to a 9th. That's about all I knew, too, except that there were modes that used the same notes of the key that you were in, and that there were circles of fifths and fours, etc... This is like the first two weeks of music theory or something.
Once I wrote my first song I wrote another two with basically the same chord progression, and when I returned to my own residence I picked up the Casio again and wrote dozens of more songs, a process that has continued to this sad piano-less day. Earlier in this academic year I began piano lessons. My teacher says I improved greatly so who am I to argue.
I also took voice lessons for two years. Whether I can sing is a matter of debate, but I had made a resolution to study voice several years before, and never did it. It was
When I think that I will buy a six-pack of craft beer for $9 and change, and do so at times more than once a week, this electric keyboard seems pretty inexpensive in retrospect, so that I wonder why I hesitated to purchase it. I played this thing for hours and hours for 21 months, so much that I broke it, in fact. Despite its cheapness and inadequacy, I could use it to write music on and practice a multitude of things. It never went out of tune. I would say I could have put nearly 900 hours on it. I know I rarely used it less than an hour a day for over 600 days, so it cost me 18 cents an hour.
I could still use it as long as I don't care about that F.
It sat for a long time. I bought a jazz fake book (real books they call them now) and started to learn a song, but didn't get very far, and it sat for a long time. In August of 2015 pet-sitting at my girlfriend's house for a week, feeding the chickens, etc... I started to play her electric piano, an old Yamaha, and wrote my first song. I guess I had been looking at internet sites on jazz piano because I knew what a ii-V-I was, a tritone substitution, that you could substitute iii for I, for example, and that every chord in jazz was a seventh chord, and that you could further extend that to a 9th. That's about all I knew, too, except that there were modes that used the same notes of the key that you were in, and that there were circles of fifths and fours, etc... This is like the first two weeks of music theory or something.
Once I wrote my first song I wrote another two with basically the same chord progression, and when I returned to my own residence I picked up the Casio again and wrote dozens of more songs, a process that has continued to this sad piano-less day. Earlier in this academic year I began piano lessons. My teacher says I improved greatly so who am I to argue.
I also took voice lessons for two years. Whether I can sing is a matter of debate, but I had made a resolution to study voice several years before, and never did it. It was
When I think that I will buy a six-pack of craft beer for $9 and change, and do so at times more than once a week, this electric keyboard seems pretty inexpensive in retrospect, so that I wonder why I hesitated to purchase it. I played this thing for hours and hours for 21 months, so much that I broke it, in fact. Despite its cheapness and inadequacy, I could use it to write music on and practice a multitude of things. It never went out of tune. I would say I could have put nearly 900 hours on it. I know I rarely used it less than an hour a day for over 600 days, so it cost me 18 cents an hour.
I could still use it as long as I don't care about that F.
Got Prose?
I just sat down and wrote a few paragraphs of fluent, almost final prose, this morning, almost 500 words in a little more than an hour. This is what we do; as scholars we are professional writers, and we can write. Now granted, that is fast even for me, but I simply knew what I wanted to say and said it.
There will be struggles in writing, but they will be less melodramatic the more you write. It does get easier with experience and it should, or it is like no other activity known to humankind.
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we overdramatize the writing process. It is not particularly painful when we take most of the ego out of it. What makes it difficult and fraught is the constant self-doubt or need for self-affirmation.
There will be struggles in writing, but they will be less melodramatic the more you write. It does get easier with experience and it should, or it is like no other activity known to humankind.
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we overdramatize the writing process. It is not particularly painful when we take most of the ego out of it. What makes it difficult and fraught is the constant self-doubt or need for self-affirmation.
Triangulation
When we read a Victorian-era translation into English of Garcilaso, we have a third element to think about that has not much to do with Garcilaso or with ourselves. In other words, we could read Garcilaso directly, or even with the help of a more recent translation if we don't know Spanish well, but our interest in Garcilaso is independent of whatever interest we have in Victorian era poetry. So all the Victorian detritus is precisely what we aren't interested in, because it is irrelevant. We want a 21st-century understanding not mediated by some distracting 19th-century understanding of the 16th century.
And if we are judging it by our own standards, we might not like it; it might not be our own taste. And maybe Victorian translators have different ideas about literalness and so we can take issue with their accuracy.
Yet we are also entitled to be interested in 19th century translation practices in their own right, and in the history of the reception of Garcilaso. Now are question is not: how good was Wiffen as a translator of Garcilaso, but rather, what were contemporary ideas about translation? So questions of both taste and fidelity take a back seat.
Yet it precisely in these two areas, taste and fidelity, that we can make judgments about what Victorian translation ideals were about. Those are the things we notice, especially when they depart from our own preconceptions. Insofar as they are in accordance with our own ideals, translations become less visible.
The wonderful moments come when a translation is really awful or really wonderful. We can have a Chapman's Homer Keatsian epiphany, or feel such a gap in the translation that an abyss opens up for us: how did he get it so wrong?
