Since it's Christmas...

Christmas is less than two weeks away, and I have nothing to post about it. Neither news article nor dinosaur comic has inspired me to write, and none of my own Christmas-related thoughts is insightful enough to share. But I love Christmastime too much to let it pass without a mention. As I said last year, I'm convinced that--despite the garish, over-hawked kitsch flowing freely over the festivities--Christmas brings out the best in people. So, lest the season go unheeded, let me share two small items:

1. Christmas music might be my favorite part of the season, and I've spent the last week or so fine-tuning the ultimate Pandora Christmas station. The very worst Christmas music is ostentatious and diva-driven; the very best is still, solemn, and beautiful. In an effort to sift out the chaff, I've seeded the station with a choice blend of 'classical' and contemporary music. I dare you to judge my choices. This year's newfound gem is the warm, hearthy choral work of Vaughan Williams. Although an agnostic, he was devoted to spreading Christmas cheer, writing a fantasia on Christmas carols alongside a ballet score for Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Listen and enjoy, I entreat you.

2. My wife and I can't stomach the idea of Christmas at 75 degrees. So, instead of staying in Texas, we've arranged to be here on Christmas eve. A prediction: best Christmas ever.

I don't want to forget

Over the past several months, I've been reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels. Or, at least, I've been trying to read them. I enjoy reading, and I usually get through new books quickly, but Tolkien has been slow going--sufficiently so that I've had to take a few breaks to read something more digestible. I could postulate reasons for why that's my fault rather than Tolkien's (and I bet a Tolkien fan or two will leave comments to that effect), but hundreds of pages of irregular pacing, half-hearted character development, and improbable dialogue have led me to a more direct conclusion: whatever his other talents, Tolkien just isn't a great writer.

Having said that, however, I have every intention of finishing the series, for a perhaps surprising reason: I've been profoundly affected by the books. Pervading the series is an overwhelming sense of reverence for the past: the men of Gondor look into the distant past to recall their former glory, history and heros are remembered through songs and poems passed generation to generation, and the preeminence of Rivendell is best understood by recognizing that the elves--having unbounded lifespan--are guardians of history all but lost to the rest of Middle Earth. With Tolkien's emphasis on the ancient and almost-forgotten, reading about Middle Earth evokes images of a medieval monastery on an overcast day--old, dark, and almost depressing, but also inspiring and beautiful.

I've become easily impacted by these sorts of emotions (and, correspondingly, increasingly interested in traveling to places where ancientness is on display). I can't completely articulate why this is the case, but allow me to conjecture a partial explanation: my memory now is not the memory I remember. I no longer remember the details of what I read and hear, and the once-precise recollections of my life are beginning to blur. As with Tolkien's writing, I can come up with purely circumstantial reasons--a grown-up, multi-tasked life precludes my giving full attention to anything, ruining any hopes of ambient memorization; and years of scientific training have reinforced a preference for understanding over regurgitation--but the truth is that my memory is losing its former sharpness, and it can only dull with age.

Trivialize it if you like--dismiss it as the idle navel-gazing of someone whose quarter-life crisis is in full swing or the lightweight drivel of someone who's trying too hard at philosophical depth--but this matters to me. It's legitimately tragic, precisely because there is nothing I can do to prevent it. For example, if I want to relive my childhood, I putatively can fire up the NES emulator and play Super Mario Brothers to my ten-year-old heart's content (actually I do this all the time). But it doesn't really work. Sure, every so often I catch a reminiscent whiff of the plastic cases that held our NES cartridges or a glimpse of what the Mushroom Kingdom looked like that first Christmas morning, but mostly I'm just overwriting old memories. Instead of associating Mario Brothers with my childhood home, now I'm just as likely to associate it with one of several college apartments. Similarly, I can re-read books that defined my life as a teenager (I do this a lot, too), but again I'm more likely to reinforce associations with the present than I am to conjure images of the past. The brain supports only a limited number of neural connections, and any gateway to the past becomes increasingly ineffective the more I use it.

