The Penultimate Word

This is the interior of a church in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which was converted into a bookstore. Do follow the link, it has many more pictures. Magnificant, don’t you think?

I recently finished Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he tries to understand and explain intuition, the process by which we make instant decisions without consciously thinking about how we make them. He opens with a story about the Getty Museum, which in 1983 was contacted by an art dealer to see if it was interested in acquiring a kouros which the dealer claimed was made in the sixth century BC and was in almost perfect condition. Since almost all of the two hundred kouroi in existence today are badly damaged, this would be a fantastic acquistion for the museum if true. The museum had a geologist analyze the stone using an electron microscope, electron microprobe, and other instruments and he concluded that the stone was indeed very old. On this basis, the Getty agreed to buy the statue and in 1986 put it on display.

There was one problem. It did not look right. Art historians, curators, and other art experts all thought there was something wrong with it as soon as they saw it, but couldn’t quite say what. Upon further examination, they concluded that the style was wrong for the period it was supposedly from - in fact, it seemed to mix the styles of several periods. One expert thought it look too “fresh”, and a 2,600-year-old statue should not look “fresh”. Further investigation revealed that the statue was in fact a fake produced by forger in the 1980s.

It took just a few seconds for the art experts to realize that something was wrong. Blink explores what happens in those few seconds.

Gladwell talks to a number of psychologists, training experts, doctors, and other people to explore how people make snap decisions. He discusses how people are so very often right when they make those decisions, but how they can also go tragically wrong - he spends an entire chapter on the Amadou Diallo killing. The book is anecdote-driven rather data-driven, so it seemed to me to be more superficial than it should have been. I prefer more data, but that’s just me. However, I found it very interesting with a lot of insights into how we process information.

I just finished The Life and Death of Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht, a book I blogged about earlier. The title is a misnomer - the book is really about the glory days and ultimate coming to grief of the big classical record labels. Lebrecht documents the power trips great conductors like Karajan, Stokowski, Toscanini, Solti and others were on, how their rivalry caused many of the same works to be recorded over and over (and over and over - there are over 500 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth for example).

The classical recording industry destroyed iteself. Its hubris, disconnect from the market, and complete failure to come to terms with the internet doomed it. For all that, the book is a good read, because the characters in it - the musicians, producers and record company execs - were such outsize characters.

Lebrecht also lists what he considers the 100 best and 20 worst recordings ever made. These lists are always subjective. There are a couple of recordings I think should be on the list of 100 that aren’t there, but he does list many recordings I don’t have that I would like to add to my collection. The list of 20 worst is just a hoot.

If classical music is your area of interest, this is a good book to have.

For my birthday I received a book called The Life and Death of Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht, a music critic and editor. The title is not accurate, the book is really about the rise and fall of the great classical music record labels - Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, EMI, Victor, etc.

Lebrecht is a witty and engaging writer, and his book is filled with anecdotes. One of the funnier concerns the German conductor Otto Klemperer and a Hungarian record producer living in Los Angeles called George Mendelssohn, no relation to Felix. Mendelssohn, trying to get a new record label called Vox off the ground

… grabbed hold of Otto Klemperer, who wrecked his American career with manic-depressive escapades and was heading off to conduct the state opera in Hungary, a rash move in the gathering Cold War. Mendelssohn got Klemperer to record a few symphonies in Paris and Vienna. Back in LA, the pair entered a record store and asked for Beethoven’s Fifth, conducted by Klemperer.
‘Sorry,’ said the assistant, ‘we’ve only got Toscanni and Walter…’
‘But we want Klemperer.’
‘These are the best recordings,’ said the sales guy. ‘Why do you want anyone else?’
‘Because I am Klemperer,’ growled the conductor.
‘And I guess your pal’s Beethoven,’ grinned the assistant.
‘No, he’s Mendelssohn,’ roared Klemperer.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed the clerk. ‘You know, I’ve always loved your Wedding March.’

Interesting article in the New Yorker on the promise, and limitations, of efforts to scan, digitize and index all the print books in existence.

Google has been at it for several years, and the results of their work can be seen at Google Book Search. Google has two sources of books for its project: the partner program, and the Library Project. In the partner program Google collaborates with publishers (currently over 10 thousand worldwide) to provide users of ways to search for books currently covered under copyright. In the Library Project, Google is scanning and digitizing as many books as they can in collaboration with great libraries around the world, including the libraries of the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. This effort is not without controversy (Daniel Brandt is no relation to me).

