As I type

 As I type my fingers act automatically. I don't look at the keyboard: my fingers simply know where the letters are. I make mistakes, but that is beside the point. My brain knows on some level what I am doing. For example, it knows that some words only need the left hand. However, to remind my brain of where a letter is, I have to move my fingers. I couldn't recite to you the querty keyboard.  

On the piano, my fingers also know where the keys are. I can play blind, for example. I can make a mistake if the key I am reaching for is two octaves up. 

The neurological process of writing by hand is different, I'm told.  Maybe better, but there is still a beauty in the unconscious logic of typing.  

Words cannot describe

I've talked about this trope before. In a formulaic way, words cannot describe just means the experience is powerful.  It really isn't about words themselves, but about experience.  You expect me to say something, but any statement pales in proportion to the experience itself. "I have no words..." and then the speaker gives a speech anyway about having no words. 

The next stage of the trope is to focus on language itself. Here, the point is that language is inadequate on some fundamental level. Inadequate for the enormous experience... but I would say also not really suited to evoke even ordinary life. I cannot make my words smell like cinnamon. If you already know what it smells like, then the word just functions as an arbitrary surrogate. If you don't know the smell, or if you don't know the word, then it doesn't work at all.

The third step in my argument is that this is not what language is supposed to do anyway. It was never supposed to be a surrogate for reality itself. It can only be judged inadequate because we have a false idea of what it's supposed to be. Take music. We can use language to notate music, but it is a bit awkward: a quarter note triplet played legato on G4. We have another system, called sheet music, that does the job better, though it is also awkward to read and write except for highly trained musicians. The sheet music is inadequate too, but good enough to preserve musical ideas and tell the performer how to realize them.  

Here's where it gets interesting. Even though that is not the main job of language, language can be evocative also. It is no longer an abstract representation of reality, but an experience that is real in its own right. This is something that we call "poetry." The combination of words gives us something new, something that cuts through our ordinary perception with an intensity. Think of a poem that tries to talk about the experience of listening to Monk play.  Ok.  It will probably be a bad poem because it sets itself up to fail by trying to replicate an experience in an inadequate medium.  Now think of a poem that is not about Monk but replicates the experience of his music in a different medium, adequate to itself.  

 

Terrible arguments

 You need to study humanities because it is the only way to learn critical thinking, etc...  

Then explain how people in the humanities, the actual professors and prestigious intellectuals, propose and accept really terrible arguments?  How will the undergraduates studying these things be able to escape terrible arguments, or judge which arguments are better than others?  We cannot even agree about what a poem means. 

I'm not setting myself up as the arbiter of what a good or bad argument is.  But I am a professor of humanities (at least one of the humanities), and some arguments seem bad to me.  Is it because I didn't study enough humanities?  What if I and another humanist disagree about what a terrible argument is?  Who is going to decide who is right? A third humanist? A committee? 

(I'm not giving examples, because then we would be debating the merits of particular arguments. Maybe my example of a terrible argument is something you think is wonderful. That is the problem in the first place.)

***

I guess the shortcut is to think the left wing arguments are supported by critical thinking, and the right wing ones are right wing memes.  But then the critical thinking arguments disappears, because the right (left) answer is always obvious. It is "on the right side of history."  No thinking is required after all! No amount of humanities education fixes this.  

Act of God

 There was a video with Joe Pass saying his talent was God-given, etc... 

There's another one where he explains how he learned to play: he would listen to a Charlie Parker solo for hours in order to replicate it perfectly, and then do another, another after that, etc... with many solos by many players of various instruments.  He wouldn't just learn guitar solos.  

Let's say that both perspectives are valid from the point of view of the player, and there is no actual contradiction between being given a gift and putting in a superhuman effort to make that gift something real.  Maybe the gift is just sitting down and doing it for hours at a time for many years.   

They asks Ron Carter about his bass influences. He said his influence was a trombone player, J.J. Johnson, getting that agility moving from note to note efficiently while seeming to move the slide very little. Johnson was trying to play on a brass instrument with the grace agility of a saxophone, not emulate other trombone players. I think Roy Eldridge on the trumpet was trying to play like Coleman Hawkins, not other trumpet players.  

A movie dream

 I had a kind of disturbing dream.  It wasn't happening to me; it was more of a movie I was watching. A man was attacked and had to kill his two attackers. It was at a school where his daughters studied, but it happened off hours. I will spare you graphic details. I knew there were twenty minutes left in the movie, in which the police would interrogate the man. It wasn't clear whether he would be accused or not.  

I awoke with some relief that it was only a dream / only a movie and didn't concern me directly, though somehow I was the protagonist of the narrative, at one remove.  

I got another email from the pretentious poet

 It was similar but not identical to the first one.  There was no acknowledgment of my unenthusiastic response to his first message.  I'm not sure if the poems he is sending me now are different or the same from the mediocre ones he sent me last time.  It kind of feels like a joke or an AI thing. I'm not sure even if this person exists. Probably he or it is sending these messages to many people. Some new kind of spam?  

So this time I won't respond at all.  

A dream

 I was walking near some docks, and the memory came to me of having worked there. I remembered some nasty union officials and company bosses, and co-workers who nicknamed me "college boy" or "college." I was skeptical because it didn't fit in with anything I remembered or with my self-image. 

As I woke up I thought about other situations in which the dream world had a kind of self-consistency, as though it were a world that existed. One in which there was some kind of summer work and a particular bus to take to get to a coastal resort.