Translation is hermeneutics, but it is also aesthetics.
And if we are judging it by our own standards, we might not like it; it might not be our own taste. And maybe Victorian translators have different ideas about literalness and so we can take issue with their accuracy.
Yet we are also entitled to be interested in 19th century translation practices in their own right, and in the history of the reception of Garcilaso. Now are question is not: how good was Wiffen as a translator of Garcilaso, but rather, what were contemporary ideas about translation? So questions of both taste and fidelity take a back seat.
Yet it precisely in these two areas, taste and fidelity, that we can make judgments about what Victorian translation ideals were about. Those are the things we notice, especially when they depart from our own preconceptions. Insofar as they are in accordance with our own ideals, translations become less visible.
The wonderful moments come when a translation is really awful or really wonderful. We can have a Chapman's Homer Keatsian epiphany, or feel such a gap in the translation that an abyss opens up for us: how did he get it so wrong?
Translation is hermeneutics, but it is also aesthetics.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Critical thinking
"By both race and gender there is a higher percentage
of black women (9.7 percent) enrolled in college than any other group including
Asian women (8.7 percent), white women (7.1 percent) and white men (6.1
percent), according to the 2011 U.S. Census Bureau."
This is great, but it doesn't make black women "the most educated group" in the US, as some media were reporting.
22% of black women have college degrees, which is lower than white women, Asian women, Asian men, and white men. It's impressive in historical terms, but more than 50% of Asians get college degrees, so an Individual from that group is twice as likely to have college degree as a black woman.
So how can you go from that 9.7 statistic to that conclusion? That is probably the percentage of all people, not the percentage of college age people. Because, well, it is obvious that 91% of Asian women of college age are not skipping college. So if the black population is younger on the whole, then it would include more college age people, but you would have to correct for demographics first. Also, attending college is not as significant as graduating.
This is great, but it doesn't make black women "the most educated group" in the US, as some media were reporting.
22% of black women have college degrees, which is lower than white women, Asian women, Asian men, and white men. It's impressive in historical terms, but more than 50% of Asians get college degrees, so an Individual from that group is twice as likely to have college degree as a black woman.
So how can you go from that 9.7 statistic to that conclusion? That is probably the percentage of all people, not the percentage of college age people. Because, well, it is obvious that 91% of Asian women of college age are not skipping college. So if the black population is younger on the whole, then it would include more college age people, but you would have to correct for demographics first. Also, attending college is not as significant as graduating.
Intellectual Curiosity
I won't say intellectual curiosity is the only thing you need, but isn't it the most important? Worrying about being smart enough is a trap, instead you should cultivate curiosity and recognize your own lapses of curiosity and see how you can learn from them. Scholarship without this quality is easy to spot because it is dull. The writer is never asking himself interesting questions, and is satisfied with dull answers. We don't really know that much about literature or about the human mind, so the possibilities are endless.
I was wondering recently whether there is another sense, along with the 20 or so with which we are possessed, with the name I would give it being chronoception. Of course if I google this word I get some results so I am not the first to ask this question or invent this word. But that doesn't matter.
I am also wondering if there is related research into ruthmoception, where the question is not longer duration, but also segmentation and articulation in time. I'll have to go back and read Bergson.
I was wondering recently whether there is another sense, along with the 20 or so with which we are possessed, with the name I would give it being chronoception. Of course if I google this word I get some results so I am not the first to ask this question or invent this word. But that doesn't matter.
I am also wondering if there is related research into ruthmoception, where the question is not longer duration, but also segmentation and articulation in time. I'll have to go back and read Bergson.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Molinos
No llegarás jamás al monte de la perfección ni al alto trono de la interior paz si te gobiernas por tu voluntad propia. Esta cruel fiera enemiga de Dios y de tu alma se ha de vencer. Tu propia dirección y juicio, como a rebeldes, los has de avasallar, disponer y quemar en el fuego de la obediencia. Allà se descubrirá, como en piedra de toque, si es amor propio o divino el que sigues. Allà en aquel holocausto ha de aniquilarse hasta la última sustancia tu juicio y tu voluntad propia.
Molinos has very few rhetorical moves. He begins many chapters with a contrast: there are two types of x, and this one is superior to that, so recogimiento is better than meditación. He cites other authors in support of his points. He uses similes. Writing at the end of the seventeenth century, he is largely innocent of any baroque flourishes. There is some tedium in reading him. I was surprised by this because of Valente's admiration, but I realized at some point that the attraction for Valente was triple: the persecution he experienced at the hands of the Inquisition made him a perfect example of the dichotomy between official religion and heterodoxy. Then the mysticism itself. And finally this limpid prose style. I've bolded some rhetorical figures here, simile, epithet, and metaphor.
Under torture, he confessed to eating meat on Fridays, using the fish only the whet his appetite, and to letting himself be sodomized numerous times. He was imprisoned for many years and died there. The Inquisition continued to persecute his follower in France into the 18th Century.
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