Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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| July 29, 2007 - August 4, 2007 »
July 27, 2007
When vocalists reach for that high note, they often have a facial expression to match -- and players of musical instruments do something very similar, especially when they play "singing" melodic lines. See: B.B. King.
How precise is the connection between the sight and the sound? Very, according to an forthcoming article in the September issue of Psychological Science. In an experiment conducted at the University of Toronto, 17 students whose musical training ranged from nada to substantial watched soundless video recordings of three singers trying to hit pitch intervals of various sizes: thirds, fifths, octaves, and so on.
The performers weren't told the purpose of the experiment, so they were un-self-conscious about their faces were doing (or as un-self-conscious as you can be while singing in a lab). But, to a surprising extent, the students who watched the videos could accurately gauge the size of the interval from the singers' expressions alone. (To take account of the lack of musical training, participants simply rated the size of the interval on a scale of one to seven.)
The authors, psychologists William Forde Thompson and Frank A. Russo, don't try to sort out to what extent the singers' expressions amount to actorly efforts to "signal" the interval to a crowd, serve as memory aids for the performers themselves, or are simply the involuntary result of physical effort. They just note the striking correlation.
Since Thompson and Russo do mention the King of the Blues, they probably should have added that with guitarists it's got to be either option one or two. Trust me: It just isn't that hard to bend a string.
Next up in the Toronto lab?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:31 PM
July 27, 2007
The Ideas section's new editor, Gareth Cook, threw a party in Harvard Square last night for outgoing editor Wen Stephenson, who will run Tom Ashbrook's show, "On Point," on NPR, based at WBUR here in Boston.
Casablanca was packed with Ideas editors past and present: Since launching in September 2002, Alex Star, Jenny Schuessler, and Wen have served as editors, while Jenny, Wen, and John Swansburg have served as deputy editors. (I served briefly as Wen's interim deputy.) Alex is now at the New York Times Magazine, Jenny is at the NYT Book Review, and John is at Slate. Me? I'm at home, here in West Roxbury. But we were all in the same room, for the first time ever, last night.
Gareth's incoming deputy, Steve Heuser, was also on the scene -- along with Ideas designers Greg Klee and Mike Swartz, photo editor Susan Vermazen, and staff writer Drake Bennett.
L to R: Gareth, Wen, Alex, Jenny, Steve
Globe, Books, and Boston.com editors Marty Baron, Jim Concannon, and David Beard were there too, along with Globe staff writers Wesley Morris and Yvonne Abraham, and of course several hungry/thirsty freelancers, including Ideas columnists James Parker, Harvey Blume, and yours truly.
Apologies to those whose names I haven't mentioned -- I'm a little foggy this morning. A good time was had by all! See below:
L to R: Wesley, Drake, John, Greg
We'll miss you, Wen, but we look forward to the new, improved "On Point." And Gareth, I hope it wasn't just the spirit of the moment that made you promise to throw several Ideas parties every year...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:53 AM
July 24, 2007
I recently mentioned a few books -- some new, some old -- that I've been reading while vacationing in the Berkshires. Here are a few more new books that I'm excited about reading this month.
* "Lost Between the Edges" (Semiotext/e Native Agents, distrib. MIT). Described by the publisher as "a new classic of symbolic warfare waged in the street and the mind," this novel by Toronto-based author and artist Eldon Garnet concerns the efforts of X, a "renegade academic and punk intellectual," to put a Holocaust denier out of business, permanently. I enjoyed Garnet's 1995 novel "Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure" (also from Semiotext/e), and I've long admired Chris Kraus's Native Agents imprint, so this ought to be a good read.
* "The Poetics of DNA" (Minnesota), by Judith Roof. According to Roof, a professor of film studies and English at Michigan State, formerly discredited Western ideologies about identity, gender, and difference have made a comeback in recent years thanks in no small part to wrong-headed analogies, metaphors, and other "figurations" of DNA. Roof blames not only science writers, however, but scientists: After all, she points out, "selling the project of mapping the entire human genome is easier... if we conceive of the ultimate product as the book of life, a tidy tome with affinities to a cookbook, a manual, and the Bible, rather than the molecular topography of of incipient protein production." Peddlers of pseudoscience, beware!
