Tibet protests

Critical Review or Loving Fantasy

The following is the most outrageous review of... well I'll let you guess until you get to the end. Hint: think 19th century piano virtuoso.

After the concert, he stands there like a conqueror on the field of battle, like a hero in the lists; vanquished pianos lie about him, broken strings flutter as trophies and flags of truce, frightened instruments flee in their terror into distant corners, the hearers look at each other in mute astonishment as after a storm from a clear sky, as after thunder and lightning mingled with a shower of blossoms and buds and dazzling rainbows; and he the Prometheus, who creates a form from every note, a magnetizer who conjures the electric fluid from every key, a gnome, an amiable monster, who now treats his beloved, the piano, tenderly, then tyranically; caresses, pouts, scolds, strikes, drags by the hair, and then, all the more fervently, with all the fire and glow of love, throws his arms around her with a shout, and away with her through all space; he stands there, bowing his head, leaning languidly on a chair, with a strange smile, like an exclamation mark after the outburst of universal admiration: this is Franz Liszt!

Old critical reviews of Prokofiev and his work

Here is New York Times music critic James Gibbons Huneker's opinion (from a 1918 issue) of Prokofiev's first piano concerto:

The First Piano Concerto of Prokofiev was in one movement, but compounded of many rhythms and recondite noises...The first descending figure -- it is hardly a theme -- is persistently affirmed in various nontonalities by the orchestra, the piano all the while shrieking, groaning, howling, fighting back, and in several instances it seemed to rear and bite the hand that chastised it...There were moments when the piano and orchestra made sounds that evoked not only the downfall of empires, but also of fine crockery, the fragments flying in all directions. He may be the Cossack Chopin for the next generation -- this tall, calm young man. The diabolic smiles press upon you as his huge hands, the hands of a musical primate, tear up trees and plow the soil. That fetching, old expression, 'Hell to pay and no pitch hot,' applies to Prokofiev: only he owns his Hades and has the necessary pitch in abundance.

And now an excerpt from "Musical America" about the 1916 premiere of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite in St. Petersburg:

Crashing Siberias, volcano hell, Krakatoa, sea-bottom crawlers. Incomprehensible? So is Prokofiev. A splendid tribute was paid to his Scythian Suite in Petrograd by Glazunov. The poor tortured classicist walked out of the hall during the performance of the work. No one walked out of Aeolian Hall, but several respectable pianists ran out.

Excerpts from my Bhutan journal, again

Here's another ditty from my journal I kept while trekking through Bhutan:

A rat prances to Prague
for breakfast
2 in the afternoon, melting
coffee beans sizzling on a
platter.
rattle.
ring the police

Now don't be so critical. Remember, I was short on oxygen.

And now my favorite one so far:

rain like a leg fallen asleep
a gray tent house, amorphous
water dribbling through its skin
dirt specks like ticks
spelling constellations
a chocolate milky way

I'm guessing on that last one, I was in the tent, probably trying to sleep. Unfortunate things happen to people who can't sleep.

Excerpts from my Bhutan journal

Its 12:30 and not wanting to go to sleep I reached for my journal from my Bhutan trip, which was sitting above my bed. I remember, Near the end of the trip, strands of nonsense twirled through my head and I was compelled to write some down. Here's a sample:

Wake at 5.
Its 8. hours bundled
in a dream of seconds
stretching the dawn
along the rough horizon

Its 5. light dinner. Its 6.
Dark. Step out into nothing
the world at your feet
like a tight rope line
Now its 11. The thinnest silence
you've ever heard
Your heart beating time.
One by 2. One by 2.

Its 11. Enclosed by immeasurable
counters, counting each
day each hour each minute

Each minute, one foot at a time
along the rough rope.
grasp it. it is morning

minutes flowing into an eddy
of time
collected like stamps
sent off to distant places,
locomotion.

Miss Rosie by Lucille Clifton

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

-- Lucille Clifton

thanks Tara

A play comparing two proofs of the quadratic reciprocity law

Two hilarious math professors at New Mexico State University wrote a play, set in 1844, featuring a discussion between Gauss and Eisenstein about quadratic reciprocity.


http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~history/schauspiel/schauspiel.html

The Book of Thel

I just ran across a great poem by William Blake which starts with Thel's Motto:

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

I'm writing the midterm essay for my music history course. The assignment, named "The Tale of Two Periods," is to contrast one Baroque piece of music with one Classical, in conjunction with the contrast of two corresponding poems.

Here's the rest of The Book of Thel

Gorilla evacuation

The evacuation of a dead Mountain Gorilla in the Virunga National Park of Eastern Congo

thanks to Brent Stirton and bbc.com

Schiller and Hesse

This passage from On the Aesthetic Education of Man reminds me of Herman Hesse's powerful interpretation of Siddhartha's passage to enlightenment through the world of Man.

One of the chief reasons why our physical sciences make such slow progress is obviously the widespread and almost insurmountable tendency towards teleological judgements, in which, as soon as they are used constitutively, the determining faculty is substituted for the receptive. Nature may touch our organs as vigorously and variously as you please -- all her diversity is lost upon us, because we are looking for nothing in her but what we have put there, because we do not allow her to come forward to meet us, from without, but rather strive with impatiently anticipating reason to go out from within ourselves to meet her. And if in the course of centuries one man comes along who approaches her with calm, pure and open senses, and therefore encounters a number of phenomena which we by our anticipation have overlooked, we are mightily astonished that so many eyes in such bright daylight should not have noticed anything. This premature striving for harmony before we have gathered together the separate sounds of which it is to consist, this violent usurpation of the intellectual faculty in a field where its authority is only conditional, is the cause of the sterility of so many thinkers for the greatest benefit of science, and it is hard to say whether sense-faculty which admits of no form, or reason which abides no content, has done the greater harm to the extension of our knowledge.

Not to say Schiller is leading us to the conclusion that these problems can be resolved through the adherence to and practice of transcendental philosophy. On the contrary, he states earlier that the nature of such views contradicts the harmony and unity of opposing forces that is the hallmark of aesthetic philosophy, that is, the subjugation of the natural impulse by the purely intellectual impulse. This antagonism breeds division and discord.