It may not matter in any long-term sense whether or not I can remember my childhood Mario exploits or the feeling of reading Dune for the first time, but as I notice my memory fading, I feel like bits of me are slipping away--both without my permission and in spite of my best efforts. Like a small town trying to preserve its way of life against the press of modernity, I feel the need to protect my past from being swallowed up in the present. And as the gloomy, comfortable fog of agnosticism finally sets in, I'm forced to confront a stark reality: as those memories are forgotten, parts of who I am are lost forever. Not merely misplaced or damaged, but irretrievably lost and irreparably destroyed. And there's nothing I can do--nothing that will work, at least. Entropy knocks down all our sandcastles, even the ones we build of ourselves, and none of our noisy efforts at self-preservation can change the outcome.

I say that's a tragedy. If you still don't think it's sad, well, maybe we can't be friends anymore.

Theme and variations

I recently promised some friends that I'd post the final project from the composition class I took last semester. I figured that my blog-following audience [as well as you lurkers; I know who (most of) you are. If you're going to read, you might as well leave a comment once in a while. Or, if the subject matter doesn't suit you, you can at least send a surrogate.] might be interested to see it, too.

But this... isn't that project. I'm actually quite proud of my work on the final project (a cello concerto), but I left a few things half-finished in order to meet the course deadlines. So, while I finish up the score for the cello concerto, allow me to offer this as a cop-out: my first composition project for the course, a theme and variations for piano.

The requirements were straightforward: one theme plus five "variations" on that theme, lasting in total approximately three minutes, containing at least one key change and one time signature change. I wrote each of the variations in a very different style, and since I believe that context always enhances the listening experience, let me drag you through a little bit of play-by-play analysis:

- Theme: It's... well, it's the theme, presented very simply in unremarkable four-part harmony. It's a little boring, even, but that's sort of the point, to take an ordinary theme on a wild ride through the variations. Plus, it's only thirty seconds; you can make it.

- Variation I: The first variation is a slow, brooding treatment of the theme. I like its atmosphere, but still the presentation is rather uncomplicated.

- Variation II: I lack the contrapuntal mettle to write a full-fledged fugue, but this variation is at least fugue-like. I love Bach's ability to weave passion and intensity into a tightly constructed musical mass; here is my effort at emulation.

- Variation III: Here I'm deliberately imitating the major-scale sappiness of Rachmaninoff. Although this variation was a good exercise in part-writing, it's a little too melodramatic for my tastes.

- Variation IV: I'm most proud of these last two variations, mostly because they exhibit qualities my of own compositional voice: asymmetrical time signatures, lots of dissonance, unapologetic parallel motion, and an emphasis on harmony over melody. And while the fast tempo forces this variation to be over too soon, it's far and away the best 20 seconds of the piece.

- Variation V: The final variation is an attempt to merge Sigur Ros-style ambience with an Eric Whiticare-style approach to harmony. (There's also a Sufjan Stevens reference; five points to the first person to correctly identify it!) I'm pretty happy with the result and its atmospheric minimalism. I won't pretend that there's some grand artistic meaning to my little school project, but I think this variation gives a fitting end to the piece: after folding, spindling, and torturing the theme, we pare it down to its essential elements and lay it to rest.

Below are links to the piece itself (.mp3) and the score (.pdf). Be forewarned: even though there have been great advances recently in electronic music, the mp3 file still came out of Finale's synthesizer. As far as synthesizers go, it's quite good, but don't expect it to sound like the real thing. And since I don't play the piano, a live recording isn't likely to be forthcoming anytime soon. Also: you may need to turn up the volume or use headphones. Finale is a little sissy about volume.

I know it isn't much, but it's something I created from scratch, and something I'm a little bit proud of. Please enjoy (please?):

Score (Finale)

(Sometime tomorrow I will upload the hand-written score, which will immediately make the whole thing at least 17% more bona fide. I'll also try to get Google player embedded into the post. I couldn't get it working, and I believe that blog jukeboxes are moderately evil, so we're stuck with this for now.)