* "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories), edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck still haven't made a movie of Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," like they said they would, but now we have "Voices," a CD of 16 readings selected from that book. If you liked Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in "Lord of the Rings," you'll love him as Bartolome de Las Casas, providing a 1542 eyewitness account of how Columbus devastated the Indies. Also included: John Sayles as Mark Twain commenting on the Moro Massacre in 1906, plus Lili Taylor, Sandra Oh, the divine Marisa Tomei, and others.
* "The Fun Never Stops" (Fantagraphics), by Drew Friedman. Friedman needs no introduction -- although he's the darling of alt.culture magazines and journals like Raw, Weirdo, and BLAB!, his comics and illustrations have appeared in mainstream publications like SPY, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, and The New York Observer for years now. Those of us who can't get enough Friedman are in luck: Here's an anthology of his work since 1991. It includes the amazing strip from Raw about Buddy Rich, in which Rich nearly kills a stranger who suggests that Gene Krupa is the world's greatest drummer; the New Yorker comic "Cooking with Genius," in which Beckett waits for 3-minute eggs to boil and Einstein's 5-alarm chili erupts in a mushroom cloud; and even Friedman's "Toxic High" drawings for Topps. Thanks, Fantagraphics; I'll be poring over every panel for weeks.
* "Critical Americans" (North Carolina). Leslie Butler, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth, celebrates the ambitious liberalism of the late 19th century, when the Cambridge, Mass. circle of George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton articulated political ideals and cultural standards that seem impossibly utopian at our own particular moment. Down with American racism, materialism, and jingoism? Up with educative citizenship and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy? Please tell me that our next president will share these sentiments.
* "The Act You've Known For All These Years" (Canongate), by Clinton Heylin. Heylin is the author of far too many books -- over a dozen biographies and histories of the Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan (a few times), Sandy Denny, the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., and Joy Division. But of course all the research the British author has done must make it easy for him to knock off a book like this one: a biography of a single album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which as we know, was released 40 years ago this summer. "Sgt. Pepper's" was inspired by Beatles friends and rivals like Dylan, the Beach Boys, and Pink Floyd. "It was precisely the fact that 'Pepper' was a clever collage of all the most up-to-date innovations of others," writes Heylin, "that made it sparkle so brightly." Which innovations were appropriated for which Beatles songs? Now you'll know.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:33 PM
July 24, 2007
In his column yesterday, the Globe's Alex Beam asked: "Who can ignore the loopy website BoycottLiberalism.com, which anathematizes goods, services, and people of whom the right-wing webmaster disapproves?"
Beam goes on to say:
I first learned about this website from Brainiac, the Globe's intello-blog, which reported that BoycottLiberalism was calling for a girlcott of Watertown's own Eliza Dushku, she of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Bring It On" fame. According to Joshua Glenn, BL.com added her to the Do Not Patronize list because Dushku attended a benefit concert for John Kerry. Senator Kerry, of course, figures in BL.com's "Liberal Hall of Shame," in between Robert Kennedy Jr. and New York Times columnist/scold Paul Krugman.
The intello-blog thanks you, Alex.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:53 PM
July 23, 2007
I don't ordinarily read every essay in each issue of the journals to which I subscribe, but when you're on vacation you do things like that. So it was with pleasure that I devoured issue 26 of the Brooklyn-based journal Cabinet, over the weekend. The theme of the issue is "Magic," and it includes excellent essays on, among other things: "Deceptionists at War," "The beguiling stagecraft of American politics," "Black Herman's African American Magical Synthesis," "Secular magic and the modern cultural imagination," "A brief history of magic's most famous illusion," and "Indian magic's new superstar."
Cabinet's timing is perfect. I've also been reading "The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice," a fascinating new book from Cornell University Press that examines ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magic practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author, Christopher Lehrich, a visiting assistant professor in Religion and Writing at BU, argues that magic is, in fact, a mode of theory that is "intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth" -- that is to say, magic is deconstructionist avant la lettre. I particularly appreciate Lehrich's successful attempt to write a work of interdisciplinary scholarship in an engaging fashion; books by tenure-track academics are normally all but unreadable.