A rival project to Google’s is the Open Content Alliance, a non-profit venture which is also digitizing whole libraries for web access. This project, wary of the for-profit nature of the Google project, aims to place material on the web without the restrictions imposed by Google.

These projects will bring unprecedented access to an unimaginable number of books, and this is unambiguously good. But there are limitations. From the article:

And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks. Historians of the book—a new and growing tribe—read books as scouts read trails. Bindings, usually custom-made in the early centuries of printing, can tell you who owned them and what level of society they belonged to. Marginal annotations, which abounded in the centuries when readers usually went through books with pen in hand, identify the often surprising messages that individuals have found as they read. Many original writers and thinkers—Martin Luther, John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—have filled their books with notes that are indispensable to understanding their thought.

Furthermore, each of these projects has its own database, interface, and limits on the numbers of books it will digitize. Copyright adds another layer of restriction. Will we ever have a seamless, universal library containing the whole sum of human knowledge? No, of course not. But what we do and will have is wonderful.

(Updated 6 November - fixed some typos)

Hogwarts Professor

The Leaky Cauldron

and of course

I give a bunch of stuff away, so read no further if you haven’t read the book.
Continue Reading »

I recently finished the book Temperament - How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization, by Stuart Isaacoff, pianist, author, and founding editor of Piano Today.

The way instruments are tuned sounds like an incredibly dry subject, but it in fact is a subject which has been furiously controversial for centuries. The theory of how vibrating strings produce sound was first developed by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, and the relationship between notes on a scale were thought to be ordained by God. While the Pythagorean system produced “pure” intervals, it produced horrible results as music and harmony became more complex. Fixing the system involved scientists including Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Descartes, musicians including John Dunstable, Frescobaldi, and Bach, and religious figures including myriad Popes and John Calvin. Many methods proposed by all these people challenged fundamental beliefs people held of the relationship between God, man, and the universe.

Isaacoff mixes cultural history, musical theory, and mathematics into a very readable account of how the modern system of what is called equal-temperament tuning came into being. If you are a musician, I highly recommend this book.

I recently finished a book I enjoyed greatly called Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand, by James Barron, which follows the construction of a Steinway Model D concert grand in its eleven-month journey from raw wood and steel to a finished piano. Along the way, Barron talks about the men and women who build these instruments, using methods which have changed remarkably little from when Steinway & Sons began building pianos in New York City in the 1850s.

There are no blueprints for these pianos - the are (mostly) hand-built. Each craftsman learns his job from the one who had the job before him. Some of the workers are recent immigrants, others have fathers and grandfathers who worked for Steinway. The techniques they use they learn by observation, by intuition, and by doing.

When they begin building a particular instrument, no one knows how it will sound. The soul of a piano is its soundboard, five-by-eight slab of planks made from Sitka spruce. The only source of the spruce Steinway uses now is from Alaska and British Columbia. New England, packed with usable spruce after World War I, is logged out. The wood is carefully screened by craftsmen with decades of experience, who select only planks with at least 103 inches of straight, consistent grain, no blemishes, no discoloration. But there is no way to tell how the wood will vibrate when it encased in the piano.

Woven through the book is the story of the family. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg grew up in northwestern Germany and learned the piano-making craft there. Because of wars, political turmoil, and lack of economic opportunity, Heinrich Engelhard, his wife, and several of his sons moved to New York to begin a new life there. They anglicized their names to Steinway, put the whole family to work, and by 1860 had sales of $1 million a year. Heinrich’s son, C. F. Theodore Steinway, who developed much of the piano’s mechanical action and generated many of the family’s patents, hated America so much that in 1884 he returned to Germany and opened a factory in Hamburg. The two factories work closely together to this day.

The Steinwegs moved to New York because of the large German enclave there, which by 1900 was the third-largest German-speaking urban center in the world after Berlin and Vienna. This gave them their own language and their own trusted labor pool. But to be successful they had to sell into the larger English-speaking market. This wasn’t always easy - anti-immigrant feelings are a perennial part of the American landscape. But through perserverance and real knack for self-promotion, the family became a fixture in New York society.