Statuesque

If you follow the links embedded in my posts (and seriously, you really should; I spend considerable time hunting them down, and furthermore they are awesome), you know that I'm a fan of Bertrand Russell. Although he probably would have mostly thought of himself as a mathematician, he's better remembered now for his skeptical philosophy and quotable one-liners. Over the past several years, a few of his quotes have helped formalize my thoughts in a few areas I already felt strongly about: the value of questioning one's assumptions, the wisdom in acknowledging uncertainty, and the nobility of the scientific endeavor. He's also occasionally forced me to realize that sometimes I sympathize with the skeptic more readily than with the believer.

But as much as I like him, every so often he gets it terribly, terribly wrong. Consider the following:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Sounds innocuous enough, maybe even something I'd support, given my overexuberance for mathematics. But no. As you might imagine, I take no issue with the idea that mathematics possesses truth and beauty--mathematics is all about the truth and beauty (although, if you want to be picky, we have to be careful about what we mean by mathematical truth. But I don't want to be picky.). Instead, my problem is with the "cold and austere" part. Maybe I misunderstand Mr. Russell, but I think he's missed the mark.

Here we go: it's become a cliche to characterize mathematics (and mathematicians) in simultanously dismissing and reverential terms. That is, it's terribly complicated and we could never understand it and it's SO amazing that someone could, in fact, understand it. But it's also so complicated and abstruse that it's entirely disconnected from our real life, so it's ultimately unimportant and irrelevant. By extension, we do the same thing to science in general: regard it as an impressively difficult, but impenetrably tedious task better left to someone else who happens to enjoy the pointlessness. (I could go on about how harmful this idea is, how it's perpetuated by our approach to math and science education, and what it says about us as a people, but I need to get back on point.)

"Cold and austere" only serves to reinforce this idea. It suggests that mathematics, science, and even logic in general are remote and lifeless and alien to everyday existence. That logical, mathematical thought is a robotic, passionless exercise that leads to a boring and unimportant answer. Even more, it misses so much of what logical thought actually is. Your friends, your parents, and even Yann Martel all want you to believe that logic happens in a sterile, Spockian vaccum of emotion and imagination. But they are all wrong. Logic is alive and hot with argument, struggle, and discovery. It requires (not merely permits) imagination, passion, and creativity. And its results have the power to fundamentally alter how we perceive our everyday reality. (I mean this: I dare any of you to learn calculus [or maybe learn about the Cantor set] without suffering an irreversible perceptual shift.)

To be fair, probably I've significantly exaggerated Russell's meaning. Indeed, he certainly knew something of the joys of mathematical exertion. But I still argue that his imagery isolates mathematics from reality, treating it as something to be curated and admired rather than experienced. Mathematics--and logic in general--is less like appreciating a classical statue and more like creating a Jackson Pollock: an effort to find truth and beauty out of instinct and intuition; an unpredictable, even violent process that forges order from the chaos of human thought.

The state secedes

Yes, yes, yes. I know. It's been "a while". I'm sure you've all missed me. I have excuses: research qualifiers, paper reviews and revisions, recruitment weekend, composition projects, and a well-connected Finnish engineer have all distracted me from serving up rhetorical goodness for my (four or so) devoted fans.

I started a few posts--one on the tragedy of fading memory as it relates to William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" and one on an unfortunate quote by the otherwise-brilliant Bertrand Russell--but I didn't finish them. Those were shaping up to be complicated posts, and it takes me a lot of effort to organize and articulate my thoughts correctly. So, in keeping with my Gaussian approach to this blog, I've scrapped them--at least for the time being.

But today's topic is perfect for the blogger in a hurry. It's stupid, it makes me angry, and it requires only a minimum of analytical horsepower: Texas secession and the anti-tax tea parties.

On Wednesday, while at a tea party rally in Austin, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that if the Federal government didn't start listening to the American people, secession was a real possibility: "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."

