Layered

 We can think of intellectual life as layered in chronological stages over one's life time.  Of course, it is perfectly possible that someone can die young, and yet make a significant contribution at an early age. In those cases, we don't know what the later stages of development might have brought. 

One layer sits over another layer. We still know what we learned as children in school. There is a layer, then, of more specialized (and general) knowledge gained in college. 

Graduate school is layered on that. Now knowledge is even more specialized, but general knowledge should increase there as well.  

Early years as a professor, young researcher.  Then the "mid-career" scholar. Then the recognized expert at the highest rank.  All throughout these stages there are plateaux, and even possibly declines.  You can actually get worse as scholar, or become simply repetitive.  I know at one point I was very repetitive. I probably still am repetitive.  

Intellectual depth comes from the layering of these stages. Growth doesn't have to stop unless there is an actual cognitive decline.  Otherwise, we can be innovative as long as we want to.  

The best of many worlds

 My friend would tell her friends when we were first going out  He is handsome, and so smart. 

Then, after a while, she would tell them. He is so kind! 

One Note Mayhew

 I'm kind of obsessed with songs that use 1 or 2 notes as the central motif. "One note samba" would be the obvious example. Of course, it uses more than one note, but the initial theme is monotone. It adds the Bb after a while, and then the B section uses a ton of notes. 

Second example, "Thelonious" by you-know-who.  The motif is Bb, repeated, going down a half step to A, then back again to Bb.  There is only one other note in the A section of the tune, a fourth up from Bb to Eb.  

What else?  C Jam blues has a melody that goes up a fifth from the tonic.  

So the movement that normally was in the melody is transferred to the harmony, in the Jobim example. The initial F sounds different depending on its relation to the underlying chords. There is also rhythmic dynamism. It don't mean a think if it ain't got that swing / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah /  dah dah.  The last part is all on one note.  

Staying on one note for a while is also an improvisatory technique.  It could be "honking," in which a tenor sax will pick a low note and just milk the hell out of it while the audience goes crazy.  Or, in Sonny Rollins, a way of creating tension and rhythmic variation.  Repetition creates tension, because the listener wants it to end, to resolve to something else. 

En effective technique is to play one note for a while, then a crazy ornamentation that goes all over the place.  

What other tunes use this device of repetition?  

Spot the fallacies...

" Decades ago, the sociologist Robert K. Merton worried that the rise of more rapidly changing forms of knowledge would exacerbate the costs of academic gerontocracy. It might have been more defensible in the past — the medieval university coming honestly by its premodern characteristics — but no longer. “Today everything is quickly acquired, even that experience in which formerly consisted the sole and genuine superiority of the old over the young,” Merton cited his forerunner in sociology, Robert Michels, as saying all the way back in 1911. Modernity meant that “age has lost much of its value and therefore has lost, in addition, the respect which it inspired and the influence which it exercised.”"

Anyway

 Anyway, there is a CHE article about gerontocracy in academia.  It states, outright, that younger professors are more innovative, and that we old folks just teach what we learned in Graduate School 40 years ago. This is so true... I only teach semiotics and structuralism.  The author has open contempt for values like wisdom and experience. Modernity means that we learn faster, and don't have to bother with accumulated traditions, like they did in medieval times.  

Look, I was smarter at 28 when I finished my dissertation, than I am now.  By smarter, I mean that I had a brilliant mind.  And yet, my work was (relatively) shallow at that point.  (But not as shallow as this guy's critique of us geezers in our tweed jackets with elbow patches!) What I might have lost in brilliance I have gained in depth. There is a balance there. You need both types of intelligence. 

Of course, when our generation of privileged white men finally retires, there won't be these privileged positions any more anyway. Academia will be destroyed anyway.   

French Revolution

"This generationally toxic combo means that younger academics today regard those elders much as serfs on the brink of the French Revolution saw the noble lords."

I think this writer is a bit confused about the French Revolution.  

Dream of JCO

 I was to share a room with a former student of mine, on some kind of field trip. I was nervous, even though we had two separate beds. I promised to myself that if she tried to come into my bed I would reject her. But really, dreaming of NOT wanting to sleep with someone is the same as dreaming you do want to. (The logic of dreams is reversed.) I said goodnight and asked her if she had gotten into the program I recommended her for, perhaps in nursing?  

In the morning we were to meet Joyce Carol Oates, though in the dream she somehow had the nickname "Connie," and was into occultism or tarot readings in a way I wouldn't associate with Oates at all. We didn't actually meet her, though.  

The dream morphed into preparations for a potluck. The person I was going with said she had bought and prepared the food, and even washed the dishes. This seemed unfair to me, because I had just spent more money than that on a huge present that I had to carry. There were two of us and we had to carry three heavy items to the car.  

There was a discussion of gifts: in a certain family each person got the same number of gifts, like 3 or 4, in the interests of fairness. It was pointed out that in one case two of the gifts for one person were bicycles. The obvious flaw in the system was that the gifts were not of equal value.