The piano which Barron follows through the factory, serial number K0862, became one the instruments Steinway lends out for recitals, recording sessions, and concerts. Its first public appearance was at a music festival in Kalamazoo. After it returned to New York, it was lost for three weeks. How do you lose a 9′ concert grand? It’s easier than you think.

Steinway has recently branched out into more than pianos - The Steinway Collection offers “Classic Casual Sportsware, available in a vibrant melody of styles and colors, and a select assortment of Golf Accessories”. Perfect for your next golf date with Billy Joel.

Warner Bros. and Universal Studios are opening a Harry Potter theme park in Orlando in late 2009. JK Rowling has said that the “plans look incredibly exciting”.

I have my own mental images of Harry Potter-land, so I have not seen any of the movies and I doubt I will ever go the theme park because their conceptions will not match mine, and I am sure to be disappointed. But I am sure that it will be extremely popular.

Some people think she is selling out, but I think she is perfectly entitled to do this. No one, especially Rowling, has claimed that HP is high art.

I had always regarded graphic novels as comic boks with literary pretensions, an attitude which irritated my sister into lending me Maus, A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman.
Maus is about the wartime experiences of Spiegelman’s parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, and Spiegelman’s difficult relationship with his difficult father.

Vladek and Anja Spiegelman spent three years dodging Nazis and their civilian, occassionally Jewish, collaborators until they were caught and sent to Auschwitz. Their story is harrowing, enraging and utterly compelling. Art’s depiction of his relationship with Vladek is poignant, and sometimes very funny.

Spiegelman’s art allowed him to create a book with far fewer words but the same richness, nuance, and texture as a straight prose book. The Germans and Jews are drawn as anthropomorphic cats and mice, respectively. Polish Gentiles are pigs. In one chapter, when Vladek and Anja are hiding in the home of a sympathetic Polish woman, Vladek furtively goes about his business in the village wearing a mask in the shape of pig’s snout. It sounds stupid written out like this but it absolutely works.

Maus is frequently difficult to read but impossible to put down. I highly recommend it and will read again.

In anticipation of the publication of The Deathly Hollows, the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, I recently re-read the first six front-to-back. I had not read the early books in years, and it was interesting to see how consistent Rowling was from book to book. She carefully builds up the Potter mythology and rarely contradicts herself (although I don’t understand how house elfs can Apparate at Hogwarts while no one else can). The early books were much darker than I had remembered, probably because of foreknowledge of later events and revelations. Quirrell seemed much more menacing the second time around than the first.

This what I think will happen book 7:

• Draco will join the good guys. He already showed that his heart is not really in being a Deatheater, and since Voldemort threatened to kill him if he didn’t murder Dumbeldore, he is in mortal peril and his only hope of protection is with the Order.
• Aunt Petunia knows a lot moe than she is letting on. She knows what a howler is and what a dementor is, and she is, after all, Lily’s sister. She is probably a Squib.
• The “R.A.B.” who stole the horcrux Harry and Dumbledore were after in The Half-Blood Prince is clearly Regulus Black, Sirius’s brother. The note left by R.A.B. in the locket fits in with the story Sirius told about his brother. I think Regulus hid the real horcrux in the Black house. Kreacher knows Regulus hid something important in the house, but is not sure what it is, which is why he was hoarding all that stuff in The Order of the Phoenix. It is possible that Mundungus inadvertantly stole the horcrux when he was looting the house after Sirius’s death and sold it.
• Harry is not a horcrux, as some have speculated. It takes some effort to make one, and Voldemort was intent on killing Harry and to his great surprise almost destroyed himself when he couldn’t.
• Dumbledore will not return. His death and funeral were written with too much finality by Rowling to allow that. He may, like Obe Wan Kenobi, put in a cameo, but that will be it.
• Snape will turn out to be a good guy. In The Half-Blood Prince, he very carefully did not kill anyone except Dumbledore, and went out of his way to protect everyone else. I still don’t know why Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him and why Snape agreed and I will be interested to see how Rowling handles that.
• Neville plays an important part. He grew tremendously in The Half-Blood Prince, and I think Rowling is setting him up for bigger things in book 7.
• Harry dies. Everything points that way.

Other HP speculation here. This is a good site for the completely obsessed.