First, let's get one thing straight. Texas has no special "secession clause" built into its constitution or treaty of annexation. (Even crackpot secessionists admit this.) It's as mythological as the idea that Texas's state flag is uniquely allowed to be flown at the same height as the U. S. flag (in fact, ANY state flag can be flown at the same height. Perhaps Texas is the only state insecure enough to feel the need.) Texas is no more allowed to peaceably secede than any other state, and that question was settled about twenty years after Texas joined the union.

There's a lot to pick on here: the irresponsibility of a standing governor publicly (even if hypothetically) suggesting secession, the obvious hypocrisy of waving an American flag while calling out for secession, and the absurdity of invoking the Boston Tea Party when you have elected officials in Congress. But this article covers those issues, so I'll leave them alone.

Instead, I want to make a different point, which is one of timing. Why are people suddenly so outraged over governmental excess? We've been engaged in "unsustainable" government spending for several years now, and no one complained nearly this loudly. The primary difference is that now there's a good (although perhaps debatable, but still: most credible economists [sorry, Ron Paul, you don't count] agree that SOME sort of stimulus was necessary) reason for it.

So I'm forced to conclude that a "secondary" difference is the real reason for all the protesting: there's a Democrat in the White House instead of a Republican. In other words, this is mostly an exercise in mob-driven partisanship. Hard-core conservatives are hell-bent on complaining about the new administration, so they decide to rekindle their rage over something that didn't get them all that upset a year ago.

It's frustrating for me as a (nominal) conservative, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to take conservative leadership seriously unless you're a party loyalist (which I'm not). This sort of redneck populism has all the intellectual honesty of an NRA pamphlet, and it appeals to roughly the same audience. Unless their goal is to shore up political capital in the former confederacy, encouraging people to "tea bag" Obama isn't exactly a winning strategy.

Of course, if that is their goal, I guess it works out pretty well for them if the secession movement takes hold. It'll simplify the problem of choosing a presidential candidate.

Who knows what might come out of that?

Inaugural thoughts

Somehow, Rice is a little more liberal than college campuses that I'm used to, and many classes were rearranged for today's inauguration, which lots of people watched on campus. I joined them, and I'm glad I did. And while I'm surely entering blog-cliche-land by doing this, here are a few scattered thoughts:

I enjoyed the quartet performed just before the oath of office. I rarely think of John Williams as a great composer, even for films (he's tall on simple, brassy bombast and short on subtlety; for my film-scoring money, Thomas Newman is your man), and I'm required as a cellist to remind you that Yo-Yo Ma is overrated (but I like him anyways: he's a superb--but probably not the greatest--classical cellist, and I appreciate his efforts to transcend genres and spread awareness of great music). Other than the fact that the clarinet part seemed to exist only to channel (or rip off) Aaron Copland, it was a great little piece that perfectly matched the tone of the inauguration. It was somber and occasionally dissonant, it had the (again) Copland-esque wide-openness that's uniquely American, and it had moments of genuinely exciting intricacy (right after the clarinet introduces the "Simple Gifts" theme). I was pleasantly surprised, and they did well to class it up after Aretha Franklin's over-divaed "My Country 'Tis of Thee".

I was bothered by commentators' frequent attemps to turn Obama's election into the culmination of the civil rights movement. I doubt that anyone honestly believes that Obama's election marks the eradication of our nation's racial difficulties, and conversely I don't think the goal of the civil rights movement has ever been to elect a black president. I realize that his victory is an important token of how far things have progressed, and I think it's entirely appropriate that the inauguration should occur the day after MLK day, but it's simply inaccurate to speak as though the problem is finally solved.

If you watched the inauguration, you probably noticed that Obama and John Roberts stumbled a bit on the oath of office. I did a little digging, comparing the transcript of what was spoken to the oath as specified in the Constitution. It appears that Roberts made the initial error and prompted Obama incorrectly, tripping Obama up (perhaps he recognized the mistake; he's likely been looking forward to taking the oath for a while) until Roberts corrected the mistake. Interestingly, though, Obama eventually repeated the first (and incorrect) prompt given to him. So if you're starving for another constitutional conspiracy theory to throw at the president, you can complain that he never properly took the oath of office...