Lehrich's book kicks off with a chapter on the Hermetic corpus -- a collection of Neoplatonic dialogues (conversations between Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Egyptian priest roughly contemporary with Moses, and various interlocutors) composed in Alexandria during the first centuries of the Common Era. These writings were highly influential during the Renaissance, among thinkers who believed that they contained clues to knowledge (about the revelatory character of nature, for example) that had been lost to humankind at some distant point in the past. So this is an opportune moment to recommend another new book I've been reading: "The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus" (Cornell), by Florian Ebelling, a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Ebelling strips away the mumbo-jumbo surrounding the figure of Hermes Trismegistus amd the writings attributed to him, and offers an overview of the current scholarly understanding of Hermeticism. Not always easy to follow, but very useful, indeed.
PS: The following essays from the current issue of Cabinet are also well worth reading:
* The Barber Trial: an account -- by Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman -- of the 2006 French trial Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, in which the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was sued for libel by the French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, because Finkielkraut called Sivan's documentary "Route 181" (about the 1947-48 expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from the territory that would become the state of Israel) an example of "Jewish anti-Semitism" and an incitement to violence against Israelis.
* Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, a translation of the trial transcript.
* Joshua Foer's history of "aquatic ambulism," or water-walking, from Jesus and Saint Peter to the 2006 London gallery exhibit "Bridge."
* "The Real Thing," in which yours truly draws the reader's attention to curious parallels between the argument made in Van Wyck Brooks's 1915 book "America's Coming-of-Age" and the discovery-invention of the 1915 curved Coke bottle.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:10 PM
July 23, 2007
I'm still in the Berkshires, dialing up to the Internet, so until next week you won't hear very much from me. But here's a good story...
Retrofuturists, steampunks, and other friends of mine would like nothing better than to commute to work via personal blimp. We imagine that it would look something like the machine in this 1900 image:
According to a story in today's Globe by the talented Boston.com multimedia producer Thushan Amarasiriwardena, an Amherst-based outfit is designing a friendly-looking blimp for flight enthusiasts who want to fly as quietly as possible.
Perhaps the future is now? Here's a photo of the personal blimp, taken by Amarasiriwardena:
And Amarasiriwardena also shot a video of the blimp. Phew! These multimedia producers work hard, don't they?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:29 PM
July 23, 2007
I've been thinking a lot about the local-food movement, and specifically food miles, since publishing a piece on the "new food journalism" in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Here are a few points to toss into the interesting debate that Drake's lead Ideas piece is inspiring:
1. In "Omnivore's Dilemma," Michael Pollan exempts chocolate and coffee from his ban on non-local foods, on the grounds that there is a centuries-long tradition of consuming truly unique foodstuffs from faraway lands. But how is Pollan's eating chocolate in Berkeley -- at any time -- any different from Bostonians' eating lettuce in January?
2. What are people in Reno, Nevada, supposed to eat? (Is it a coincidence that many of the leading local-foods advocates live in Northern California, a comically perfect place to grow food?)
3. Given that we live in an economy in which virtually everything in our homes has been designed and built hundreds or thousands of miles from where we live, where's the sense in singling out food for this particular kind of analysis?
On the last point, this might be one area in which it makes sense to think like an economist (or at least like Columbia's Jagdish* Bhagwati, whom I interviewed on the subject): If we were to raise taxes on gasoline (or petroleum, or carbon), that would discourage environmentally wasteful shipping throughout the economy. There would be no need to calculate how far the butterbean on your plate traveled to reach you, or the RAM card in your computer. (No one would possibly calculate all the "food miles" and "consumer-product miles" in their lives anyway, Bhagwati says; each person would need a full-time staff of analysts for the task. Even then, it would probably be impossible.)
On the other hand, a lot of local food just tastes better -- reason enough to eat more of it.
Should only Floridians eat these?
*Spelling fixed.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 09:29 AM
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