Generative metrics

 I guess, the generative metrics people care what makes a verse metrical or not, analogously to what makes a sentence grammatical. It doesn't get very far at answering why metrics exists in the first place. One example is the severe downplaying of rhythm in Fabb and Halle. For them, it's almost as though rhythm were an accidental byproduct of meter, rather than the reason it exists in the first place. Fabb even denies that meter is temporal in character.  

I'm looking again at Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing to see whether that might be applicable.  

Fabb and Halle

 I checked out their book. Meter in Poetry: A New Theory. (Cambridge 2008). It is an excellent book. No discussion of stanza, verse paragraph. A handful of mentions of enjambment, mostly about the possibility of enjambing within the word--certainly interesting, but more of an exception in most poetic traditions.  The theory of meter is the theory of the metrical line, not of the combination of metrical lines into larger prosodic units. There's very little discussion of relation of poetic prosody to speech prosody.  

(Carlos Piera's chapter on Southern Romance meters in this book is very good.)

That is fine.  It allows me to point out that metrics is very good at analyzing lines of poetry individually, but that there needs to be a whole discipline of the prosody of the unit larger than the line. Lineation is so strong a force that every discussion gravitates toward it.  

Why the "Trump is Hitler" rhetoric didn't win the election for Harris

 1. A certain number of people will vote Republican no matter what.  This category is least likely to be swayed by arguments of this sort.  It would be like me (never having voted for a republican in any election for local or state of national office since being able to vote in 1978) being swayed by a "Bernie is a communist" argument, if I were to choose between Bernie Sanders and Mitt Romney.   

2.  We lived under Trump for 4 years.  It didn't feel like Nazi Germany.  Daily life under Trump was not that different from life under Obama or Biden. 

3.  We've always been told that Republicans are fascists, nazis, etc... The idea is that this time the candidate really is Hitler... But the feeling against Reagan, Bush II, etc... was similar. The average person just responds to the "Republicans are fascist" argument like they do to the "democrats are communist" arguments.  It is just viewed as a kind of political hyperbole. (They boy who cried wolf.)  

4. People didn't like Hitler because he was Hitler, not because he was the reincarnation of some other bad guy from another era.  

5. There's a kind of intellectual laziness here. If one candidate is Hitler, then every one should vote for the non-Hitler candidate, obviously. So you don't have to make a case for this other candidate at all! 

It's like being asked to choose between insipid food and poison.  Logically, you should choose the insipid food, rather than the poison, but wouldn't you prefer a tasty meal, that also won't kill you? 

6. It just seems desperate.  

Reading music

For an odd-numbered interval (3, 5, 7, 9), both notes will be on lines, or both on spaces. Two lines or spaces apart is a third, three is a fifth, etc... 

An even-numbered interval will be on a line and space (2,4,6,8,10). A note, an octave up or down from a space, will be on a line., and vice versa.  C on the bass clef and on the treble will be mirror images.  

So intervals will have certain look on the staff.  You can look and see fourths and fifths and thirds intuitively.  

Art Tatum

 I have a book of Tatum transcriptions. I can't play them, aside from a few easier measures here and there, since I don't have impossibly fast fingers, or even medium fast chops, but there are a few revelations. The voice leading is wonderful, with chromatic movement in the left hand. Voicings are full and complex, very cool chords The tune "Moon Glow" has an ending in the A section with quarter note triplets, and Tatum milks the syncopated rhythm for all it's worth. The longer runs are wonderful, though the least playable for me.  Sixteenth notes go by fast at 184 bpm, to be exact, four times that rate. 

My fingers are getting a bit faster, not by doing Tatum runs, but through other exercises. The idea is not to be super fast, but to more comfortable at a moderate tempo.   

Scrambled dream

 These dreams were scrambled. I was sitting in the back row of a comedy award show, squeezed in among famous comics.  They all decided to go to one of the front row, and I felt two women on either side almost on my lap. The comedy show, though, was mostly music.

***

I was at a rehearsal, and did not have my car. I asked my friend Joe if he had a car there. He looked surprised and said "yes" in an inexpressive way. Then I asked him for a ride and he said "no" in an equally neutral tone, with no apparent emotion. I was thinking to myself that I would have given Joe a ride if the situation were reversed.  Maybe Joe doesn't like me?  So I began to walk home. I was dressed in a bathrobe and boxer shorts. (Joe had also been oddly dressed.) I was at my home town high school to begin with and was going west, the direction of the sun in the evening, but everything looked unfamiliar, with tall buildings where none had been when I was growing up. When I got home I told my family about a "ballet" rehearsal, though earlier in the dream I had been in the music department, looking for a piano to play in an unused classroom, where our choir had rehearsed. 

***

Other parts of the dream were too scrambled to remember.   

More on the signature

 A metrical signature is like an accent, or a particular qualitative factor that makes a voice recognizable, or combination of features that make a face into a Gestalt.  Since it's qualitative, it can't be measured, exactly, though it might have some statistical tendencies. 

It is interesting that we use "measure" as our idea of verse. That's what meter means. In older metrical treatises the word favored is "numbers." Meter has to be numerical in some way. The number doesn't give the Gestalt, though.  That would be like saying that human faces are all the same, if they have the same basic components, two eyes, below that a nose, ears on the side, etc...