And that brings me to my last point:

I'm optimistic about Obama's presidency. I didn't vote for Obama, and he almost certainly will enact policies that I disagree with, but I've spent time sticking up for him among conservatives. Maybe I've been brainwashed by all the Facebook and the YouTube and the Google, but I think the goodwill we've seen towards him is well-founded. I believe he is both intelligent and intellectually honest: despite his far-left record, he's shown moderation, pragmatism, and a cool head since his election, hardly the hallmark of a closed-minded ideologue. I believe that his bipartisanship is more than lofty rhetoric: he has repeatedly sought the advice of his rivals. And I've come around to the idea that these principles--intellectual honesty, restraint, and moderation--are more important than ideological compatibility. The time for shrill cries of "terrorist" and "radical socialist" is over and, in all honesty, never was here. The incoming administration will undoubtedly have its deep flaws, but it's been a long time since we've had the opportunity to let ideological loyalties take a secondary role and unite in optimism for our nation. Maybe we'll end up disappointed by yet another career politician whose campaign message was only rhetoric. But I think that now's a unique opportunity to take a chance, give the benefit of the doubt, and offer hope for the country.

Dumb enough to think it's important

Whatever my shortcomings, I'm an honest person. Honest to a fault, perhaps. I'm usually undiplomatically blunt, flattery makes me uncomfortable, and I'm awkward when social circumstances prevent me from speaking my mind directly. But, for all its drawbacks, I'm passionate about honesty, particularly intellectual honesty. By that I mean that a person should admit his biases, honestly strive to understand and appreciate opposing arguments, and readily acknowledge that he is often wrong. Intellectual honesty is an honesty with oneself, an aim that should supersede ideological loyalties and personal allegiances. Anything less diminishes our epistemological autonomy, which is (I submit) the fundamental ingredient of being human.

As a result, I hate the assumption--which is nearly ubiquitous in political debate--that your opponent disagrees with you because he is uninformed, deceived, or somehow morally deficient. It's the nasty stuff of partisanship. It drives the meta-partisan venom of Ann Coulter and the shrill pedantry of Keith Olbermann. It leads a person to believe that his party is the party of facts and logic and the lone defender of goodness and decency. It makes us believe that if only our opponents were a little smarter or had our possession of the facts, they would obviously agree with us. It reinforces the idea that political opponents are the enemy, encouraging a person to describe his opponents in cheap caricature: Republicans are portrayed as selfish rednecks while Democrats become lazy entitlement-seekers.

I find such a mindset more harmful than just about any political position. It encourages divisiveness and prevents us from understanding one another. But it also obscures one of the few reliable truths in politics: everything, no matter how well thought out, has its downside. Nearly all political positions involve a compromise of principles.

At its best, socialism (I use the term loosely, both for simplicity and to dilute the stigma unfairly attached to it) encourages compassion, protects the disadvantaged, and discourages materialism. At its worst, it promotes laziness and mediocrity. I think that's precisely why artists, writers, and academics typically lean left. It's not because they're naive or don't live in the 'real world' (whatever the hell that means). It's because--as evidenced by their career choices--they're motivated by something other than material gain.

At its best, capitalism (again, used loosely for similar reasons) promotes self-reliance, industry, and the value of excellence. At its worst, it promotes greed, selfishness, and the exploitation of the weak. That's why businessmen and entrepreneurs tend to lean right. It's not fair to assume that they're too selfish to care about the disadvantaged. Instead, they think financial reward is the best possible incentive to help people realize noble ambitions.

(Of course I'm being a little too nice. I'm aware that there do exist troglodytic conservatives and dole-bludging liberals. But the point is that it's better to assume good faith than to uniformly paint your opponents with a caricatured brush.)

Personally, I tend to lean right, especially on fiscal matters. But I'm not trying advocate a particular ideology, even mine. Instead, the point I want to bring home is that a person can be just as smart, decent, and well-informed as you and still espouse an entirely different political ideology. I do believe in absolute truth. I just don't think we encounter it very often. And almost surely we do not encounter it in the political arena.