Academic Freedom

Here's an interesting one.

An "academic freedom syllabus" that sees academic freedom exclusively as administrators caving in in "knee jerk" fashion to the right. She repeats that phrase "knee jerk" so many times. And "alt right."

Most of the time, academic administrators are repressing freedom on their own accord, not because of some external right-wing threat. They are doing so when faculty challenge the administrators, or to satisfy some not right-wing constituencies of students, or in a misguided attempt to enforce Title IX.

They are creating "free speech zones" and speech codes.

The so-called "progressive stack" is very dangerous. If someone has the academic freedom to call on students according to a hierarchy of race and gender, why wouldn't another professor have the right to call on students according to a "regressive stack"? This professor might say, well, "since my colleagues are using the progressive stack in their classes, I need to counter this by calling on the most privileged first, etc..." Well, that would be outrageous, but if the progressive stack exists, then wouldn't the same academic freedom justify the regressive stack.

Of course, some would point out that the regressive stack is already being practiced. I can see that perspective too.  So we could go around in a circle with this argument. I would counter that then the regressive professor could say that he is just following the status quo then, so he can't be disciplined for doing what he has always done. Because academic freedom.

 I think this should be debated and if anyone can prove me wrong I would be happy.

Pronouns

Jonathan uses me myself and I pronouns.

When addressing Jonathan please use you pronouns.

A Short Cultural History (A Fragment)

Meanwhile the great edifice crumples, creating danger zones where

sharp edges create an "attractive nuisance." Once, these

borders were policed by well-meaning bureaucrats.  The culture

coarsens and grows bewilderingly nuanced at the same time. "Shit happens"

on the one hand, and, on the other, infinite gradations of identity, in the small gap

between two otherwise indistinguishable genders. The response

was supposed to be that that the most subtle and the least subtle among us

"lack all conviction." But it isn't so. Those working against the obesity epidemic by day

would join in protests against "fat shaming" in the evening but if you thought

there was a contradiction in this you would be very wrong. That's just one example.

I'm speaking off the record here. I can't even mean what I say anymore....

You can't plagiarize by accident

Suppose there is a language with ten nouns and ten intransitive verbs.  Speakers of this language only use two word sentences like "lion sleeps" or "man eats."  So there are 100 possible sentences in the language. The chances that two sentences will be identical, then, is 1 in 100.  The chances that two consecutive sentences will coincide are 1/1000. And so on.  (Image two people in rooms 100 miles apart who are asked to write essay in this language.) Of course in a corpus of billions of words you will find identical stretches of language, and these will occur according to the probabilities we can easily calculate.

Now let's say that the language gets many more types of words, and more in each category, and that sentence length is indefinite, and patterns of syntax more varied.  Now we have 20,000 words, not 20, so I can't even run the percentages any more: they are too vast. See two short stories by Borges, "Pierre Menard" and "The Library at Babel" for more insight into this. See Chomsky on the creativity of language.

In our musical system there are twelve notes. I used to wonder why we didn't run out of new melodies. After all, the possibilities are finite. It is true that many melodies contain identical sequences of notes in some stretches, but it is not hard to write new melodies.

The idea that your language forces you to say certain things and not others, then, needs to be re-examined. You can follow all the rules of syntax and still come up with original combinations.

***

Plagiarism by accident happens when you literally copy and paste something and leave the quotation marks off, and then come back to your text and lose track of whose language is whose.  It is an accident but it is still your fault. Aside from the carelessness of not marking the language as quoted, there is another issue: you should have a pride in your prose that would make someone else's language stick out when inserted therein.  Sometimes I look at a guest post by Thomas on this blog and think for a second or two: oh, that is strange, I don't write like this, before realizing that, no, I don't write like that. Thomas writes very well, but differently than I do. There are posts I don't remember writing, but I recognize them as my writing.

 I guess poets with cookie cutter styles might have this problem.    

The Testament of Mateo del Olmo

I lost one book to alcoholism

one to debt

one to depression

another to life itself

and so I leave to the world these four books of poems

Pristine, Poems of Salt,

The Diamond in the Rough,  Rawhide Visions

Associate Deans

We used to have associate deans for humanities, social sciences, hard sciences.  Now we are going to have associate deans for "academic innovation and student success" and things like that. This means that we won't know them as well, because they are not in charge of various sets of departments, but of broadly defined conceptual values.  There will be one for diversity, maybe one for sustainability.  

I see this as part of the trend toward emphasizing less academic functions of academia, though the dean is making these positions 25% ones rather than 50 to save money. So the dean will do as much work, probably, but be paid half the amount for the administrative work sh/e does.

Humor and wit in music

Music can be funny or witty, but how so? It might be interesting to look at various kinds of musical wit. I'm reminded that scherzo means joke, so we might think certain movements of longer works are meant to be playful. 

Then we have intertextuality, like a quotation in a jazz solo. I think Parker quotes "White Christmas" in a solo on "Ornithology." 

There is irony, as in the use of excessively simple or saccharine melodies that we don't feel are to be taken seriously.  Parody as well.  

The frustration of expectations, or misdirection, or surprise.  The use of odd juxtapositions. 

Funny timbres and tonalities, dissonances. It might be funny to use a kazoo.  

I think Haydn is funnier than Mozart, and Monk funnier than Mingus, though the latter can be witty as well. Ellington is witty in a sophisticated way. 

I never went in for the PDQ Bach stuff for some reason.  

It takes some sophistication to hear humor in music, because many people approach music, especially classical music, with a deadly earnestness.