A piano tinkling in the next apartment

I'm learning the harmonization of one song each month. For January it will be "These Foolish Things." I've got through the first few measure already. Anyway, the rhyme "apartment" / "heart meant" is wonderful. "A piano tinkling in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant."

A simple test

Does your religion claim to have the truth (THE truth)?

Does it stigmatize non-believers?

Does it have a long tradition of religious war? Conquest and forced conversions? Patriarchy? Anti-semitism? Slavery? Resistance to science? Torture and burning at the stake? Corruption?

If it is a relatively "liberal" religion, or a "moderate" or "tolerant" version of a traditional religion, how long has that been the case? For how many generations, for example?

Why go to graduate school?

Here is one answer.

This is pretty simple and dramatic. More money, less chance of being unemployed, with a PhD or Professional degree. This is true at any level of educational attainment, with the least employable, the least well-remunerated being those without high school diplomas.

Those with professional or PhD level education enjoy what is basically full employment. Even the bad academic job market in some fields does not make a statistical dent here. This being said, should you ge a PhD in a field with abysmal job placement at a mediocre state school, if your only dream is tenure at Princeton? Probably not.

What is more effective, praise or criticism? (neither)

A good post from bulletproof musician.

Neither praise nor criticism is at the center of effective instruction, but rather instruction itself. Lessons from basketball coach John Wooden.

Mission Creep of Peer review

Composer / musicologist Kyle Gann on Peer Review

A quotation is an ornament to a piece of writing when the quoted phrase is so striking and memorable that the author couldn’t have come up with anything as evocative himself. But if I can state an idea clearly (and little academic writing is as readable as mine), why would it carry more authority if put into a sentence I stole from another writer? If what I say is false, and its falsity has been demonstrated in a previous publication, then I should be told to do my homework. But if what I say is demonstrably true, what does it matter whether someone else has said it before? We are not medieval monks, that we fear to record the fact in front of us unless we can find a citation for it in Aristotle.

Quiero laurearme, pero me encebollo

Here is a line from a sonnet by Vallejo. Laurel branches are the crown of the poet, hence "poet laureate." He wants to crown himself with this traditional award, but instead he "onions himself." He creates a reflexive verb out of the word "cebolla" following morphological rules of Spanish word formation. There is the rhetorical figure of antithesis, obviously, the verbal wit that comes with the creation of neologisms. It is worthy of Quevedo.

An old discussion of

logopoeia.